In a few weeks, I’m moving out of the neighborhood where I’ve been living for the past couple years, just as I was really starting to appreciate it. I’ve been taking more walks lately. When I first moved to the area I thought it was a pretty boring walking area, but the thing that I forgot is that I thrive in boring environments.

Down the sidewalk a bit from my gate is a tree that produces some kind of round-ish green fruit, perhaps small limes, or unripe lemons. As I begin my walk, I pull one of those little pieces of fruit off the tree. For the rest of my 30-minute-or-so walk, I play a little game of running out into the middle of the street and pitching the lime down the middle of it to see how far it can go until it stops. I’ve gotten pretty good at it. The trick is to aim for the exact middle of the street and send it on as straight a course of possible, because as soon as it starts to roll too far to the left or right, it inevitably hits a curb pretty fast and slows to a stop very quickly.

A major rule of my little lime-pitching game is that I have to wait for a perfect moment when no cars are coming either way and no pedestrian is walking by to see me do it. That’s harder than it sounds. On an average walk, I only really get to pitch the lime a total of about four times. And even then, sometimes I look up after I release the piece of fruit down the middle of the street to see someone I hadn’t noticed before, looking at me from apartment stoop, eyeing me suspiciously. Or suddenly a car will pull up to an intersection and see a speeding lime roll by in front of them and naturally deduce that the only explanation for it is the guy standing in the middle of the street a ways down, watching it go.

My best day was last Friday evening. I got six throws in, and all of them were really good, middle of the road attempts. I was feeling especially high that night. It was Friday, for one thing; always a reason for delight. And things are going particularly well for me right now. It seems every time my phone rings, it’s someone on the other end telling me that something I wrote and sent to them is something they want to possibly give me a prize for. That night I’d just gotten a call from someone who read the play I wrote four years ago and they’re going to do a reading of it in New York City. After that, they might produce it. That made me want to go out and take a walk, and throw fruit down the middle of the streets of my neighborhood. It sounds insane, but could it be that all the insane things I’ve done to entertain myself all my life are exactly the sort of things that I should be doing more of than ever?