The eggshell is cracking.

I spent some time in a new city this weekend, walked through streets (both with and without names) that I'd never seen before, touched a Great Lake and had it lick me back, ate a profoundly overloaded hot dog -- and I found, while not precisely what I was looking for, an answer or two to questions I'd been asking myself for years.

The sky was hazy as I passed by the lakeshore, watching five bouquets bloom across the water. The skyline drank up the clouds, skyscrapers playing hide-and-seek while the waves washed the rocks away.

I saw a dinosaur of heavily braced metal, a rock band that pushed past the edge of the world and ran until they came back around the other side, a smile on the face of a man with a scruffy beard and lonely voice.

I stood in a cage and broke the lock.

Some of these things are more true than others.