A drizzly September day which allows me to wear my new raincoat. It’s weird to admit that weather, whatever its particular manifestation and connectedness to scientific pattern and overarching suggestions of doom, really just broils down to allowing you an opportunity to wear your new raincoat-a thought which is echoed in the hapless face of every besmirched stranger you pass on the street that day, who is totally unprepared for the bad weather.
But, ah, September: you have always made me nervous. My gripe with this month probably first coincided with the grim realization that I was not going to be a home-school student, and having to leave the comfy lair at age five, to go to the inferior public school. The bus had not rounded the corner to my street that day as I wiped the cobwebs from my eyes and realized what was going on. “—Wait, no!” I may have pleaded with my mom, as the school bus stopped in front of me and the door opened with an audible screech. Making my way through the congested throng on the school bus that day, I clutched my E.T. backpack, and fought my way to the back window, where I watched my mother still standing at the bus stop, before the driver pulled away and my mom receded into invisibility.
I always hated school, not out of any particular academic hang-up per-se, but mostly because the people that I had to interact with there (i.e. teachers, and cloying kindergartners with a massive interest in building blocks) were totally lame. My parents, having chalked up my nervous tics and critical viewings of A-Team episodes as some weird character flaw, had totally misinterpreted the fact that I probably would have been more at home in some upscale Montessori concern, where deep thoughts are lulled and articulated to the sounds of Brian Eno records. Instead, I plundered forward, irritating friends and teachers, which is a trait that extended far into my academic career, and never really got any better.
Another reason why September sucked is because it coincides with my birthday. Depending on the calendar year, sometimes this day aligned with the first day of school, which was never a particularly choice present to receive. My parents would end up buying me clothing and school-related items as birthday presents in lieu of the more fun-associated comic books and action figures with immutable limbs. I would unwrap a fancy Trapper Keeper binder and stare blankly at its cover before moving on to the next item, and being reminded that school started that day. A sense of dread thus became sublimated with my birthday, which is something that also never disappeared, and resonates with the marked sense of over it-ness which may no longer have anything to do with the academic calendar.
I explain all this to Sarah as we walk through the cold rain at night. The weather patterns are all fucked up, and as much as they correspond to information recorded on a chart somewhere, with grim statistical and apocalyptic implications, experiencing it on a pure skin surface level freaks you out that much more. And accompanying all of that—the apocalyptic notions of weather; going back to school; another year in the can; the beginning of another ending—is the smell of new cotton, and the peculiar scent of rubber of my new raincoat, which is and has been the sartorial ushering in to the end of everything.
