so. october's over.

"The lucidity, the clarity of the light that afternoon was sufficient to itself; perfect transparency must be impenetrable, these vertical bars of a brass-coloured distillation of light coming down from sulphur-yellow interstices in a sky hunkered with grey clouds that bulge with more rain. It struck the wood with nicotine-stained fingers, the leaves glittered. A cold day of late October, when the withered blackberries dangled like their own dour spooks on the discoloured brambles. There were crisp husks of beechmast and cast acorn cups underfoot in the russet slime of dead bracken where the rains of the equinox had so soaked the earth that the cold oozed up through the soles of their shoes, lancinating cold of the approaching of winter that grips your belly and squeezes it tight. Now the stark elders have an anorexic look; there is not much in the autumn wood to make you smile but it is not yet, not quite yet, the saddest time of the year. Only, there is a haunting sense of the imminent cessation of being; the year, in turning, tuns in on itself. Introspective weather, a sickroom hush.

The woods enclose. You step between the first trees and then you are no longer in the open air; the wood swallows you up. There is no way through the wood anymore, the wood has reverted to its original privacy. Once you are inside it, you must stay there until it lets you out again for there is no clue to guide you through in perfect safety; grass grew over the track years ago and now the rabbits and the foxes make their own runs in the subtle labyrinth and nobody comes. The trees stir with a noise like taffeta shirts of women who have lost themselves in woods and hunt round hopelessly for the way out. Tumbling crows play tig in the branches of the elms they clotted with their nests, now and then raucously cawing. A little stream with soft margins of marsh runs through the wood but it has grown sullen with the time of the year; the silent, blackish water thickens, now, to ice. All will fall still, all lapse."

-- Angela Carter, from "The Erl-King"

prettier clouds but i'll still insist there's a wound in the sky. i'm almost through the weekend, the worst of it. thinking of last year and trying to remember specfics, but it's all hazy after a certain point-- a thought i had earlier, what did i do when i got home that night last year? i think i was totally calm because i'd cried in the car the whole way back to dracut, i'd come back after SWTP to an empty room and remained as calm as possible, the long hallways of empty bowditch seeming despair-ridden enough, no one to talk to, that burst of emotion would have been superfluous. i just made arrangements to get home as quickly as possible, listened to music, and tried to piece the world together in my mind. i don't know how many times i listened to "truce" that night.

so by the time i got home i had that post-crying calm, when everything seems ever so still and you're not okay but you have perspective. the dark of two a.m. in late october and the stars above my house guided me to my room and to bed and to comfort. but this is speculation, i don't know where i was mentally after i got back, just that i didn't think i'd be able to go back to school for a long time. then i slept in a little and made it back the very next day. just hours later: maybe in my dreams i sorted it out enough to realise i needed to just go back and get back into life and not just retreat home regardless of what i was going through. then some other things happened and heartbreak was diluted enough that i could function for the next few months, into now.

then halloween '05 came and i missed any festivities but i talked (unexpectedly) to becky, and it had been quite a while at the time, and we had our brief correspondence. she wrote me a letter i didn't get until january and i wrote her a letter that she didn't get until much later where i explained exactly what had been going on that night and those before it, and i included a thought, something along the lines of "we're still young and all the world is before us." i'm still young and i still feel that way, but with each passing year it becomes less and less valid a worldview. but in a year so very much has changed.

gusts: i woke up at around six this morning to the vast quiet nothingness of the apartment with its windows open and swirling wind whistling all around. the hallway outside sounds like it would be a wind tunnel, but step out and you can't feel it at all. try to close the door and you get a resistant current that keeps it open. drifted in and out of sleep for five hours with my own window open, fan off, so i could hear everything. heard people running to cars, wind's swirly noise, and lots of sirens: the world ending, or at least in an advanced state of turbulence.

and it fits that today should be stormy, because i wish it wasn't the day it was. as if a hole in the universe had opened up on the calendar date of october 28th and will burst with grey skies and howling winds even a year after the fact. what could have been escaping, its existence one of pure possibility, the roads not taken bursting forth from the sky and scattering the falling water onto every aspect of the emergency of our lives.

medieval european history, medieval philosophy, archery. some other stuff too, but it doesn't fit the theme.

navigating the proverbial ship of self around the thickly settled rocks of several independent, emotionally delicate situations while listening to a lot of mary timony and worrying about getting stabbed if i should dare to step outside.

"alleged chuck norris fact: 'chuck norris' tears can cure cancer. too bad he never cries. ever.'

there was a man whose tears could cure cancer or any other disease, including the real cause of all diseases – sin. his blood did. his name was jesus, not chuck norris.

if your soul needs healing, the prescription you need is not chuck norris' tears, it's jesus' blood."

-- chuck norris

read this. when i can stop laughing i'm going to be writing up an article on this for the new red skies opinion blog, if we ever get the thing designed.

i used to think of salem this time of year from an aerial perspective, sitting in my room back in bowditch when no one else was around. i'd get lines like "city by the sea" in my mind while i tried to imagine the high-angle view of the landscape and the people moving about in harvest-time bustle amid fantastic leaves. i'd put on "the jeep song" by the dresden dolls for that girl group effect during the chorus, then usually skip ahead to "truce" and pick out the parts that seemed to have relevance to my own situation.

i like going downtown, it's a bit of a head-clearing experience while at the same time being the exact opposite. while demons of the past need to be cleansed, that work is never done as more are made daily, so it was a singularly interesting experience taking a walk down there with catherine this afternoon. life moves on and we're all so confused, aren't we? matherine, i'd forgotten about that one-- always searching for some imagined state where everything would be that much better, moving in and out of places, conversing on park benches and in the midst of large crowds, down streets and through open spaces, with small children charging at us and small dogs running in the distance. and a taunting toyish train that keeps passing back.

and i say things i shouldn't say that are all true, and what's the harm in true?

weather was perfect today and it's wednesday and we (or, at least, ashley and i) hear so very much about weather-- ashley spinning the mercury tubes of death that some call a sling psychrometer and children playing with pennies and quicksilver and i can't wait for the weekend. but back to the now (or the then, this morning) and it's the day where everything is too early and a breakfast interlude becomes the saviour of morning. left central when it was cold and through raining but just only, left class with it a little warmer, nudged into the perfectly comfortable, still under a greyed-out canopy with blue sparklethroughs of sky just barely resolving themselves into visibility and the shapes of clouds. welcome warmish breeze. i have the tain in my head and maybe she does too, and i'm thinking about goblins and dinosaurs and evil psychologists and orion because those are the stories of the last twenty-four hours.

and i didn't know dinosaurs could do such things, coexisting with cars and playing with cats in pool halls and finding out that school is cancelled the next day because of the cold. such amazing creatures.

i happened to be copying this out of a book just when elizabeth called (something that, after two years or so of silence, seemed so impossible i'm sure the dimensions of the universe are currently sliding in all directions after being so fantastically broken apart), and doesn't it just fit so perfectly:

"perhaps it was the snow, or the food, or the impossibility of my life that made me hope to go to bed and wake up with the past intact. i seemed to have run in a great circle, and met myself again on the starting line."

-- jeanette winterson, oranges are not the only fruit

it's an october of limitless surprise.

me, this morning: "a chill breeze. a chill breeze!"

how long has it been? surely over a year, tipping toward two. seems like it. and i'll admit it, even though it takes me back to a version of myself best not revisited: at least two or three times since that last time we spoke (it was one of a few occasions i have bumping around in memory, can't recall exactly) i've had half a mind to find out if and when you were back in town, and call you up. say i'm here too, not so far away, and i still remember where you live and i've driven past there a few times, or really wanted to, could have, and maybe if it's okay i'd like to pick you up and go out for the proverbial cup of coffee and talk. like people always say but rarely do.

except the way i saw it we'd actually do it, and we'd talk about what's happened in our lives or something substantial, and you'd probably laugh but i'd tell you what i could never quite articulate back then, informed by what's happened since. i wouldn't almost tear out the undercarriage of my car turning out of the loop parking lot. i always take a right when i go there now. it's become a matter of course to mention how often i used to spend friday and saturday nights there whenever i'm there with anyone else. truth is, i talk about you all the time with people i've met since who have no idea who you are. i relate parts of the experience of you as if they were stories passed down by others through time, any embellishments or inaccuracies i've added now seeming like reality because that's how i've been telling it. time's lens will add a layer of romance to anything. so much has probably changed, i wouldn't recognise a lot of you now. or you me. and i can't believe i'm writing this, but it's been a month for improbability.

to own canterbury tales puppets.

i got through the spring so well even without catherine. she's really gone this year, and i really thought i could do this. i had it together for the first few weeks of school, i'd been looking forward to being back so much that the momentum carried over from the summer and i was ready to just act as if the reality i'd constructed after july went awry to get myself through the rest of the summer had simply blossomed into reality the second i stepped out of the car in front of central. it didn't, it was somewhat different and we all adapted. fine.

then we hit october a week ago and the cracks started to show. i'm just talking about myself now. and with every passing day last year starts to seem closer rather than as far away as it really is. and whatever similarities may seem to exist, everything is so different now. last year isn't looming recent history so much as it is a reference point that i can point at in my current confusion and conclude that i've been worse off and made it through. a reminder that the twists and turns of my life provide enough unresolved complication that i don't really need to be adding more unnecessarily. keeps it calmer, adds perspective. and while i was thinking about all of this today catherine was there anyway; far away, yes, but available when i need someone to talk to.

restoring that sense of connectivity i always want to believe in, that people can understand each other at a distance and say exactly what needs to be said.

new red skies. read it, or you won't know what to do when the zombies come for your family.

you're completely out of your element here, friend.

so, yesterday: even just weatherwise it split the world of contemplation in two: i did a lot of walking with the hazy sunshine beating down on me or at my back, trains of thought beginning to twist and spool themselves as if it were early summer. but it's nothing of the sort, and everything else about the day, save the occasionally uncomfortable heat, screamed october. sad fate, really-- seasonal heat irregularities mean we have to almost force ourselves into the frame of mind this part of year demands.

and it's just been one of those long weeks, the good kind.

fly on in our hearts, travel companion.

governant - a body of people ruling a country whose only significant characteristic is uniformly poor spelling and pronunciation.

first of the month and it had to be a sunday. sunday means a sunday morning means sleeping in, the pleasant, digressive part of the day, but it also means there's hell to pay in the form of a sunday night. nothing more desolate than a sunday night: nothing more given to reflection on the week past and what i should have done and should have said and nothing more given to reflection in advance on the spectrum of possible outcomes for the week ahead-- always insecure in the knowledge that in a week i'll be right back here doing it all again. and reflection on dreams, that double-edged sleepinlatemorning where you can keep rolling over half-conscious thinking "that was a good one" and slipping back into whatever sweet sunday morning dream it was, serialised, moving on to part two, the people you see every day doing the things you must secretly wish they would or why would you keep dreaming about it?

but those dreams cast their fantastical, mocking shadow over the rest of the day and the night, a night suited to little else other than watching the minutes slip by as you know the last week of life has: things no better or perhaps worse than before. and dreams still don't come true.