Is It Fall Yet?
Apart from tremors and the ever-present feeling of impending dissolution, one of the attendant drawbacks to constant drinking at high volume is a propensity to snap awake in the middle of the night, after the alcohol has worn off but long before there’s any point to getting out of bed. It is during these bouts of withdrawal-induced insomnia, when one tries to lie very still in the futile hope that sleep might just happen on its own, that one’s mind tends to run wild, cycling through every possible thought or emotion that one does their best to suppress with drink in the first place. The only way to avoid this sort of self-confrontation is to trouble the mind with a different topic altogether in hopes that it will distract or even lull into a trancelike state that at least approximates rest.
So, for various reasons, I found myself this morning at 4 wondering whether or not it was autumn already.
It is not an idle question. New Yorkers, living in a city where spending an afternoon indoors carries the risk of missing the season entirely, demand as much of it as we can get. After a particularly stultifying summer we are in even more need than usual for those few days of crisp air and the smell of smoke signifying the oncoming winter. Autumn is a season of promise made even more significant because its brevity and uncertainty assures that it will always disappoint, no matter how desperate we are to make the most of it. Meanwhile, we have spent the time since Labor Day living in a false fall, where our anticipation of autumn’s pleasures have been overburdened by our anxiety over its arrival. It seems like nothing has really happened yet.
Or has it? Look around you! The baseball playoffs are less than fifteen games away. Fall! The football season is only two weeks old and we’re already seeing some of the traditional off-field legal troubles. Fall! The bars overflow on the weekends with young people in expensive merchandise radiating the joy that only a midday buzz provides. Fall!
Even on the cultural front the signs are promising. The new Woody Allen movie that you are not going to go see because, get real, can you even remember the last time you went to see one, has arrived in the theaters. Fall! The 2010 television season has begun, bringing both funny fat people on the networks and expensive prestige pieces on HBO. Fall! We have already determined this year’s Great American Novel and had a tiresome debate over whether or not that construct is still valid in this modern era, and there are still new books coming. Fall! The search for the “song of the summer” is long since over, and now we can turn our attention to albums from serious white guys noodling around on guitars. Fall!
Politics, after the slow summer boil, are finally starting to get exciting (if ominous and depressing). I am in particular fascinated by the rise of New Jersey governor Chris Christie as a beacon of hope to the dying moderate wing of the Republican party. It is of course a tired (and probably unfair) cliche to suggest that Republicans lust for the brutal authority of the bullying boot, but it is rather interesting to see that while the majority of the party has gone so far around the bend that its would-be standard bearers are clambering over each other to see who can accuse the President of the United States of being a maniacal Kenyan anti-colonialist with the most vigor, the “rational” rump which once ran the show is now casting its favor on a blustery fat man whose idea of discourse is to shout “fuck you” at his opponents. If Ronald Reagan were still with us he would be very confused (as was the case during much of his presidency, so points for consistency there, I guess). Anyway, whatever your political persuasion there is plenty to observe and discuss right now. Fall!
Almost any way you look at it, all signs (even the astronomical ones) suggest that we should expect the season to start at any moment. Soon you will be drinking warm cider laced with rum, a scarf around your neck and a surprisingly bright sun shining on your face and providing the brief illusion that all will be right with the world, that this year things will be different, that winter won’t be as hard as you expect. Fall is coming. But not for the next couple days: it’s going to be in the 80’s until Sunday.
Photo by Luke Redmond, from Flickr.