I don’t know why I have this vibe. Maybe it’s the fact that I just ordered some new shirts from American Giants, maybe that it’s puffy-cloud overcast and cooler than usual or that there are red leaves visible outside my office window. Could be the return of the college football season, could just be something in the sounds of the current playlist (Flying Burrito Brothers, Book of Love, Steely Dan, none of which intersect with any of my schooling)–
–but for reasons unknown, it feels like time to head back to school, in a way I don’t know that I have felt in…thirty years? Maybe? This is definitely a more high school or undergrad feeling than Vanderbilt ever was after year one – get your outfit right, new kicks and new jacket, make a bit of a fresh start even if you’re at the same school – which I can’t really put a finger on.
Because nothing really differentiates this year from last year. The world is still going to Hell in a handcart, there’s no connection whatsoever between misconduct and consequences, life is a random event generator with no god but Loki and no hope but to keep out of his eyeline as long as you can. The best I’ve been able to is finagle an excuse to start work at home and drive in a little later on.
I feel like sitting out on the balcony at the Overcup or the patio at SATCO, bootheels propped on the railing, pint of Guinness to hand, brown leather jacket on beneath a fitted Ebbets Field cap – conditions that never once obtained in my entire educational era. Like my mind is building some composite memory to reflect on out of the shards of the past.
There are so many memorable Septembers. In fact, every September from 1987 to 1994 was its own flavor of unique, as was 1997 and 2000 and 2004 and 2006 and and and…this is my fiscal year, always has been, probably always will be. My half birthday is when things really get going again. Just how it is. It’s not a bad feeling, for once, not bound up in recriminations and missed opportunities and what should have been somewhere else long ago.
Nothing but to sit with it and see what it means. If anything.