September was kind of a messy month for me, in a 2024 that’s been overall quite shit.

Syd and I did celebrate our anniversary on the 18th, so there’s one bright spot.

We got pretty lucky here regarding Helene; the worst of it slid somehow around us, dooming bits of western North Carolina and erasing a stretch of I-40 for something like the next year. My best friend who lives in Asheville is alive and unharmed, and she even has power and running water (not currently universal there), but I won’t be able to go see her for the foreseeable future without making lengthy detours.

The 83 mph winds we were threatened with never happened; the worst gusts here in town seemed to be more in the 25 mph range. So that one pine tree in our neighbor’s yard remains in his yard, not our bedroom. That is good.

I’m trying to see optimism in a cataclysmic storm stomping all over the southeast at the end of September, just past the end of summer, the end of … I dunno, something. Maybe these last three months of 2024 will be different, Helene a sort of thunderous punctuation, a deadly semi-colon dividing the clauses of this year.

And to that, it is finally October. The internet is bursting with folks celebrating the arrival of “spooky season,” and traditionally I am among them.

So then … let’s go.