I love the view from my office window. Well, first of all, I love that I have a window. I like to point it out to other workers here who don't have windows. I stand in front of it, flatteringly backlit, so that when someone comes to visit me, I appear to have a full-body halo.

Here's a view from my window:

I guess that's really just a view of the stained-glass thing I bought at the Mental Thrift Store, but it gives you an idea of what it is like to have this window. The stained glass thing serves as my ocean view. I look at it and pretend I can see all the way to the sea. It's my faux-cean view.

My real view includes a lot of queen palms and cars in the parking lot across the street at the halfway house. Right now there's a red Geo Metro and a white Toyota truck with a red door and a grey front end. Sometimes people work on their cars there, or chain-smoke and mingle, and occasionally there is a fight, which I also enjoy. Fights generally involve a group of tough-looking guys and one tough-looking girl confronting a somewhat tough-looking but sheepish other guy. Maybe he missed his child-support payments. I don't know. I cannot hear their voices through the glass.

The expensive "live/work" complex adjacent to the parking lot is almost finished. I've been watching its progress for more than a year now, which means to me that I've been at this job, looking out this window, for far too long. One face of the complex is scattered with colorful circular tiles in an artless, random pattern that reminds of how my face looked when, in seventh grade, I came down with chicken pox. Since I noticed that, I find myself repulsed by the live/work complex, as if it's infected with a virus and I should stay clear. It also has an irregular and lumpy chimney that makes me think: hives. That complex should get its ass to a clinic for some penicillin, or something, before my building catches whatever it's carrying.

One thing my window does not have is a sign like this one:

My brother sent me the picture, which he took himself after discovering the sign in the window of a little dress shop in Rhode Island. I assume he was either in the dress shop with his wife, or just passing by the dress shop, rather than that he was either a patron or the person spitting on the windows. It would be hard for him to spit on the windows with the kind of regularity indicated in the complaint, because he doesn't live in Rhode Island, so it would mean a substantial commute.

I'll have to ask him about it. I'd like to rule out his involvement, but I've come to understand that in this life, you just never know.

Star of the day. . .George Jones