Nero fiddled. And got a bad rap. Well, boys will be boys, and girls just want to have fun. History is boring. And it's not going to repeat itself.

There is a pure mystery, smothered in payoffs, and something subtle about a bouncing roulette ball. With the smell of sage wafting in the door, one-armed bandits fish for pocket change. For a split second there was that shadow of a memory lurking. Forgotten times of walking somewhere, perhaps a beach? A desert. The story evaporates.

On a spring day, with the sun shining and liquid amber blooms bursting midbranch, who cares?

In those days, a washboard was played with metal thimbles. It was a welcome great raucous rhythm that danced out to sunset. This morning on the front porch, robin lands in the jasmine vine and is not searching for seeds. A watchful bird. What we do here bounces in and out. There are pill bugs that squeak in the driveway, you have to listen closely.

Moss and feathers are a regime that couldn't be called Spanish, for lacking the delicacy to hang from trees, or the click and post of a surrey, fringe on top or not. These are times of electric cars that talk with secret data to each other. Do they need us anymore? Where they go depends on a GPS satellite that might be hacked by aliens. So just relax and enjoy the XM radio.

With a line of credit lacking, let nothing ye dismay. A dung beetle in the driveway will learn the pill bug gerrymander, whack-a-mole, fwip, fwip, thread the thimble and the house is serving mint tea, for free. It's the day of centuries, way after Nero, and who can say now, with any certainty, which came first – the pill bugs or the credits. These are government things. But there was, it now seems certain, a contracture. Fractal reality. Laws of chance reinventing themselves.

Trees roll by and traffic signs that have lost all meaning. It's as close to comfort as it gets. Tabitha comes to purr on my lap. I'm not going to ask her if she remembers Toby who got so old and just disappeared one day. The electric cars are circling a woodie, the shivering station wagon that recalled San Francisco cable cars heading for the turn about, tourists riding their roulette table dreams. It doesn't matter. No one's looking. They're playing Pokemon Go and someone just spotted an alien.

It might linger here in the driveway, a trace of storyville, wisp of Spanish moss. See the pill bugs roll, breathing sage air that hangs from cactus trees in their silver history of the biggest little City in Nevada. There'll be no sadness in storyville tonight -- there it goes. Just purring. Warm feet.

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