Woman, Whiskey, and Wool

The boozelight is changing here in the land of the sulking sun. I am getting the feeling that our winter is underway, and that there will be a lugubrious, protracted wait for the next days of warmth and clarity. While I look out at our darker skies at midday with an appreciation for the changed aesthetic, I know that it means months of the weighted drudgery that this city seems uniquely driven to deliver. Now, on the porch, the summer beer turns to the autumn whiskey as the need for cool refreshment turns to the need for warm reassurance. They sky weighs down on us; it is heavy on our days and our souls, heavy on our feet, heavy on our cars, heavy on our streets and sidewalks. Where for the previous several glimmering months the movement was all winsome with windows down and an eye to the horizon, it is now reluctant, insistent and belabored. We are not going where we must anymore, but we must certainly get where we are going.

The blasts from the ferries are longer, lower, slower and now somber, and I guess many of the conversations aboard them are, too. Salt spray hides among the rain, goaded on by a rotten wind that has an eye only for misery. The summer breeze knew how to carry a lavender note, but this crass blow instead pushes warmth and patience too far from home. So, with shoulders stuck in a shrug, a city's worth of wan commuters engages in drawn commiseration over dreary details of present concerns. There is not the heartstrength left for whimsy or planning, only where to get now and how and curse this briny chill that will not come off of me by fireplace or furnace, but best by flask, and especially when coupled with a woman and a wool blanket.

The woman can never shake the dank cold, and so balls up small and close, and gives you the smell of her hair to mingle with your drink, your nose alternately buried in both. There is no need for any light here - you are not trying to find anything. Instead, you are trying very pointedly to not be found out by sodden November and her will-hobbling gales. If you give your position away it is by the muted clink of the ice in your condensation-laden tumbler. And when you do give yourself away she cannot reach you there anyway, but will have to wait until gray morning, when you are drawn out by duty, as she has nothing against the buttressed fortifications of woman, whiskey and wool.