october seems to come at about this time every year.

i feel like walking dead today. zombie. much of it is the season, the abruptionary weather shift, the seasonal adjustments of the climate both inside and outside my head.

i also am bafflingly sore all over from yesterday‘s moving of 3 boxes to the storage place down the street. i realize now that simply pushing that heavy hand truck was itself a labor,and piling those heavy boxes on top added to the workout. i guess i imagined that the hand truck would do all the work but i unwittingly did plenty of work myself. oh wo. now there are sore stretches all along my sides.

i ordered a convection microwave oven today. i am tired of waiting 40 minutes for a HotPocket. i am also choosing to confront my fear of microwaves head-on with purchase of a pretty exxcceellllent-looking device. it‘s way more expensive than a regular microwave but hey, who cares, i‘d rather go that route and get what i think is best than risk buying cheap crap and wishing i‘d paid more for better.

sometimes i think about the illusory nature of lifetime guarantees, and a product‘s lifetime expenses. i can‘t imagine being at death‘s door and wishing i‘d paid less for the bed on which i was dying, but then who knows what minutiae and mundanities swirl through the mind at such times. my aunt once told how she was driving on an interstate, divided with a grassy median in the middle, during a rain or snow storm. she hit the brakes and the car began to spin, out of control, fast. she closed her eyes and took her hands from the steering wheel and said “This is it.“ it was peaceful. she closed her eyes. moments later she opened her eyes and found her car completely on the other side of the interstate, facing the wrong direction, cars on that side of highway swerving to avoid hitting her. she had completely crossed over from one side of the interstate to the other with no physical memory of feeling anything. but what had interested me more about the story was the retreat to calm, the resignation to give up trying to direct forces out of her control. i would have imagined mor eintrospection, more of a look inward, a confidence or a lack of confidence that the end would be handled well by others. after 9/11 i had endless nightmares of being in those buildings, or in those planes, and the filthy feeling of failure that would have filled me knowing that my end was now, at this hour, at this moment, at that place. the world sails on without us, and the looking-around at that moment of utmost peril might be of disdain, dismay, world-loathing, or nothing at all. maybe i would think about baseball.

…..

i stocked up on hotpockets and frozen fish today, anticipating tomorrow‘s convection erection. and bacon. instead of 40 minutes for a hot pocket or a stove covered with grease splatter on account of my need for 3 strips of bacon i will have my goddam hot pockets in 2 minutes and the bacon in 10 seconds. oh yeah. welcome to the 1980s.

i have always feared microwave ovens. seriously. i imagine that anything i put in there will explode. i may have seen sparks leap from some gold-trimmed plates in my youth, or maybe i believed those stories about cats and infants stuffed into microwaves and exploded like th eblood inside John Lennon‘s glasses. virtually everything i ever heated up in a microwave had pockets of heat with neighboring cold. the convection deal allegedly improves on this microwave typicality. or does it? i‘ll report back on this vital matter.

…..

my bones ache. my minds ache.this time of year. how can i forget? it suits me, the seasonal adjustments of temperment. it fits my relationship with the earth, the lonely turning of the planets, the aching of the orbs, the doleful wisdom of the tides. the sun, the moon, and the stars, to quote the greedy old lady from The Magic Fish. and being sore all over on account of something i had no idea would cause such minor misery does little for uplift.