This is a jar of various nuts, bolts, washers, widgets, and doodads that I keep around for those times I need some random part for a bicycle. Most of them wouldn’t suit the bikes I ride nowadays, but they were great for the bikes I was riding back in college.

Underneath all the clutter is my dad’s back porch, some kind of old concrete where they used a lot of fairly fine gravel in addition to sand. I’d dumped out the whole jar on the porch so I could find a part, and decided I ought to take a picture. If you look close you can see a sort of self-portrait in one of the ball bearings.

On a metaphoric level, this is also a self-portrait. I think of it as the general state of my mind; lots of useful stuff scattered into near uselessness because I either haven’t had time to organize it, or couldn’t use it if I did organize it because I couldn’t find anything.

Why overcomplicate when you can overthink?