Loving this guy’s mixes. It’s not usually the vibe that you’d be thinking of on a Sunday morning in the summer in New York, but it foreshadows the end of summer. It’s right around the corner. Labor Day is next weekend. The sun is coming up later and going down earlier. The cooler weather, despite how it felt walking around town yesterday, is coming soon. I welcome it with open arms, but at the same time, the end of summer and onset of fall always brings the feels. Not necessarily bad feels but a quiet anxious thing. It’s change and yes the seasons always change but the change from summer to fall is different. It just hits different than the others. I’m absolutely ready but that doesn’t mean the feelings don’t come.

And yes, I’m ready. I’ll welcome the new season and the feelings too. I’ll welcome them like greeting old friends at the front door. They’ve come to hunker down for a while, like on a Friday night when there’s nowhere to go but your friends come over and you just sit and talk. Maybe you reminisce about some point earlier in the summer, or in a summer a long time ago. You all get nostalgic for a time and place from some point in the past, or perhaps an old friend that doesn’t come around anymore for whatever reason. Maybe they moved on. Maybe they died. There’s a lot of that as you get older. The list lengthens. Oh boy, does it get longer!

A toast to the inevitable…

To the inevitable. Time is coming for each of us. All of us. A time will come when we are gone so long that even the last people who remembered us are gone so long that nobody remembers them. So long that nobody will ever even speak of us. Like we never existed. I can’t decide how I feel about that. On the one hand I always wanted to have that immortal kind of fame and acclaim. Then it adjusted to a bit here and there. Now? Now, having shed the shame of how things actually worked out, and learning to not care if people spoke ill of me (after all, how is it my business anymore what people thing about me?), I find the idea of never having existed liberating.

What was it David Foster Wallace said? Something to the effect of, you will stop caring what people think about you when you realize how seldom they do.

Insert laughing emoji here.

That’s liberation. Released of the burden of self… and all that shit the Crocodiles carry on about.

So at some point after midnight I got a birthday message, short and strange, from an old friend, ex-lover, never-quite-a-partner.

“Happy birthday. I hope you are content and adored.”

It seemed to me a while back that there was some hostility about… no, I’m not ready to commit this to writing. I’m not sure what happened that we stopped talking. There was hostility and while I’ve some ideas about the source, it can’t be certain. This short message might hint at it, but even that is uncertain. It may just feed into my bias about the situation. Content and adored. After a year you still think about someone else loving me and not just me? There is my bias. Our own time was long over, this ex and myself. That seemed certain to me but was that sentiment shared? It had been years. Seven, maybe eight years gone by and some of them made it difficult to sustain even a friendship. Maybe the “let’s still be friends” business is a bad idea anyway. It often is, for sure. Was it in this case? Perhaps. I used to think that was the mature way to go but now I believe mostly that it’s the immature way to go.

I guess I should just take the birthday sentiment at face value and feel grateful. It might show just where I am about the whole birthday thing but it seemed sad and kind of false. It was the first message for the day though, and it’s always that way with her. It’s always come yearly right after midnight. Always the first.

Always the first. And it was my first sober relationship too. Or at least sober as in not drinking. I’d be hard pressed to say that either of us was spiritually fit in the way that The Crocodiles mean when they talk about being sober. Anyway, the message left me with a wistful feeling on what would have already been a day of mixed feelings.

So strange.

So strange.

More later.