The clock ticks. The fan whirs. There is the ring of silence in my ears. I hear footsteps on the stairs outside the door. It is the neighbor going home to the flat upstairs. The caramel is soft and sweet in my mouth. I smell the coffee in my cup. The couch is soft and comfortable. The blanket on the back of the couch is fuzzy and warm. The nights are getting colder. It is October after all. The days are still warm though, unless it is raining.
I like rainy afternoons in fall. The leaves cover the streets where the wind has blown them off the trees. The puddles splash as cars drive through them. It reminds me of the falls of my youth. School has been back in session for a month or two. I am starting to have the feeling I would eventually identify as ennui. Leave it to the French to have a rich vocabulary for the shades of feeling depressed.
It has taken me most of my life to realize that the feeling is a chemical reaction to the change in the amount and quality of the light. I’ve even started to look forward to it as a change of pace from the manic mood of summer. Winter will be too cold for depression, at least of this sort. I never had a whole lot of problem with depression in the heart of winter.
It makes me want to watch old black and white movies and close the blinds on the blowing rain. Movies have helped people forget there troubles for well over a hundred years now. It was always my dream to make a full length movie and give back some of those feelings of wonder that have helped to pull me up out of the blues of fall.
Sometimes the best way out of depression is to tell the story of someone else’s troubles. The twelve bar blues consists of a statement of the situation in the first four bars, The second four bars repeats the first, usually verbatim. The last four bars elaborates on the troubles and rhymes with the first four bars (and second). For example:
I woke up this morning with an awful aching head.
I woke up this morning with an awful aching head.
My new man had left me, just a room and an empty bed.
— Bessie Smith, “Empty Bed Blues”
I think it has something to do with realizing that other people have problems too and your problems may not really be as bad as all that. It is just the time of year. The quality of light. The sound of the rain on the window and the street light shining through the rain as it streams down the pane.
Sweet dreams, don’t forget to tell the ones you love that you love them, and most important of all, be kind.