October Skies

The skies have been nice lately. I don’t know if It’s just that I am looking up more than normal, or if it is just me getting excited to having something other than the blank blue canvas of the summer sky to look at, or if the skies really have been more dynamic of late. Whatever the case, they have been nice. Big billowy clouds erupting from the horizon and holding over the fields of ripening pumpkins and the flatter clouds of evening breaking apart in the oarnge sky.
I like this time of the year. It feels like youth to me. It reminds me of 1998. I think in 1998 it may have been the first time I walked outside and smelled the smell of leaves and ice water and said "This is what October smells like." It was also 1998 when I really began to wake up as a human and experience life without the filter of parental dogma. Not in the sense that there was a dramatic parting from my parents or anything else, but I think it was then that I saw the cracks in their surface and their humanity shone through. I think that I loved them all the more for it, but I realized that they could be fundamentally wrong and instead of forces they became people.
I like driving around Orting and the rural remnants of this area to look at fields of corn and pumpkins and the general buzz of agricultural harvest time. It’s nice to see places where food is still plucked from the ground or a tree. It’s easy to forget that it doesn’t just spring up from watered bins in the produce section.
I suppose the beauty of October and my fondness for it is also a kind of deep breath before November. November marks the beginning of my yearly tradition (now spanning a decade) of self imposed torture. If October is when I bath in the warm sun of nostalgia, November is it’s twilight, where I begin to count the regrets and measure my life in failures and unaccomplished goals. I start to see moments in the past where with just a little bit of insight, I could have changed my reality. I like to sit and let my wander about what would have changed, like in the Butterfly Effect. I know it’s’ all useless, but it’s a masochistic ritual that I need to go through. It will all peak in early December, when I will have allowed myself to sink far enough into a hole of self loathing, regret and self pity, that I’ll be able to convince myself that I’ve paid my pittance for the year and then go back to life.
I really like October. I’m building fence right now. I’m glad I’m not doing it in the sun or heat. A sunny October day with some wind is the best time to work outside. Moving keeps you warm and the wind knocking the leaves around adds for a little drama. The fence is looking good and is almost done. I think I’ll build the last significant run of it this weekend. I like knowing that I’m building the barrier between my home and the rest of the world that will sit for the next twenty years or so. That’s wild. Twenty years. When was I allowed to start thinking in those kind of time spans.

My life update for my non-existant readers.

An update for anyone who reads this on a regular basis (as if).
I got engaged, I’m pretty stoked about that. It’s weird to think that I’m gong to married. It was weird, there was kind of an explosion of engagements/getting married amongst my extended group of friends here recently. I guess that’s what happens when you get to be around 30.
I still hate my job and have tried to think of several ways to not do it. The problem is, they are paying me too much to quit. Stupid reason, I know, but my girlfriend is in massage school and until she finishes, I’m the only income in the house and we’re kind of living off of her savings too.
I feel more and more isolated from the world every day. I have a couple friends who I see. My other friends have either abandoned me or I’ve abandoned them. I guess some are just geographic stuff and the small fact that I’m more and more less inclined to leave my house. My hermit friend and I exchange letters and talk on some Saturday nights (when he plugs in his phone, because he is drunk enough to face the world).
I’m building a fence at home. The worse part about it is, I’m totally stoked about it. I’ve not fished much all year. Maybe the past two years. I don’t really love fishing alone and it’s just not working out with most of my fishing friends.
I feel like life is in a huge state of flux. Where everything is being wrung out so what is important can stay. I suppose periodic catharsis is good for the soul.
I’ve not been writing.
My computer at home is broken.
As of this morning, of our three cars, we have one that is working.
Our dog is in the vet for the second consective day because she ate an entire rack of rib bones.
I smoked cigarettes for the first time in like 4 months last night. I’m worried that my girlfriend is going to keep smoking.
I’m worried our dog is going to die.
I’m supposed to build 90 feet of fence this weekend.
Fuckin’ shit.