Lunchtime

Today's high in downtown DC was 72. Now that's damned peculiar.

But it did enable me to have a most enjoyable lunch-break. The kind I love the most, but never actually do:

A brief walk to Julia's, score a bottle of water and a vegetarian empanada (wacky choice for me: normally it's the saltenas or nothing), and saunter up to the benches in Dupont Circle. And feast happily while reading a book.

It was t-shirt weather, for crissakes.

The sky was deliciously gray (I'm no fan of direct sunlight, no idea why) and the wind blustered through the crowd like a hoarde of invisible hooligans: ghosts of a mad mob of Arsenal fans rushing the "visitor" seats during the match with Derby County in February of 1972...

Ah. No, that was the book, not reality.

But for once, it was nice to walk away from the melodramatic horseshit of magazine art-direction (where an attempted photo assignment involving two CEOs and their teams, to be shot in two cities by the same photographer in 24 hours, became a single shoot with just the one CEO because his team pissed off the whole thing with no notice and the other company got The Fear, as if they were about to be invaded by a barbarian army from 60 Minutes, forcing a complete artistic re-think for a cover story within 30 minutes)........

......to leave all that behind for an hour, and simply sit with the blustery gray ghosts, with good food and the air pregnant with the threat of afternoon storms, and read for a bit.

Not a profound experience, but as lunchbreaks go, I'd give it three and a half stars.