The weather is changing now in Korea. Days are longer and colder, but the radical weather shifts make dressing impossible. The morning bitter and freezing and the afternoon warm enough for a t-shirt.

I feel drained by the changing temperatures, the changing sun schedule, the changing leaves. All that change seems tiresome, and I have my own changes to deal with. At the moment I’m looking at changing jobs, changing my apartment, potentially changing countries, eventually changing everything I’ve been doing for 8 years. And I have to wonder where all that change is going and what all that change is going to get me.

I find thinking about all of that draining as well. So I try not to think about it at all, but then I find myself utterly lost in those moments of most minute change.

I am walking down the street and the wind whips up in front of me. It picks up leaves and debris and detritus and lifts it all into the air. The little wind spins itself into a small cyclone for a moment and then disappears and the flotilla, suddenly without it support, drops, falls, crashes to earth, abandoned. There it lies to be trampled upon by passerbys, to crack and crumble and become nothing under the feet of us on the sidewalk, or under the uncaring and unforgiving wheel of a car that scoots along the street.

There is a lone leaf, red in color, and it finds a new draft and gets picked up again, to repeat the only ritual it has now. It is no longer a living thing, it has died, past on, but it still a part of the makeup of the season it will serve its purpose later as the mulch that will allow new seasons to renew. But here, now, it is nothing but debris to be tossed about at the whim of a fickle wind. It makes not choices, it has no decisions, it means nothing.

I watch the red leaf fall again as the wind dies. It moves down the street faster than I do. I want to catch up with it, to run to meet it, to pass it somehow. Part of me wants to grab it, keep it, put it in my pocket and keep it from being whatever it is that it could someday become. I want to hold onto that moment and prevent the change.

With the leaf in my hand I might stop time. I might be able to capture and contain and keep it all from happening. Maybe it is just the attraction of having all that power. Regardless of how much of an illusion it actually is.

It’s close to six and the sun is low on the horizon, the leaf moves on, joins other leaves, flies away. I walk into the twilight towards home.

More to come about the night...mostly as it comes, in random images and remembrances....to include:

 Straight Jackets


Bawdy Wenches



Bands
 
More Bands


And Debauchery
 

I'm asleep.

That was the good part. It had been a long day and after a long day I had managed to get to bed to sleep in a way that was both satisfying and relaxing.

Life was good and quiet.

The first thing to wake me up was the dog. The dog clicking and clacking along the hardwood floor at the end of the bed. He does so because he is cold. He had his hair trimmed last week and since then he has been getting the shivers and shakes at night from being cold. I understand his pain. What annoys is that he had not deigned to join me in bed when I asked him at ten in the evening. Instead he chose to sleep on the floor in the sitting room until he was cold and then come wake me up at two am to get into bed.

Fine, I lean over the side, grab the munchie little monster, grab a pillow and roll back over to sleep. Sleep alludes me for about a half hour, until finally I start to feel myself drifting off. Which is when the dog decided he was not comfortable at my feet and decided to come sleep by my head. Which was not happening. So we fight about it for a while until he ends up back at my feet. I turn over on a different side and prepare to go back to bed. And as finally the sandman drifts in silently through a window the dog starts to snore. Then roll over. Then paw at the bed. Then roll over again. Then snore. Repeat.

I'm getting close to kicking the dog out of the bed when he finally seems to settle and go completely to sleep. His warmth and sanombulance is catching. I find myself dosing now, at three am, and soon to sleep.

My eyes close and I drift off to the sounds of the quiet city. A car passing here, or there, mostly just quiet fall night. A truck pulls up outside my window and I note it in my half wakefulness but I'm moving closer to dreaming. Then I start to wake up, thinking that it sounds like the truck has parked under my window leaving the engine running. Then another. Then another. Then a bunch of Korean guys start yelling really loudly.

"You have got to be KIDDING me." I get up, throw on a bathrobe and head into the sitting room to look out and see what is going on. I throw open the window and see not one, not two, but three, gigantic trucks parked outside my window. All with the engines running. And hoses running down the ally into someone's apartment. Apparently someone in the neighborhood was having their heating oil tank filled at four in the morning. The sound was almost deafening from the sitting room.

I went back into my bedroom. Throw the window closed. Crawled back into bed and tossed and turned and tossed trying to find some way to get back to sleep.

An hour later I have a pillow over my head. The building is still shaking from the trucks parked outside. I keep wondering when my alarm will go off.

A half an hour later I wake to the sounds of Chicago NPR. My head hurts and I'm tired.

Perfect.

Waking home from an early nightcap, having had some wine (fine a bottle of wine) with the Irish. I decided that I wanted to bring home some ice cream. Which seems like a great idea but you have to keep in mind that I'm not supposed to have it. The boy, however, loves it, and I'm sure the dogs would be happy to watch him eat it in the hopes of licking a spoon.

At the shop I was talking with the Irish and so therefore distracted between a conversation and thirty one flavors to choose from. So I almost missed the advertising that was sitting, ah...right in front of my face.


The counter girl got very annoyed with me as I snapped photos, but sometimes you just have to go for it.