Sometimes images give us their message loud and clear. There’s no mistaking it because of the power of the visual or the gifts of the photographer or the structured nature of the composition. Or sometimes because of chance. Other pieces are less straightforward and much more given to suggestion. It’s the malleability of the image, the impressionable nature of the viewer.

For instance, this looks like bad inside liner art for a record, doesn’t it? I’m thinking upper midwestern band who can’t help but write about the cold and barren land a little too often. You think it’s the diminutive sun. I say it’s the water collected in the rumble strips.

Slow day, until it wasn’t. I slept in. Caught up on the world. Had an early lunch, tidied up a bit, and started packing a suitcase with — it isn’t a useful phrase, but I’ll use it — studied helplessness.

“Studied,” meaning something like “carefully considered or prepared,” or “marked by conscious design or premeditation,” or, my favorite, “achieved by careful and deliberate effort.”

For me, it was about not having a solid deadline for packing. And being completely befuddled by the forecasts for the places in my immediate future. Everything is 120 to 880 miles away from the next place, and there’s nothing requiring being outdoors, except for all of the things that require me to be outdoors in highly variable weather conditions.

Oh, it’s possible I’ve forgotten how to pack. It’s equally likely that I nailed it, or forgot something, or packed far too much. I’ll know before the end of the year.

So that’s the road. And you’ll notice that, in this one, I was careful to time it so that the tree is blocking the sun.

That changes the whole shot. Less desperate; same amount of loneliness. It was both chance and composition, the sun looks like the sun rather than a bad watercolor accident, but otherwise, there’s a lot of chance here, because I was watching the road more than the camera.

There’s a fun community oriented radio station in southern Indiana. I’ve happened upon them running incredibly specific fishing reports: who caught what in which lake, with what lure, and what the fish weighed. It’s terrific.

There was also a promo today about hunters donating deer for hungry neighbors. Bring your whole deer over to this particular place and they’ll process the animal and send the meat off to the community’s food banks. And you’ll be registered to win a new gun, sponsored by … a dentist, I think it was. (One deer, by the way, yields between 40 to 50 pounds of meat, and about 200 meals.)

The afternoon DJ has been there for 30 years. He sounds like he should be there, and that’s not meant to be reductive. He’s got a pitch perfect presentation.

But it was funny to hear that syrupy local accent backselling Cher’s “If I Could Turn Back Time” and Neil Diamond’s “You Make It Feel Like Christmas” before leaning into the Tom Petty/Stevie Nicks duet, “Stop Dragging’ My Heart.”

All of which came right after the comprehensive farm reports. (Wanna know how November soy futures did after the bell?)

It’s a local station — they’ve been owned by the same people since the 1940s — and locally-owned radio is wonderful, is the point.

We also listened to the campus station for the University of Southern Indiana, 95.7 The Spin.

The DJ wasn’t backselling songs, he did frontsell one new song. He did hardly any station branding. He (or they, it’s difficult to tell with campus radio) programmed great music. And he was a GREAT story teller. Over the course of three talk segments, I got a slice of life. It was so charming because there’s not much better than someone earnestly doing good campus radio. It’s one part confessional, one part aspirational, a bit vulnerable, not-at-all pretentious and completely amateurish. The young DJs may be really smart. They’re all clever.

At some point we started losing The Spin’s the signal, and two other stations bled in and out. It felt like every bad representation of schizophrenia you’ve seen in movies.

Here’s Twista! And Stone Temple Pilots! And Twista! And STP! And Twista! And … Brooks and Dunn?

By this time it was well into the evening, and The Yankee suggested we play my favorite car radio game. (She secretly likes it, too.) So we DXed stations and listened to …

650 WSM Nashville
660 WFAN New York
670 WSCR Chicago
700 WLW Cincinnati
710 WOR New York
720 WGN Chicago
730 WFMW Madisonville, KY
740 KRMG Tulsa
750 WSB Atlanta
760 WJR Detroit
780 WBBM Chicago
850 KOA Denver
870 WWL New Orleans
890 WLS Chicago
950 WAKM Franklin, TN
1000 KTOK Oklahoma City
1040 WHO Des Moines
1060 KYW Philadelphia
1100 WTAM Cleveland
1120 KMOX Kansas City
1200 WOAI San Antonio
1230 WHOP Hopkinsville, KY
1670 WMGE Macon, GA

Fourteen states, makes for a pretty good hour! Two lifetimes ago, I reported on a dozen or more of those stations for ABC. Lots of tornados and murders and corrupt judges and the like.

Anyway, we’re near here, until we aren’t. Which will be before you read this.

Things move improbably fast this time of year.