Fall Has Sprung

It's been a while since I've put up anything too, hasn't it? Time keeps on slipping into the future, as the old folk song says. Autumn seemed to burst onto Portland a week ago Monday, bringing the clammier, cooler air and frequent drizzly rain that I expect we can count on seeing at some point on any given day until springtime, save for a few bright, unannounced windows in the weather schedule. As more of a plus, the leaves are turning more dramatically than I remember them doing last year, if not up to East Coast standards, and the view from my particular 18th-floor corner of the office -- south along the Willamette River and west towards the rich-people houses up in the hills -- features some modestly striking reds and golds, complimented by the gloomy low cloud cover and the fog that clings to the heights until the early afternoon. If you've ever looked at a Dutch masters landscape and thought, "That painting is gorgeous, and in fact I'd love to live inside of it, but I hate windmills," I might recommend western Oregon in October through February.

We're well into the heart of the cultural calendar as well as the NFL season so it seems there's once again a lot for me to sit down in front of and watch, if not at the Schnitz then at Claudia's with a greyhound and a breakfast sandwich, or even more likely on the comfort of my very own couch. I'd watch PBS' Great Performances broadcast of the L.A. Philharmonic's inaugural concert with Gustavo Dudamel (feat. Mahler 1 and John Adams' new City Noir) this very night, in fact, except that Kyle's a little bit laid up with what looks like the flu and I'll be hanging out with her at her TV-less pad. (I have no fear of contamination myself, due to trust in my tried-and-conceivably-true miracle cure of eating responsibly / drinking lots of water / not having children, as well as a fatalistic interpretation of the germ theory of disease, i.e. if a bug's going around it must have gotten into my own body before I even noticed anyone was sick.) All the sit-n-watch activities can start to feel overly passive after a while, and part of me wants to, I don't know, do that thing where you try to write an entire novel in the month of November or something, though given that I can apparently hardly put two blog posts together my prospects there would seem dim. And other parts of me (the butt, the eyeballs, the brain) are pretty content with soaking in the audiovisual evidence of others' activities. And that's okay, right? It's like Peter Sellers' character says in Being There: Go you Steelers.