These are the dog days of winter. No snow this year, just a trace. I peed my pharmaceuticals and used coffee into Boyer Chute the other day, a warm but bleak Sunday. Driving through Ponca Hills to get there is a minor joy, save for the guns in them hills, the meanness, the Catholic cult, the corn eating up land for some godforsaken reason. Blast some music, roll down the windows in January, remember biking up the slope to White Deer Lane then back down again between birds’ land and flooded fields. Nebraska smells like manure this time of year, the whole state slathered with the stuff. And no snow to still the stench.

Well, no use bellyaching. My Buckeyes won a national championship, bought by billionaire donations. I watched but didn’t care, not like you would something alive. Lady Liberty is a battered woman. Up the street there was a lot of ballyhoo renaming a post office but the sandstone steps are crumbling and that about says it all. God bless the post office, god bless the library. Everything else can kiss my ass.