## Cranes Just recently a big construction site opened on the hill directly in front of my window, on the other side of town, slightly up from my point of view. Something tall and massive, a crane! There are cranes of different apparent robustness, height, with different amounts of counterweight and this one seems capable of holding it's own in a bar fight. Night still falls quickly, we're barely building up to February. Wild mist runs through the valley in jetlines and dark grey puffy clouds. Once darkness sets in, I'm surprised to see a bright, cold-blue hued light amidst the mist. It can't be the moon because that has a yellowish tint and it can't be a star because it's much bigger. Maybe an asteroid is approaching on a tangent to earth, just over the horizon and is going to haul itself right over my head. No, it must be the crane light, no doubt about it! By chance, the crane is placed so that from where I stand it forms a tunnel for my gaze, a vortex with the mist running around it tugging at my attention. I'm sure this is one of those situations where you can get completely lost in an observation and wake up the next day in a ditch just next to a pool of wet cement, at the foot of a giant crane that by some mystery has pulled you over here, your head hurts and you feel like having walked 100 000 steps. Behind the cement blocks which hold the lever arm in place, you hear the cables swinging in the wind, someone threw away a lighter. "It is empty!", that's the reason you mutter, but as you rub your thumb over the firestone wheel with just the right mindset, it lights up an interdimensional tunnel on the inside of the crane's trunk. Here the journey begins and the only reason why you still woke up in our world is inflation. Try to book a room at the other end of the universe with these prices ... I have a particular fondness for cranes. They are elegant and as impressive as the structures they help to raise. At night they are brightly lit and like construction sites as a whole, suspended agents of change, with every turn something that clearly was is levied over to what is probably going to be. They are one armed heroes battling entropy itself, turn by turn raising the lack of concert and organization, enacting someone's larger than life dreams. Once in Nakano, Tokyo, I saw a group of three cranes. It was at night, bright lights on each of them, a white steady one and some yellowish blinking on the long arm. They were inactive, folded to the side and upwards, perfectly parallel and as I couldn't see their base, they seemed incomprehensibly huge and immaterial like some guardian spirit in the background, wise beings in the possession of knowledge and power just outside the reach of men.