The street is filled with caged and brooding men and women; eyes red and tired from lack of sleep, baseless and formless their fear can find no resolve; endless and cyclical, their work offers no respite. 
Time, relentless time, coils itself round their wrists and behind their thoughts. It is striking, fangs out, and coiling the endless loops of its hours round their necks, suffocating their lives as surely as this tie is restricting my breathing. It’s not the tie, like my dad used to say, it’s the collar. If you get the right shirt, he’d say, the tie is just dead weight.
Just so much dead weight, that’s the feeling I have now. Walking in time with the others. 
My shoes clicking on the pavement, my socks falling down just that little bit. Nothing I am wearing quite fits me, and this is all about presentation. The maple trees that line the street in front of the courthouse are presenting the late days of spring, presenting our conquest of the forests, our belief in our 
dominion over the earth and her life. The air is still and cool. The sun’s angle is shallow as it falls between the multistory car park and the city park. I can feel the air deep in my lungs as I draw breath. Someone’s glasses glint the sun from across the street.
The mundane beauty of the scene lets me leave it for a moment. A moment long enough to remember why I’ve bothered to come down here in this monkey suit.
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