Took a few days to decompress this past weekend, a nice respite from committing to the written word. And along the way, I came up with a new theory: city livin’ is all a matter of aggravation management. Along with all the good that comes with an urban lifestyle, there are always those irritants that keep you just at the edge of the edge. Sometimes it’s the small stuff, like firecrackers going off for the three weeks prior to Independence Day. It’s a personal bugaboo, what can I say?

Other times, it’s the isolated moments, happening on a larger scale. For example, the other night, I saw a car completely wreck into a parked vehicle, just in front of Basil Spice on South Grand. Following the hit-and-run driver for 10 blocks, I lost them between Gravois and Chippewa, with cars and lots of rain between us. So it goes.

Now, some of these aggravations register on the really small scale, yet somehow wind up the most annoying.

Take the photo to the right, Exhibit A. It shows some sunflower plants, cut down by a tool of some sort. Each year for the past three, I’ve planted an ever-larger stand of sunflowers in the alley behind my crib, figuring it gives a splash of life to that space, and takes advantage of what’s an otherwise overly-fertile patch of isolated dirt. Why pour cement over that, when you can invest in $5 worth of seeds for a little life? Guess someone disagrees with the aesthetics of my choice, as a handful were broken and snapped mid-summer last year, while this year’s first wave of damage comes via a saw.

Weird. Just weird.