The daily digest of Twin Cities culture | Secrets of the City

Snapshots from a drive home from work while listening to the new Ween album, which is fantastic if you like Ween, and I do:

Three shiny balloons trapped in the branches of a tree above a baseball diamond.

A long strip of aluminum foil tumbling like an acrobatic hallucination down the middle of LaSalle Avenue.

A shirtless man wearing a sombrero and laughing ecstatically while trotting along beside a prancing little dog outfitted (I'm guessing against its will) in a purple vest.

An old woman, holding a little girl's hand at a street corner, bending down to clearly hiss something in the girl's ear, and then whacking her on the head with what appeared to be a Bible.

A fireman dozing off in a lawn chair in front of a fire station.

An awkward young woman alternately lurching and tip-toeing along on roller blades.

A teenage boy sucking a hickey into his girlfriend's neck at a bus stop bench.

Mormons on mountain bikes, poking through things at a garage sale.

A pitiable spectacle involving an ancient hunchbacked man and a microwave oven he was apparently trying to carry home.

Two hearses lined up at the entrance to a senior citizen center.

A man I recognized as my old friend Clammy Reese, wearing threadbare golf togs and toting a bag of clubs, standing at a busy intersection with a sign that read: "Indulge me, why don't you? Winter's coming and green fees ain't free. God bless you, I guess."

A sandwich shop with this modest slogan painted on the window: "The Best Sandwiches We Know How To Make --That's A Promise!"

Hundreds of geese in a supermarket parking lot, from the looks of things holding some kind of meeting, probably having to do with a planned trip south. Do geese in fact fly south for the winter? I don't know why they wouldn't.

An inexplicable billboard: "Music is Not a Priority in Unhappy Lives."

An morose-looking young mother watching her two children burying themselves in the playground sand, and thinking (or so I imagined): "Deeper."