Once upon a time, I saw the number 23 looking a bit rusty, worn out, and well past its prime; it was puckered and dimpled, oxidized, and defined more by the light of the sun and the shadow of its slight elevation from the surface upon which it had been pressed. It looked mysterious and cryptic when photographed in such a way as to divorce it from its truck-yard origins. It’s been a few years since I’ve even been to the truck-yard in question, and I can’t say that I miss it, though I do miss some of the photographic opportunities that can only be approached in moments of extraordinary boredom. I miss the woodlice and the grasshoppers, and the occasional, battered and stained numbers etched/scraped/paint-dabbed onto various things; and though I’ve made no overt references to it, the number 23 has been in the back of my mind for quite some time. I tend to see it everywhere, and during one particular week, I saw it glaring in all of the flagrant colors of rhinestone bling, gold, and strange shimmery stuff like Swarovsky crystal. I didn’t take many pictures of those, but I rather liked the Gold 23 announcing the address of an otherwise-drab building that smelled, suspiciously, like a Dunkin’ Donuts franchise, despite the absolute lack of donut-type substance within a 4 block radius. I liked the filigree, the swoops and curves, curls and disembodied angel heads, like the mast-heads of some strange, Bradbury-induced sand-ship, as depicted in The Martian Chornicles. I liked the implication of an owl, hiding in the shapes, and wondered what sort of owl would hide in such aurine splendor at odds with a very gray building in a very gray part of a largely gray city, on the eastern lip of a sometimes-gray lake. But then, I stopped thinking about owls, snapped this photo, and then caught the train home, as I’d felt the urge to write a near-disjointed/episodic short tale about a guy whose life (and his northward journey from one place to another) was defined by 4 modes of transportation/movement. I only remember that, because I’d tried (and failed) to put a reference to the number 23 into the story. But it simply didn’t fit. Oh well. At least it got a photograph to commemorate whatever it was that inspired that particular inspiration. As always, thank you for viewing, reading, and commenting, and I hope you’re all having a great week. Oh, and for those who are curious, this is the "raw image" that also served as the basis for some of the shifty layers in the 6-layer collages that have seized my muse. I figured, since it's appeared as a background character in other works, I should at least give it a foreground of its own.