Image: Eden, Janine, and Jim via Flickr

“I get depressed when the seasons change from Summer to Fall. What can I do?”—Bummed About Autumn

Who wouldn’t get depressed? The days are getting shorter. The nights are getting longer, and are already full of terrors. Everything’s getting colder and darker. There’s no good TV shows running. The only comfort in the entire cruel world is like pumpkin-spiced things. Beers, coffee, pumpkin-spiced pumpkins, whatever. Your baseball teams are probably not contending. Leaves are dying and smelling a little like poop. Football players are all injuring each other.

The light changes ever so slightly. As if it was not there to send you warmth or illumination. It is “light” in scare quotes. Just enough to remind you of everything you’ve lost and are slowly but surely losing a few minutes at a time. Sure, I’m right there with you, Bummed. Even if Fall is your favorite time of year, even if this is a particularly warm Autumn so far, you know in the back of your mind how this movie is going to end. We’re all headed straight for another Winter.

In Winter it’s dark all day and all night. This lasts for like 5 months. Or it seems that way. No one understands you. There’s few reasons that seem worth emerging from the warmth of your blankets every morning. At this point you’ll yearn for anything pumpkin, but it will be gone. All the pumpkins are frozen. Their little pumpkin faces filled with frost and regret. They once smiled so joyfully but now they feel nothing except cold and dark and helpless.

Weren’t we just here? Wasn’t it moments ago that we were waking up to a new week, full of dread and barely able to drag ourselves to the starting line? Didn’t we just complain about how exhausted we were and wonder how much more we could take? I guess the good news is I can copy and paste this exact block of text over and over again until it finally all comes down, because we live in a world where it’s always like this now. Here’s some music. Enjoy.

★★ Ever-brightening blue showed through the gaps in the purple clouds till the purple itself had turned silver. The breeze was not cool enough to bring the hoodie out of the six-year-old’s backpack. A late arrival to the schoolyard, wearing a sweatshirt, asked the other gathered boys in their t-shirts if they were cold, and when they said no, ditched it. The chill aded to an intermittent clamminess, under a cloud-glazed sun. The thick and humid air was hard to draw in through the remains of fall’s first head cold. The sky got bleaker and bleaker. Children emerged from the afterschool sports program with their hair clumpy and damp with sweat. Something less than rain fell for a moment.

Image: Tomer Gabel via Flickr

[It’s been a terrible week at the White House, even correcting for the fact that this is the Trump White House, and incompetence, evil and spectacle have been normalized to a degree once believed unattainable in America. JARED, IVANKA, their DAUGHTER and SON, GENERALS KELLY and MATTIS, and GARY COHN are sitting at a round table like a group of knights, only if knights didn’t believe in primogeniture (because that would mean DON JUNIOR gets everything). GENERAL KELLY has finally arranged a conference call with the Supreme Court regarding how to activate the Twenty-fifth Amendment. He has kept the purpose of the call from most of his colleagues but the wisest ones have intuited something is up. JARED is thinking that sitting in a circle is stressful because there are so many opportunities to make eye contact.]

GENERAL KELLY [perfunctorily, even though he is staging a coup]: Does anyone have the number to the Supreme Court?

[IVANKA learned at a young age that exploiting the laziness of the men around her pays dividends, sometimes literally, so she dials the phone. JUSTICE GORSUCH answers, exactly who GENERAL KELLY did not want.]

IVANKA [powerfully]: Justice Gorsuch, hello.

JUSTICE GORSUCH [obsequiously]: Hi Ivanka. If this is about wearing pink to raise awareness for breast cancer, I did get to talk to the Chief Justice about that.

[IVANKA smiles fakely to GENERAL KELLY, proud that she has defiantly ignored his request to stop selling branded clothing to other branches of government.]

Sitting proudly in the psycho-biddy film canon—there is one, you know—is 1971’s What’s the Matter with Helen?, in which Shelley Winters and Debbie Reynolds play incognito mothers whose sons committed a headline-seizing murder. According to a Los Angeles Times story that ran at the time, Winters’s behavior while making the film was so erratic that at one point she was threatened with replacement by Geraldine Page. You’d better duck now, because I’m about to throw something. When Page won her long overdue Oscar in 1986, for The Trip to Bountiful, presenter F. Murray Abraham was bloody right to call her “the greatest actress in the English language,” and the idea that this acting colossus would fill in for Shelley Winters is risible; that Page would sully even the soles of her shoes on a mid-level piece of genre kitsch is unthinkable. Yet what am I to do with the fact that nestled in the above-cited canon is 1969’s What Ever Happened to Aunt Alice?

(You should know that the “psycho-biddy” designation is slightly off, given that the actresses poached for the genre—which was largely a 1960s and early ’70s phenomenon—tended to be in their late forties and early fifties. For accounting purposes, the only chronological “biddy” starring in What Ever Happened to Aunt Alice? is Ruth Gordon—seventy-two when the movie came out; Page was all of forty-four.)

White nationalists generally don’t want to look like characters out of American History X anymore. Fashion choices at the convention ranged from Ruby Ridge to Mad Men, but most of the people there looked like you might run into them on Capitol Hill or in the U-District. That said, there is a type. According to my observations, the standard Seattle Nazi is a white male under 30 who either works in the tech industry or is going to school to work in the tech industry. “You’re also a coder? Do you mind if I send you something I’ve been working on?” I heard that more than once.

It is nice to read an account of the secret lives of white nationalists that isn’t totally fucking credulous.

Every week is fucking insane these days, so when you find yourself saying, “Sweet mother of Christ was this week fucking insane” you know the week has really been a relentless fuckload of insanity. Let’s get out of here before anything else happens. Also, here’s music, enjoy.

★★★★ The children in their shorts or trackpants and hoodies pressed up against the schoolyard gate in the shade, waiting for the belated unlocking. A pigeon took one last unhasty strut through a patch of reflected sun before the tide of running little feet swept through. The light was low-angled but there was still full green foliage to catch and dapple it. The bounce-back glow in the plaza outside the apartment made a man reading a newspaper on the bench look like a photo shoot. Sun coming on directly gave the display windows of an entry-level tasteful home furnishings store the bleary and yellowed look of bulletproof checkout-counter plexiglass. The air got heavier and lost its transparency. In the full shine of afternoon, there was no such thing as monochrome brick.