Last night was covered in fog. It had seeped in from the breath of wolves on the outskirts of town while I wasn't looking, and now I had to go 45 on the highway. All the trees by the side of Arrundel Mills, their grisly forms lit up by the mall lights the only thing showing through the gray, made it look like the set of Macbeth. I could only see ten feet of white lines to know when the road curved. My energy was entirely focused on what was in front of me, a situation so rare that Yugoslavia declared last night a holiday and Nature sent a bulletin to the AP. Fog-driving music was Scary Monsters.

After I got home, I went for a cigarette walk in the fog. The cigarette walk, by the way, is a distinct entity. It is different from, say, the two-cigarette walk, which is halfway up Patapsco River Road, or the is-the-world-still-there walk, which has no defined limit but is generally at least to the train tracks at the end of Main Street. You there in Santa Fe, you can look it up on mapquest if it interests you for some reason. I live on Chapel View Dr in Ellicott City. Anyway, one of the neighbors has a light trained on a tall tree in their front yard, a decoration strangely out of place and bourgeois in this middle class suburb. It is a little like the "beams of light" memorial to the World Trade Center, only with a tree. I thought of light pollution. I thought of how, if there were no light, I wouldn't have been able to tell that there was fog, unless it fogged my glasses. Then I realized that didn't cut it, for obvious reasons. Perhaps I would know if I stood in it long enough that it began to condense on my hair and clothing. Perhaps I would never know.

I went back inside, still not to sleep. There was still so much Bob Dylan to get onto iTunes. So very much Bob Dylan. By the time of the next cigarette, it was 7 a.m. and the fog had returned to the steam vents of The Block in Baltimore, or it was recaptured by the UFO from which it had escaped, or perhaps the light of the sun had evaporated the excess water in the lower atmosphere. Take your pick.