Three years ago tonight I had my last cocktail (sober anniversary post to come tomorrow). That last cocktail had been several months, perhaps years, in the making, and while I knew it would eventually arrive, I just wasn’t exactly sure when. My mind and my body had been whispering for some time that it was enough, that they weren’t getting the protection and joy they once did from alcohol, that they couldn’t properly defeat the demons with liquor getting in the way. In my head, I understood all of that. It made sense and sounded like reason, but fear has a way of overriding sense and reason, and back then I was simply too afraid to go out there alone, without a cocktail.  

It wasn’t that last night of drinking that did it. It wasn’t that last hangover. It was the culmination of all the hangovers that had come before, in the stark light of the next day. At those times I would be filled with the dread and depression of having flushed my body with alcohol, of altering my brain and bending my perception to the point where I didn’t remember things or know what I was saying. The cumulative effect of those mornings eventually clicked over to being something I didn’t want to do anymore. I’d had enough. 

Those hangover mornings felt haunted. The quiet felt more quiet, the gray light felt more gray. The world took on a somber aspect, and I always felt more alone than ever. It makes sense when one considers the basic fact that alcohol is a depressant. I remember on one such day sitting at a cafe and watching people walk by, wishing I could have been more like them, wishing I didn’t have to get drunk the night before to handle whatever social situation was worrying me. Everyone else seemed to go through the day so much easier than me. I didn’t realize how much drinking played a part in those thoughts, how it all fed into a slow, downward slope whose ending I dreaded as much as I wanted to watch it play out. 

Was I having fun on the night of October 26, 2019? A little. Not very much though, if I’m being completely honest. Drinking had ceased being fun for a while, and it was verging on simply being a habit. It was time…

Standing half-naked in the sunlight, I still manage to cover the decades-old bruises left on my heart. Back in the 90’s, I remember listening to Trent Reznor scream, “I wanna fuck you like an animal!” and it was all just a way of getting ‘Closer’ to God. On this particular Sunday morning, God feels far away, so I put on a piece by Reznor and Atticus Ross that was produced over a decade after ‘Closer’. What a difference a decade makes, and now almost another decade has passed beyond that. Still, I stand at the window from time to time, soaking in the sun to feel some sort of warmth in this wayward world, decade after decade after decade. I feel the subtle shift of time. I feel the differences in the years, knowing much of that is simple shifts in perspective and perception. Getting closer to peace within, even as the world grows ever divisive without. 

I like this music. It’s calm and tense at once, the way most of us are living each day out. Even at our most peaceful moments, the tension of a country teetering on the brink of collapse does’t fully allow for total release and meditative bliss. All I can do is approach… gently, slowly, in each and every breath. It’s a lovely reminder that life is never fully done, and nothing is ever truly complete. It’s all one continuously flowing stream – we dip in and out of a day, we dip in and out of a lifetime. We do our best, even when it’s all falling down around us, and when I try to sort it out in words, as in this very post, it crumbles in my incapable hands. 

Working to embrace the imperfect aspects of life, I strive to make my peace with such failures. I tell myself I’m ok with it, even though it still bothers and worries me. Putting it down here, literally and figuratively, helps a little. I put it down in writing, and then I put it down in my head. The power of acknowledgement is one of those hidden secrets of life that no one ever tells you about – at least no one told me. I only knew the power of writing – of putting thoughts to print or paper – and in a way that was its own acknowledgment. The demon is always less frightening when it can be named, then trapped on a piece of paper or in the confines of a soon-to-be-buried blog post. 

Hurrying toward Halloween, which arrives exactly one week from today, this recap is bracketed by these baby pumpkins, which have their own tales to tell – the growth of a pumpkin, no matter how small and adorable, is not without its harrowing moments. Who knows what summer stories they have which got them to this sad denouement? On with the weekly recap…

The week began amid candlelight and Shirley Horn. 

A meditative walk in the woods.

The Ben Cohen calendar signals the most wonderful time of the year is coming quickly upon us.

A sexual inspiration for the ears.

30 years of ‘Sex’ and ‘Erotica’ intertwined with death.

Andy celebrated a birthday in his preferred quiet way.

A fall pause.

Hidden hope right in the backyard.

Ornamental orthodoxy.

The view from the attic.

An Albany afternoon.

Dazzlers of the Day included Richard Marx, Mufseen Miah, and David Bagnardi.

The view looks over a bit of the neighborhood, especially in winter once the leaves have gone. From the safe vantage point of our attic, lit with candles and fragrant with their spicy traces of cardamom, cinnamon, and orange peel, the view lended to the coziness – the world from a single vantage point. A section of foliage lit in fall flames against a blue sky and framed by the branches of an old pine tree, cradled as a view within a view. 

Fall is about such layers, in what we wear, in the way the trees shake off their summer finery in stages, in the gradations of light from the window and the candles. The attic is quiet. It’s where I go to pause and think, to prepare for the coming winter and reconcile myself to the gray days on the way. There is a certain peace here, safely ensconced slightly above the lay of the land, protected and buoyed by its lofty nature. Meanwhile the outside world burns up before a bright blue sky…

Ornamental kales and cabbages are my favorite kind of cabbages and kales. (Though I’m coming around the common cooking cabbage when employed like this.) For fantastic fall color, these ornamental varieties offer some fabulous hues, accentuated by drops of rain from the previous evening – a lovely reminder of all the wonder of fall, and a recompense for the loss of summer. Fall still burns, fall still smolders. 

Fall packs its own punch, casting its own spells – sometimes with color, sometimes with scents, sometimes with the lightest wisp of smoke on a breeze. In the case of fall and cabbage, it takes a lackluster and utilitarian green, and turns it into this spectacular visage. Vibrant and vivacious – power of the ‘V’. 

It was the sunlight slanting through the fiery-hued lace-leaf maple tree that caught my eye and drew me outside. The air was cool as the sun began its disappearing act. I was first focused on the copper and red leaves of this little tree, which has steadily expanded its horizontal spread over the past twenty years. For all the heated shades, and the way the colors bled from one into another, there was a bright secret suddenly illuminated by the fading sunlight. 

A few pairs of maple seeds – the helicopters of our youthful springs – hung behind the curtain of leaves. I recall them mostly from the spring, and the way they fell from the two big maples trees outside the front of my childhood home. You could also split them apart, then split the base open and use the sticky white sap to stick it on the tip of your nose – hence the other name we used for them – Pinocchios. 

These dried and brown versions, lit by the sun and revealed only through a closer inspection, reminded me how spring is still around, and present in the decay of fall and winter. It’s just slumbering and waiting until the sun starts to linger again. 

The switch happened on a recent afternoon – that moment when summer was no longer in the rear-view window, when we had moved too far beyond its warmth and light to pretend otherwise. I don’t know why I felt it so keenly, but there it was – incontrovertibly autumn – and no going back now. 

The light had shifted, it slanted differently at the end of the day, which also came on quicker. The leaves in the trees were also betraying the change, with some branches already daring to go completely nude and naked. The next bout of wind and rain, no matter how insignificant, will pull the majority down, then we’ll really see it. 

For now, with the sunny days we’d been lucky enough to have of late, it’s a very pretty point in the seasonal progression. The raw and dreary days are on the way though, and the trick will be in finding the comfort in that stark new vast expanse of beauty, as it’s a beauty that often proves elusive and difficult to see on first glance. The world is no longer interested in such gradations and subtlety anymore, and it’s all the more sadder for it.