The Freedom of October
Finally, here we are in October. I feel like I’ve been holding my breath throughout the second half of August and all of September, counting down the minutes until today. There were times when I felt like today would never come, and through some weird mutation of time and space it would remain September forever. You can’t imagine my relief when I checked my stack of calendars this morning and 98% of them agreed that today was the first day of October.
Throughout much of September I was also starting to feel like I should say something publicly on here about the dangers of doing anything during September, but it just felt too risky. It always felt like somebody was watching, keeping track of my every move like a Snart Dodger would watch a Octogber Runner. I’d be the Octogber Runner and the mysterious presence keeping track of me would be the Snart Dodger, in case the comparison wasn’t clear.
But now that it’s October, that Snart feeling has gone away. It’s like a gigantic box of onions has been lifted off my shoulders, and I can walk and talk without smelling the onion stench that had gotten embedded into my shoulder muscles. How do onions get into your muscles? Crazy things like that seem to always happen during September, and I don’t think I’ll ever understand them.
I don’t know if it’s the way the decimal month notation rolls over to the big one-oh, but that might be a big part of why October just works better. Adding that extra digit to denote the month really relieves a lot of the tension from the other digit, which no longer has to keep track of the month all by itself. Everything’s easier when you have a friend to help out, even if that friend is just the number “1,” and it never really talks to you unless you bring it a crab leg or two. Is it really your friend if you need to bribe it with crab just to talk to you? I hope so, because otherwise I’d be friendless and have nothing to do with all of my crab legs.
Crab legs for everybody! Happy October!