saturn return to sender

I was at a bar in Boulder when a black man became president-elect of the United States of America. Not just a black man, but a person of maturity, intelligence, and compassion. A person who comes to power honestly, by promise of his merit, who meets irrational onslaughts of fear and prejudice with clarity and grace. A public servant with some quality that looks startlingly like integrity. I fought back tears during his acceptance speech. I’m genuinely proud and grateful. Giddy. Tomorrow the world will be different. And also, I’m sure, quite the same.

Where were you?

I believe it’s safe to say that autumn color in Boulder is peaking. West Mapleton (about 3 blocks from me) is awful pretty.

So I just re-calibrated my laptop screen based on these recommendations. It’s a bit hard to deal with. Everything’s kinda harshed out now. And this image, mapped to the sRGBblahblahblah color space, as always, still renders better in apps that are color-profile-aware. Grr. (I’m looking pointedly at you, Firefox.)

There’s a lot of smarts and good writing in Matt Taibbi’s piece on Sarah Palin. Most of those talents are directed inward, an attack not on her, but on the kind of culture that could not only accept but embrace her as a vice-presidential nominee.

Right-wingers of the Bush-Rove ilk have had a tough time finding a human face to put on their failed, inhuman, mean-as-hell policies. But it was hard not to recognize the genius of wedding that faltering brand of institutionalized greed to the image of the suburban American supermom. It’s the perfect cover, for there is almost nothing in the world meaner than this species of provincial tyrant. Palin herself burned this political symbiosis into the pages of history with her seminal crack about the “difference between a hockey mom and a pit bull: lipstick,” blurring once and for all the lines between meanness on the grand political scale as understood by the Roves and Bushes of the world, and meanness of the small-town variety as understood by pretty much anyone who has ever sat around in his ranch-house den dreaming of a fourth plasma-screen TV or an extra set of KC HiLites for his truck, while some ghetto family a few miles away shares a husk of government cheese.

He’s scathing and crude and usually brilliant, but the piece itself is as much a symptom of our cultural illness as it is a diagnosis. The other side of self-absorbed meanness to others is self-absorbed meanness to yourself. They’re both destructive.

Today is the equinox: equal hours of day and night. The days change fast now. The difference in light between yesterday and today and today and tomorrow is the greatest it will be until spring. We’re in free fall towards the darkest day of the year. It’s windy outside as I write this, slightly chilly. The leaves scratch the ground, collect in corners, make warm the space between us. I love it.

Kristin quotes George Eliot:

Delicious autumn! My very soul is wedded to it, and if I were a bird I would fly about the earth seeking the successive autumns.

I drove to Guanella and Kenosha passes yesterday, hunting a golden tree, or a stand of them, to sit under and listen to the breezy afternoon light. (Also, of course, to take pictures.) It turns out I was a little early—most of the aspens around those passes are still green-ish. At any rate, I found no irresistibly magical niches, no obviously staged pieces of light, color, smell, and texture—too perfect to be real—as you sometimes can in the high country. Probably, I was in my car too much.

Always the altitude snob, I drove back up to Guanella pass—eleven thousand something feet—and walked around until the stars came out.

Autumn above the tree line is subtle. Still there, though.

I remember driving over Tioga Pass in Yosemite, the last fall I lived in California, for the express purpose of hunting autumn. Thousands of feet below the summit of the Sierras, near Mono Lake, a couple of cottonwoods next to a gas station had turned yellow. They made me horribly homesick. I stared for a few minutes. I adore the Bay Area, but after eight years there I was desperate for a real fall. Now I have them, though they’re still subtle compared to the east coast. Mostly they’re lost in all the work and busy-ness. But then, that’s my fault.

Another quote, from the Vinotok festival (which sounds way more fun and meaningful than, say, Denver’s Oktoberfest):

Oats and corn, oats and corn, all that dies will be reborn
Vine and grain, vine and grain, all that falls shall rise again

We’ll bottom out sometime in late December and start a slow acceleration towards the spring equinox. Then the sun will race higher every day until June, and begin to fail in the late heat of summer, and then again the color, and the cold, and the dark.

Seriously though? I can’t freaking believe it’s already almost October.