Last night the St Louis Cardinals won the World Series and today my flatmate turned the heating on. The leaves and lack of frost suggest that autumn has itself a few more weeks, but I'm suspicious. Already my thoughts have turned to winter, with all of November still to come. I crave stews and chilli and roasts and deep red wines that stick to the ribs and crunch like kindling mixed with dry leaves.
At last count, I have about six unwritten projects and one large item to edit. There's a script, a novel, a novella and scattered blog posts that may not seem like priority, but still serve the important role of keeping words flowing. I'm out shape, you see. The words are not flowing. They are a tumult in my head, of course, but I'm not getting them out to where they belong. All my blogs have suffered, my writing has suffered and with them both perhaps a bit of my sanity as well.
Such frustration requires escape and often I find myself lost in old photos or old scribblings. Sometimes both. Nostalgia strikes hard when the future is obscured. It clarifies the past and polishes it as well, giving every little nugget of memory - every warm moment - an added sheen. Because it seems so clear, so close, so grows the illusion that things were clear at the time. So follows a belief in the past's inherent innocence, as clarity quickly becomes purity in the mind's eye and soon you look out and see behind you a perfect narrative. And as soon as you see it as such you begin to wonder where it changed, how did such a perfect past lead to an imperfect and mostly uncertain future?
The radiator's kicking off a nice heat and the cat sleeps atop a pile of my jumpers at the bottom of my bed. The wind isn't howling, yet. The clocks go back in an hour or so. Tomorrow I'll run and bake bread and try, with some effort, to write.
