I couldn’t help but wonder what combinations John Cage, the man who conceived Imaginary Landscape No. 4 for 12 Radios, might create were he alive today, as I enjoyed the surround sound serenade provided to me by the simultaneous, differing ring tones emanating from my iPhone, iPad, and MacBook Air, as they alerted me to yet another spam risk phone call.

The New York Times reported this week that the “Market Garden Brewery in Cleveland is offering 10-cent beers to the first 2,021 people who show a Covid-19 vaccine certificate.” My regular readers may remember that I foretold such a combination in my February 10th blog, “A Shot and a Beer”.

I was sitting along the river, basking in the sun, minding my own business, but apparently giving off an aura of isolated-during-the-pandemic blues when a woman walking two dogs approached and asked me whether I needed any puppy therapy. I politely declined her offer and she moved on, but then I started to wonder whether I had made a mistake, that perhaps the dogs were irrelevant, that perhaps the woman’s own nickname was Puppy, and that perhaps I had missed out on an unforgettable opportunity because of a pandemic side effect of social skills decay.