I was riding home from racquetball the other day, and slid out going around a corner in a huge drift of sand.

I dodged an usually large amount of car debris — chunks of body molding, shards of red tail-light plastic, head-light glass — and spied several dead birds.

I pulled into my driveway and looked around at a barren apocalyptic landscape, as if all the life — and color — had been sucked out of this world. All the trees looked sickly and my lawn looked like it didn’t need to be watered so much as washed.

Lord, this town needs a bath.

I know how this works. Fall kills, then winter rolls in, and things really take a turn for the drab.

It just seems things are especially filthy this year — my yard, my bikes, trees, the air. I was riding to work by the hospital the other day and noticed the street was stained, like a ring around the bathtub.

I’ve seen street sweepers out and about and think they do an admirable job.

In fact, I’d love to be a street sweeper in my next life. Where else can you drive as fast as possible and as slow as you want — at the same time? In what other job can you go home and say you made the world a better (-looking) place — every single day?

And I don’t imagine street sweepers take their jobs home with them. I figure they don’t wake up in a cold sweat, worried they didn’t do a good enough job at that intersection of Ninth and Mass, for instance.

But with all apologies to the city’s street sweepers, what this filmy town really needs is a good old thunderstorm or two, a biblical gullywasher to polish the streets and scrub the foliage and launder the ecru pallor from our fair city.

After all, it really does clean up pretty nicely.