Ugh, dear reader.  Your boy was laid low by a particularly pernicious case of The Crud.  Not just your common corner-store head cold, either – no, this was full-on pestilence, like consumption but with fewer dramatic gasps and more snot.  I’ve been sweating through my sheets like…I dunno, something that sweats inordinate amounts in the night, throat raw enough to be legally declared sushi, and my voice was just shot to hell.  Imagine Tom Waits gargling gravel in a hurricane.  It’s be a goddamn opera of misery with yrs. truly singing lead.

Alas, life, of course, refuses to press “pause” just because I’m horizontal and leaking from the face.  Which brings us to more pleasant things, a couple of things that made me smile whilst suffering the sickness.  To wit:

1. The days, dear reader, are getting noticeably shorter, while the nights are stretching their long, velvety fingers further and further into our lives.  This is the ever-shortening runway to autumn, the season that smells like woodsmoke and tastes like apple cider donuts.  And
2. Halloween is just 91 days away.  Just enough time to make panic decisions about costumes, pretend you’re thrilled when someone inevitably starts barking about pumpkin spice season, and stockpile a metric shit-ton of candy you have no intention of sharing with children.

As you know, dear reader, I love Halloween.  Think it’s great.  And I can’t wait for it to get here.  That said, however, a week ago…ya know, back in July…as I was driving skillfully through a college marching band, my eye was caught by something orange, black, and familiar: a sign for a Spirit Halloween Store.  In fucking July!  Then, the next night, I walked into the Fecal Creek Costco and couldn’t help but notice a 20-foot skeleton standing in the middle of a huge Halloween section.  Also in fucking July!  Again, I’m all about Halloween, but god damn!

Here’s the thing: Halloween is great in its own right, but a big part of why I love it has to do with all the other decidedly fall/winter things the holiday brings: Fall, and cooler weather, longer nights, the smell of rain on dead leaves.  And it’s the kick of “the holiday season.”  Time to watch horror movies and make beef stew.  It’s the same reason seeing pro football on tv makes me so happy.  I don’t give a shit about football, and fuck the NFL anyway.  No…football on TV means fall and winter are upon us.  Doing anything Halloweeny while it’s 100°F outside is grotesque.

Anyway, so much for all that.  We have a bit of D.P.S. business: today is Herman Melville’s birthday.  Uncle Herm was a master of deep-sea metaphors, perverse literary masochism, and radically labyrinthine sentences.  He took a whale, shock it so hard it became an existential crises, and then made everyone read 800 pages about it.

For the non-English majors joining us this evening, Melville is the mad bastard responsible for Moby-Dick, a painfully massive tome about a Captain obsessive war with a big-ass whale (it’s a bit more complicated and layered than that, but we’re not going down that rabbit hole tonight, dear reader).

Cheers to you, Herman.

N.P.: “Love & Happiness (Ghetto Filth Remix)” – Wiccatron