october 8, 2024 – performative journaling at the End of the world

Writing feels best when it’s surreptitious, a secret, the act of a child reading past bedtime with a flashlight under the covers. What is usually a leisurely, contemplative activity is, today, a combative rush, something done quietly in a found moment at work. It’s a busy day, is what I’m trying to say. 

Today, I’m thinking of Florida. Milton looks like a son of a bitch of a storm, and it’s been a preoccupation now for a couple of days. It illustrates that my challenges today, notably a bureaucratic one at work in which I am, somehow, semi-important, are completely immaterial and unimportant and that any stress I feel about them is misplaced and unnecessary. It also illustrates how, for all our power, for all our feelings of separation from and supremacy over nature, we are still often powerless in the face of it.

May those who can, get out, and those who can’t, fare well.

I spent time last night with great friends laughing into the early night, swapping absurdities, staving off dread for today. 

I’ve always felt comfort from the indelible passage of time. No matter the good or bad, time will always march forward. How horrible life would be if it never ended. Every experience is like the old adage about New England weather, which is less and less accurate as our climate continues to change: “don’t like the weather in New England? Wait fifteen minutes.” 

I’m trying to enjoy the changing of the leaves. They’re particularly vibrant this year, and we’ve had something somewhat reminiscent of an autumn this year. In year’s past, if memory serves, it was hot late into the season—temperatures in the eighties in October, kind of thing. At least this year, it’s only low seventies. Not quite the fall temperatures of youth, but close. 

Sometimes life here is so beautiful I can’t stand it.

The sun is gentle and the breeze is faint. When the fog burns off in the morning, an open sight line of full autumnal colors fills the horizon. In parts of life in which I used to feel unnecessary and redundant, I now feel somewhat important, necessary. It’s good for the mind for you to be expected somewhere at a certain time.

And past feelings that nothing mattered have been replaced: partially with the fear that accompanies having things to lose, but mostly with a bittersweet presence of knowing how good things can be, how good they are, how time keeps moving forward, and how things change.

If you don’t like the weather in New England, wait fifteen minutes. A quote that doesn’t need to have anything to do with weather.