September

Rainy and chilly — thank God. My brain feels a little foggy, but I took melatonin before I went to sleep and sometimes it takes awhile to snap out of it; the cost of deep sleep is biological confusion upon waking. I’m driving upstate this afternoon to see a friend, and I’m looking forward to it — a few hours of driving is always (usually) clarifying. It’s far too early for the leaves to be changing colors, and in fact, as of a few days ago, it was ridiculously warm on the east coast, but at the moment, the season does feel like it’s changed or changing. The temperature will go back up tomorrow, and God knows, could hover in the 70’s until November (because of climate change) but today, I’ll live under the pleasant illusion that the next few months will be a cool, rainy, romantic autumn; a full harvest for the senses. The coffee I’m drinking is truly terrible — I guess the bag has been open too long — but I’ll keep drinking it anyway. I feel compelled to keep writing, to not paragraph break, or walk away from my laptop (mounted on a standing desk) partly because I know that once this little moment of pre-autumnal calm is over, it will not return: vanishing into a hot, anxious autumn, which will feel, in reality, like an extended summer. We are heading into an era — rather, we are there — of winter/summer, 24/7. Hot/cold. Stress/sleep. An era of unpleasant, inhumane extremes. I don’t think I’m exaggerating or that this is merely the coffee talking: everything in our civilization points to the destruction of equinox points — the points between seasonal poles; we will plow right through them. And what will be left? Maybe only memories, artwork and poems and recollections of a more temperate, moderated climate; of the subtle, poetic gradations between days and months. The human relationship with nature might essentially be over — our deepest connection to weather might be the Weather app.