October

A strange thought occurred to me while I was sitting here last night. There was a slight rain coming down. Somehow a slight rain coming down in the night in October brings out the thickest of juices from the darkest corners of my noggin. October is a strangely swinging month. The month of October has bugged artists and writers since the beginning of time. Thomas Wolfe wrote endless stuff about October. Ray Bradbury lived in that region of our world known as the October Country… 

that country where it is always turning late in the year. That country where the hills are fog and the rivers are mist; where noons go quickly, dusks and twilights linger, and midnights stay. That country composed in the main of cellars, sub-cellars, coal-bins, closets, attics, and pantries faced away from the sun. That country whose people are autumn people, thinking only autumn thoughts. Whose people passing at night on the empty walks sound like rain…

This is the month, October. October is probably the most exciting month. April, on the other hand, is another exciting month in a very different way. But October is here. It really is here. And even with the World Series approaching, I can’t even get interested in it. With the Brew Crew out of it, it’s as though the season is over. Now get outta my way will ya Freddie Freeman! I’ve had enuff of this. I just want to clear the decks. Let’s get it over with and go home! Why don’t you guys just give it to the Dodgers already. They only paid $321.3 million for it. We’ll hear enough of them for the next year on.

For most of the ball season, I listened to the Brewer games on the radio, but I happened to watch their last game on TV. Now I don’t know what it is with the unimaginitive camera men who do TV broadcasts on baseball. I’m serious. Like the other night, when the Dodgers beat the Brewers in that final playoff game "The Shohei Ohtani Show", they didn’t even think to take one shot of the defeated Brewers going into their dugout. This would be unbelievably more dramatic than the Dodgers jumping around all over each other. Everybody knew what they’d be doing. They’d all be hitting one another and hollering and throwing their caps up in the air. But what about these guys who’ve been leading the major league for the past three months? Suddenly down the drain it all goes. Just like that. Not one shot. I kept thinking, let’s take a look at what the Brewers are doing! But not one shot. They didn’t bother to cut once to that dugout.

Another thing that gets me is this whole bit of sticking commercials about the ball players right in the middle of the game. Have you noticed this? Teams have taken to putting commercials in the middle of the game to let you know you’re seeing something great. You know, those things they flash up on the scoreboard. It says: “Mookie Betts is a great player and he has just stolen his seventh base. Hooray for Mookie”. It’s all so silly! Or they might say a thing like: “Sal Frelick playing for the Milwaukee Brewers has hit in three straight games. Sal Frelick is also a great fielder and has not made an error in over two weeks”. It’s as though there is a continuing running commercial even though your head is asleep because the game is so boring and nothing is happening. It’s a continuing running commercial to let you know you’re seeing something great.

I don’t know why I got into baseball. I’m not going to say anything more about baseball. I don’t even want to think about baseball right now.

So I’m sitting here last night and it’s raining and it’s October and all of a sudden it occurs to me what a great thing it is just to be alive at this very moment. All this wild stuff going on—even the stuff that is ridiculous in all its seriousness. There’s a certain amount of excitement about it. I feel sorry for people who continually get bowed down by the troubles of the world. People who feel sad when it rains in October. Or those who get down when their favorite ball team loses. There are some people who don’t seem to realize that trouble is the lot of man and he better even enjoy the trouble that’s happening. I’m sorry, that’s just the way it is and it’s not going to go away. It really ain’t going to go away.  

One of the fascinating things about us nutty humans is we feel that life is like a giant slate, an enormous blackboard. And it’s got all kinds of bad stuff written all over it. We’re all given erasers. We work very hard and we finally get that whole board erased and it will be a clean blackboard. We just got to have a clean slate. Then we can start building a real life. And yet all the while we are constantly being bitten by the hounds of hell, they are nipping at our hocks and we can’t figure it out. We thought we had everything cleared away! The price of gas is going up again. I mean what is all the trouble?!

This world that we live in is one of the most amusing. Certainly, there is no excuse ever to be bored in this existence. That is the one thing you can’t be. If you’re bored you have somehow let the scales grow over your eyeballs and you have allowed the potatoes to grow in your ears. Because really, all you have to do is look around and listen for just any 30 second period of the day and you can’t help but blow a gasket. Sometimes you fall right out of your swinging chair and land on your head just laughing with the way it is.

Like yesterday afternoon, I was walking downtown and I saw a fully grown adult man wearing an inflatable T-Rex costume. And the guy was slowly and very seriously trying to check for an apartment vacancy sign in the window of a business building. The combination of the ridiculous costume, the speed required to maneuver in it, and the utterly mundane task of apartment-hunting made for a very entertaining slice of everyday absurdism. Madison is the capital of weirdos. You can take a stroll through this town any time of the year (not just Halloween season) dressed in a T-Rex costume and no one will blink an eye. Oftentimes I stop at Festival Foods after a run. And I won’t feel out of place in the least walking around the store donning my short running shorts and a sweat soaked t-shirt and ordering a six pack of Staghorn, a Mr. Goodbar, eleven bananas and a tube of tooth paste. Because you can bet that there’ll be at least three other freaks in the store who are ten times stranger than me.

It is easy to find the absurdity in the bazaar, but there are lots of everyday normal things that really amuse me. Some of the most ordinary things in nature can fill me with great joy. Things like watching a couple squirrels chase each other around a tree. Or kicking a rock. I can even let my mind get carried away with the leaves as they blow in the October wind. October is here. It really is here and it truly is a great feeling just to be alive in this crazy thing called life.

“We live in the best of all possible worlds, so hand me a Kent for my left, a Bud for my right, turn on Starsky and Hutch and listen to that soft, harmonious note that is the universe turning smoothly on its celestial gyros.”

~ Charles Everett Decker