Broom Day

My little routines to give the passing of time some semblance of structure include getting off my fat ass and out the door every other day to go for a walk. 

I live within walking distance of a portion of the Atlanta Beltline, and I have a route that's about 2¼ miles door-to-door from my house. I can stretch it out to a 3½-mile loop and even a 5-mile route, but for now I'm keeping it short and sweet. But still, I've covered some 25 miles just since February 6.

Sunday, I walked with my adult daughter along the Cochran Shoals National Recreation Area, which sounds pretty wilderness, but it's really just a stretch along the Chattahoochee  River on the edge of Atlanta. I used to run the 3-mile trail regularly back in the 80s and 90s; now I occasionally (if even that) walk it. But at least I'm still getting out.

The only drawback to the Cochran Shoals trail is I have to drive to get there, and parking is kind of a hassle, but I can walk to the Beltline. I prefer my walking routine to not include an automobile trip, but I may revisit that preference to give my walking routine more variety.

This 58th day of Childwinter is called Broom Day. I tried to coax the AI image generators to produce an action picture of curling, but the AI models have no idea what a curling broom looks like and kept depicting players with hockey sticks or ski poles. And it also insisted on showing the players wearing ice skates, although curling is actually played with specially soled shoes.

Trying to visualize images for the word "broom" got me to nostalgically think of Ken's Broome Street Bar, probably still one of my favorite spot in Manhattan, and a bar I used to visit frequently in the 1970s.

I was also fond of the koan-like concept of a blindfolded person sweeping the street. The streetscape, naturally, became the Soho neighborhood around Ken's back in the rough-and-tumble '70s, back before the Giuliani gentrification to the neighborhood. But the AI generators kept letting the blindfolds slip - apparently, they wanted to make sure the street sweepers could see what they were doing.