“The real thing about evil,” said the Witch at the doorway, “isn’t any of what you said. You figure out one side of it – the human side, say – and the eternal side goes into shadow. Or vice versa. It’s like the old saw: What does a dragon in its shell look like? Well no one can ever tell, for as soon as you break the shell to see, the dragon is no longer in its shell. The real disaster of this inquiry is that it is the nature of evil to be secret.” – Gregory Maguire, ‘Wicked’

One of the most fascinating thing to witness is an octopus adapting its camouflage to a new setting. It happens like magic, or some trick of the eye, and they’re so good at it you can merely marvel. It fascinates in part because we so rarely get to see the moment of transformation as its happening. We don’t usually notice the turn until it’s behind us. But what if we were aware of it? What if we felt it, sensed it, knew it to be happening in the moment? 

Stop what you’re doing and listen. Find somewhere quiet to be and simply pause there. Maybe you will hear the crickets of the night through darkened windows. Maybe you pick up on the hum of a dryer finishing its tumbling load of clothes. Maybe a television drones on in some distant room or building. When you pause to listen, and allow yourself some quiet, you see there’s not really such a thing as quiet anywhere. I read somewhere that there are rooms created of total silence, but that people are unable to stay in them for very long before going mad. Too many of us want for noise and fuzz and static of some kind – anything to keep the mind from unraveling. Distractions have become a mandatory part of life. It makes sense in a world that has gone so dark. 

I’ve inhabited the quiet for my entire life. Of course I’ve made my distractions and created my own noise – anything to escape the harsh and brutal reality of everything around me, but more than most I seem to largely live in a world of quiet and silence. Even when I’m in a cacophonous sea of people or at some high-volume concert I find myself withdrawing into an interior world where nothing exists above a dull, soft roar – like an ocean barely heard from a safe vantage point inland. I can sense the immensity of the scene, I can feel others all around me, but inside I am safely ensconced in a land of sinister silence. 

It takes practice and a great deal of self-control to master such a stance; my secrets won’t be revealed, even if I could put them into words. I will say this though: it feels like I am at one of the turns, or perhaps even a fork – and I have a vague idea of where I’d like to end up, but I’m done with taking the high road to get there. And I’m afraid that means leaving certain things behind. 

When you decide to choose the darker path, when you’ve fought one battle too much and reached a point of exasperation, you tend to get bitter, or angry, or rash – and all of it can get pretty messy. Rather than spill such an uncontrollable mess, you might try to build a safe shell to contain it. The danger is when that shell becomes a coat of armor to get you through whatever battles are still to come. You harden yourself off to the world then, keeping your hurt inside, keeping the mess contained. 

I’ve always greatly disdained the person who wears their heart on their sleeve, as well as the person prone to the emotional outburst. Get your fucking self together. No one wants to see that shit.

“It was a strangely sympathetic thing for him to say, and we stood there in a sudden, not uncomfortable silence. Men sometimes make friends this way, I think. They decide quickly… There was something vulnerable and temporary about the moment, and I was attentive to it, for a man, let us agree, is a kind of shelled animal. There is the hardened surface he presents to the world, the face and the words and the behavior, but very often these do not correlate very well with the being inside the shell. By hardened I mean coherent, deflective of attack, and capable of being recognized by others; I don’t mean unchangeable – quite the opposite, in fact. But the shell is always there, growing outward from within, flaking and breaking away, and the quivering wet stuff inside remains largely hidden. Appearances are not deceiving so much as incomplete. What you see is what you get, but what you don’t see is also what you get.” – Colin Harrison, ‘The Havana Room’

Every once in a great while I’ll indulge in a clove cigarette – and I mean a great while; I’ve been milking the same pack of cloves for ten years now. They’ve long since gone stale, but that doesn’t matter. I don’t do it out of any desire for fine tobacco, rather for the scent, the sweet taste, and the evoking of memories from falls long ago. 

When I tried my first clove, probably thirty years ago, I smoked to be social, and also with an eye for the self-destruction I found so glamorously attractive in those foolish, reckless, dumb days. When the world got you down, there was some small recompense in the brief seizing of your lungs, the slightest push – a nudge really – just a little closer toward death. Tiny acts of annihilation, safe bits of wreckage that could largely go unnoticed in the grand scheme of things; it was easy to disguise one’s degradation if you did it in socially-sanctioned ways. Easier still to disguise a long arc ending in devastation if you knew how to do such things quietly, without a commotion. 

Could someone be that calculating, that precisely orchestrated, leaving not one moment to whim or chance or destiny? Who would plan and plot and perfectly execute such a diabolical plan, and see it through to the very end? Only the most jaded and utterly unaffected monster could come up with such a blueprint, poring over it and revising it, night after night, beneath a haze of sweet smoke. 

These days, smoking is decidedly not cool or healthy (and vaping is even more ridiculous). Both are rat poison, as my brother and I once recorded in a home-made tape intended to help my Uncle stop smoking. Spoiler alert: it failed. Still, on certain fall days, when the heart is downtrodden, and the wind has shifted to alert us that summer is irrevocably over, I’ll light a clove, feel the little ache and burn, and remind myself that once I was a silly idiot. 

Don’t we all know some guy in our lives that has done something like this? I know several – one or two right in my own family – and it never ceases to amaze me how small and stupid men can be. Oh I’m sure there are a few women who suffer the same anger management and temper issues, but in my experience it’s only been the men. They are the ones who have to feel superior to something to make up for all the very real inferiority the vast majority of their lives bestows upon them – in this case the perpetrator wanted to punch a bathroom stall wall. Like, whoa, tough guy. Scared of you. 

That we don’t call it out because it’s so common is a telling and sad statement on the smallness that some men continue to betray. And that they get away with it because they have moments of tenderness and reason in-between the lashing out is a sad commentary on who the rest of us are. Myself included. There’s more than enough blame to go around. 

“Witches don’t fear the darkness; they embrace it and make it their own.” ~ John Updike, ‘The Witches of Eastwick’

Worth an almost-campy revisit at this time of the year, ‘The Witches of Eastwick’ was both ahead of and behind its time. Based on John Updike’s novel, it’s never quite clear to me what the author was trying to say, and so I take the witches as characters ready to speak for themselves, and in their words I feel their power and might and something perhaps more than the author ever intended. Personally, I find the movie best viewed with an eye of superficial entertainment – watching Cher, Michelle Pfeiffer, Susan Sarandon and Jack Nicholson volley for their respective spotlights – sometimes quite literally, as in the tennis match – is a sort of cinematic masturbation – and we celebrate all masturbatory elements in these parts. 

“The witches had learned from an early age that anger and bitterness were two of the most powerful emotions they had at their disposal.” ~ John Updike, ‘The Witches of Eastwick’

Most of the time, I merely watch the early card game/snack/cocktail sequence, which finds the witches gathering on a rainy, lightning-laden night, where they inadvertently summon a fiendish man among talk of town gossip and men. Nabisco and Cheese-whiz surely sponsored the making of this movie, because I almost went out and bought a bottle of Cheese-whiz to recreate Pfeiffer’s mountainous cracker creations. (Relax, I stuck with the Boursin.) Leaning into our worst and most basic preferences, from junk food to pregnancy cravings, hunger of all kinds makes us each a little diabolical. 

“Witches were not bound by societal norms or expectations; they forged their own paths and followed their own rules.” ~ John Updike, ‘The Witches of Eastwick’

“The belief in a supernatural source of evil is not necessary; men alone are quite capable of every wickedness.” ~ Joseph Conrad

Cloaked in shadow or black wool, I place a black Stetson on my head and step into the night. At such times, I realize I have to become my own avenger, to save my own self from the torment of the past. A clove cigarette dangles from the corner of the avenger’s crooked half-smile – it’s my way of reconnecting to the past, to those nights when the remnants of a clove whisper secrets from lips spicy and sweet and just the slightest bit sinister. In the smoke conjured here, there are trails leading to where I need to travel. We fly on those wisps, returning to another time in the same place, and when the smoke dissipates we have arrived. 

I will avenge you, little Wonder-Woman-wanna-be, with your gold-sticker stars and your yellow construction paper cuffs and that lasso of truth made of whatever sort of rope was lying around – the one that never worked because nobody ever told you the damn truth, and when they did, it only served to hurt you, never the teller. 

I will avenge you, little flower boy, lover of plants and gardens and nature, when your own family is crying out ‘faggot’ so casually and carelessly and not even thinking what it might mean to you, how it was forming the very lack of self-love that would forever haunt and inform your wayward steps. 

I will avenge you, magnificent and misunderstood fairy creature, when the world makes fun of what you are wearing, what you are reading, what you are saying and what you are doing. To be so bold as to be only yourself, and to be nothing but punished for it – I will avenge you.

I will speak for you now, for all that you couldn’t and then wouldn’t say, because you deserve to let it all go. You’ve carried it a long way, and it’s time to put it down. Rest, little boy – you’ve been tormented enough. My mantle is warm, my province is night, my work begins as yours comes to an end.

You know me. I’ve been with you this whole time. 

This song almost made it into the summer rotation, but it just wasn’t anywhere near coquette enough for the occasion. It exists, instead, here, in the early fall, when the breeze can still feel like summer, the sun still warms like August, and hope still kindles as if it has some sort of business being here. This is ‘Daytona Sand’ by Orville Peck – and it’s less about the message and lyrics than it is about the atmosphere and music; it makes me want to hastily pack a bag, hop in the car, drive somewhere – anywhere – and fuck all the way off. That’s the current frame of my mind – and it’s not good. 

Buddy, we got major blues
Another suitcase in your hand
I hope you brought your walking shoes
‘Cause it’s quite a ways, from what I understand

Something’s not right. I feel it in the agitated way the slightest bothers set me off, how they bring tears to my eyes out of sheer frustration and exasperation. I’m usually good, at this point in my life, about not reaching exasperation; lately that’s been my baseline. If you start out there, it will only and always end badly. That’s where the sirens come in, that’s where blood is spilt, that’s where you cross the lines you can’t uncross. 

It’s in the unreasonable annoyance I feel for every small petty setback, every mistake the world makes, and my reactions, blown entirely out of proportion for what is remotely appropriate, are telling me that something is wrong. 

I’m not mad, for what it’s worth…

This is something that has been building over the years – all of the years – and it goes back decades. Decades of holding my tongue and holding it all in – and as much as I may have seemed to reveal in these pages, there is simply more that has happened than can ever be put forth here or anywhere. The great burdens of our histories are what we carry with us every day, mostly in silence and quiet, and it’s very difficult to genuinely drop it and let it go. The more evolved and well-adjusted may get it all out as it comes up, wisely letting out steam in little puffs along the way. Those of us who try to be strong or stoic or simply fucking stupid try to keep it bottled up until it passes – knowing full well it will never pass until addressed, acknowledged, and, dream of dreams, reconciled. 

So I look back, all the way back, even further back than this photo I found in a trove of photo albums that recently came back into my possession; my mother can’t store them anymore, her home being too filled with my brother’s stuff. They’re mostly pictures of me in my vain years, when I was channeling Norma Desmond and Madonna and playing around with friends who embraced me unconditionally – the friends you turn to when your family refuses to understand. In binders meticulously labeled by month and year, I open the pages and travel back in time, and most of it pales in comparison to how I so vividly remember it. I should probably just burn them – a bonfire of the vanity – or toss a few in the garbage bin every week until they’ve all disappeared: an attempt at eradicating the past, because I’m tired of remembering. 

I’m getting tired of this earth
But they say some stones are better left unturned…

‘Dolores Claiborne’ is one of the most under-rated and unappreciated movies, and while it is bleak and dark as fuck, it’s still one of my favorites. Maybe that speaks to something bleak and dark about myself, but whatever. The character of Vera Donovan, portrayed majestically by Judy Parfitt, is the highlight, and when the two leads are Kathy Bates and Jennifer Jason Leigh, that is saying a lot. This mood continues…

“Sometimes, Dolores… sometimes you have to be a high-riding bitch, to survive… Sometimes, being a bitch is all a woman has to hang onto.”

Urushi. Japanese lacquer. An art that has been around for three millennia.

Pause and think of that time – all of that time. Most of us cannot wrap our heads around how long that actually is, while at the same time how short it may be in the entire history of the universe. Minuscule and magnificent all at once. Like a person’s life. When viewed on a macro level, it feels immense. When put into the long history of the world, it doesn’t even register. Even the most mighty among us won’t be here in another thousand years, nor will any memory of who we were. The eternal black. 

And so we narrow our focus, refine our view, condense that immensity into something hopefully manageable. We label and organize, whatever it takes to make some semblance of sense, to get some ind of grip on all that we simply cannot understand. The mind can lose itself when not harnessed to the mundane tasks of a day. 

That brings us back to the Japanese lacquer, which is also the inspiration for a Tom Ford Private Blend, ‘Black Lacquer’. Both contain multitudes, much like the average human being. The former can put an entire earth on the varnished exterior of a box or bowl; the latter is said to be evocative of vinyl, ink, black pepper, rum, ebony wood, peony, and olibanum ~ the prick of eternity in a drop of perfume. 

A gorgeously haunting score by Danny Elfman, a mesmerizing performance by Michelle Pfeiffer, and the transfixing narrative of dramatic transformation, this scene of Catwoman coming into creation was one of the most inspiring turns of cinema in my formative years. I would watch it over and over, aching for my own similar scene of origin amid all the adolescent angst. Somehow I knew part of what was in store for me, sensing then that I’d need this sort of empowerment during a string of bad men. 

From her meek secretarial start to the disturbing trauma of unexpected violence, and the ensuing journey that brings her from ‘Hello there’ to ‘Hell here’ – I am most definitely here – here for all of it. 

“You poor guys, always confusing your pistols with your privates.”

Gotta go… girl talk. 

Our fall season has begun.

Cue the dramatic cinematic score. 

This will be the fall of the fade-to-black.

A treatise on turning to the dark side, finding out what might happen when there are no more fucks to give, and embracing then releasing a feminine energy and female rage that centuries of patriarchy so richly and disastrously deserve. It’s also going to be a reckoning for my own family history, and the revelations it’s taken me 49 years to realize – all that was wrought and how it all came to be, suddenly coming into crystalline and terrifying focus. 

But that’s all ahead. Autumn is long. 

For now, a look back at the last week of summer, and the first day of fall in our weekly recap…

Deep thoughts.

Four rabbits or so ago.

Five chest-baring gentlemen.

Uncle Jack Off.

A summer day in Vermont with Suzie.

Painted ladies.

Troubled skies.

The night before a harvest.

Nakedly harnessing the energy of a full Harvest Supermoon amid a lunar eclipse. 

A pink plaid Speedo post.

Our coquette summer complete ~ bratty and demure.

Our fade-to-black fall ~ foreboding and menacing.

Black as night.

When rain drops fall and you feel low
Ah, do you ever think it’s useless
Do you ever feel like letting go
Do you ever sit and do you wonder
Will the world ever change
And just how long will it take
To have it all rearranged

Tell me why these things are still the same
Tell me why no one can seem to learn from mistakes

Fear not, brave and courageous readers who have come back for more! This fall won’t be all doom and gloom, for fall has its sultry enchantments and lighter moments of whimsy as well. A linky look back at previous fall entries should allay you of any one-note worries – and everyone knows I would bore myself silly if I were to cloak myself in shrouds of black and not even dip into the jewel tones. This is still the long and winding road that leads to the salvation sometimes found in the holidays. While that salvation feels like a lofty and unattainable goal at the moment, it can’t hurt to try. Well, it can, and it will, but that won’t stop me. Let’s have that look back at other fall entries that started off the season not so long ago…

Fall often begins in light and ends in shadow – a fertile playground for deeper rumination and analysis, but also for leaning into the shorter days, the bracingly-jarring mornings of the first few frosts, the seriousness that ensues now that summer is officially over. Such a difficult time – no one wants summer to end – and so we try to find places of solace and moments of peace to assuage what we might be feeling. A song then, for this moment of desperation.

Take my hand if you don’t know where you’re goin’
I’ll understand, I’ve lost the way myself
Oh, don’t take that old road it leads to nowhere
We must leave before the clock strikes twelve

Sometimes fall has to burn, to take everything that is drying and dying and burn it all to the ground. Such fires can be brilliant and dazzling, or dim and disturbing – all glowing embers and fading glory. Fall burns brighter than any other time of the year – it’s in the flaming trees, in the smoke of burning leaves, in the cricket song of the nights. The burn goes deep.

While I don’t mind a fall fire, I also embrace the softer and brighter sort of days that early autumn still affords. Whether in a colorful scarf or string of beads, the colors of fall appear more saturated than even spring or summer.

If you could read my mind… well, no one wants to go there, not even if it is fall.

But if you could read my mind maybe that would make things better…

Telling conundrum. 

Fall snaps us back into reality, whether we want it or not. It forces us to get a little more serious again, with work and school and the logistical nightmare of survival. Still, fall carries its own enchantments too, and they can be soothing and charming. Fall pushes and fall pulls, and fall will not be stuffed into submission. It knows its power, and it can be reinvigorating. 

So it shall be, and so we shall welcome fall with all her requisite wonder and magic, hoping she won’t treat us too harshly, hoping we can make it through her maelstroms, her obstacles, her storms and her shadows. 

It’s so easy to do nothin’
When you’re busy night and day
Take a step in one direction
And take a step the other way
So don’t stop tryin’ when you stumble
Don’t give up should you fall
Keep on searchin’ for the passway
That will lead you through the wall
Don’t look back or you’ll be left behind
Don’t look back or you will never find peace of mind