Uncle Autumn and His Wet Shoes
Summer didn’t taper off this year. It stood up, turned around, and shat directly onto the overheated heads of the general population before walking out without a word. No golden leaves, no soft final light—just a blunt evacuation of warmth and then miserable Uncle Autumn showing up at the door with wet shoes and his worst attitude. There’s nothing to do but get slowly sick and take stock.
What’s still worth doing in September: sneaking into an open-air cinema before they fold the screens away for another year. Sitting in the park in a sleeping bag eating ice cream while everyone else makes sensible decisions. Getting the iPhone 5 imported from the US before the rest of the world catches on—or at least pretending that’s a thing you’d do. A moment of silence for the tenth anniversary of September 11th, genuinely. Bars instead of clubs. Snake print. Glitter blazers without apology. Britney Spears. Jeremy Scott’s cardboard glasses. Terry Richardson’s entire problematic worldview. A hypothetical bit of crack. Indian summer wine villages and men’s hats. Dancing with Brazilian conviction. Eid. Curls. Party helium at exactly the wrong moment in a conversation. Vulgar vagina energy, wherever you find it. The kind of woman who just radiates an imaginary long cock in every room she walks into—something in the posture, the silence, the complete indifference to your reaction. Jai Paul at 2am in the kitchen. Going to bed fully dressed. Writing a poem for nobody. Discovering drum ’n’ bass as if it just arrived. Loving something new just to feel it. Fighting someone for fun. Pausing without reason. Acting cool. Adopting an office plant and treating it with the gravity it deserves.
What September doesn’t need: paying tuition while drowning in end-of-semester coursework. Dancing on tables in bars. Ordering cocktails in clubs. Paying at the checkout entirely in ten-cent coins. Miserableness worn as a personality. Insect bites that inflate Hitch-style within the hour. Jealous affairs that curdle into something uglier. Hurricane Irene energy, generally. Blackberrys. Slow internet. Fruit flies. Gold vending machines. Warm sushi. Getting stuck on drum ’n’ bass and making it your whole identity. Breaking up on Twitter. Watching money roll onto the train tracks at exactly the wrong moment. The ongoing argument that print journalism has inherent value that digital doesn’t—still going, somehow. Google+. Jerking off to a stranger’s bikini photos and feeling nothing afterward except the specific blankness of having done it. Empty heads finding the same shit good every single season.
Not dancing is always bad. That one’s not seasonal.