I am at work on a Saturday afternoon, enjoying the relative quiet, lack of ventilation and dim lighting. I am not so much enjoying the bagpipe sounds wafting up from the street, which are incessant and piercing. The sounds are penetrating a section of my brain that inspires anger and violent behavior, a feeling that is intensified by the amount of work I need to miraculously complete before an ambiguous date and thereby save the world.

For the same intolerance of sound, I gave up the piccolo one warm California afternoon. And by give up, I mean I hurled it across the room at my mirrored closet doors and never looked back.

Please Mr. Bagpipes, please stop. Or maybe? Nature? Could you rain a little and put out the flames of his enthusiasm? I have many more pages to go before I sleep...