Sunday Sunday...

I began a blog the other day that went something like this:

The Winter Mindscape

It is gorgeously sunny outside, yet I am inclined towards bleaker thoughts.

Caffeine crash notwithstanding, I think my level of general apathy is increasing. I want to care, I really do, but it seems like such a great effort for so little reward.

Work is repetitive. While it requires my effort, it very rarely challenges me. (The people I work with may be challenged though. Does that count?)

School is only a means to an end. A very expensive and far away end. Nineteenth century literature isn't exactly something I spend long hours contemplating. Traditional English grammar... I think the course name says it all in this instance.

What does that leave me with? Aaaaa, the ever illusive hope of a better time/life to be had after years of monotonous toil at things that are both repetitive and uninteresting; I can look forward to the decline of my life, ie: Retirement.

To be trite, I think I was feeling a bit down. Really though, I it may also be a sign that I associate some of my more miserable thoughts with fall and winter. As months go they tend to be more bleak, what better time could there be to think about how dreadful your life is than when you are bombarded with obvious signs that everything green and fresh must wither and change and die? Hello depressing mortality.

Now that I am of a slightly less brooding and wallowy with the "my life is so hard..." whining self, I am beginning to realize that fall is something in the air. No, really, it's in the air. We all breath in a strange mind drug in fall. It leaves us emotionally disenchanted, spiritually bereft and mentally anxious. We are encouraged to confront our own mortality just at the moment the outside world is beginning to hibernate. The weather turns more to the stormy and bleak. The sun sets a little earlier every day, and the little sunlight we get leaves us dazzled and sunblind rather than refreshed. We are left wanting and cold and alone, blindly fumbling for some last vestige of human comfort and warmth. Instead we are bombarded by more bad weather, and Halloween. Too much candy and too much alcohol at parties where we celebrate all that is odd and gory and frightening about death and life and all the thousand states between them. It amazes me that we haven't all gone stark-raving mad by the middle of November. But that's what they're good at. Correct dosage of the mind drug. Because , it's all about the lead-up to...

Christmas.

One of the most commercialized holidays ever. It comes just when we are at our lowest to allow us to buy our way back into happiness.

I figured out all of this while I was recovering from a migraine on Sunday. Don't say it was the Advil, you can't say that, because if you do, then you know you're just buying in to the mind drug of fall.

The old Italian people playing Bocci helped me to see it all. I was watching them, and thinking, "someday I want to be an old Italian lady". I know this is impossible, but they were having so much fun, playing this lawn bowling like game. Imagine all the funny old people you know, the really nice ones, and then imagine that they are playing bocci, and chatting about "the kids" and "the grandkids" and ribbing each other about their poor skills, and then cheering for each other when someone has a really good toss. Imagine all of that and you may see a bit of what I saw on Sunday.

So, watching these Italian people, I began to wonder why fall isn't full of things like that. Why are people so awful, in general, during the winter months when they had been so funwonderful in summer? That's when I came up with my theory of the fall air rotting the brainmeats. It's sort of like an allergic reaction. Some people are immune to it, some never develop a sensitivity to it, and the rest of the world succumbs to it without even a second thought as to the origins of the "oscariness" they feel. The world might be your oyster, but when the mind drug of fall comes, it's like the oyster you found during red tide; you can look at it, but you can't eat it, and if you look at it for too long it will start to smell, and we all know that the smell of rotten oyster is devilishly hard to get rid of.