I love taking things apart. Seeing how they work. It's like pulling the articulated arms and legs off your action figures and learning about compression coils and ball-joints.

Having less (though not no) action figures now, I have to find other outlets for this simple pleasure.

Like walking past construction sites and having "a-ha!" moments when I catch a glimpse of the white noise infrastructure of my city, disassembled. Infrastructure like fire hydrants.

I don't know how I thought fire hydrants worked. I probably never thought much about how they worked at all. But I imagine that my Sesame Street explanation was that the hydrant was just a "cap" on "water". The water just... got there.

Now my model has shifted, and whenever I see a fire hydrant I'm going to see something bigger. The hydrant as just the dangly fishing lure on that much bigger deep sea fish. Cool.