It’s fall, my favorite time of year. There’s a nip in the air, and it’s finally jacket weather. Time to break out my favorite clothes, my best shoes, and yes, my favorite cologne. The good shit. The scents I love most that are too heavy for hot weather, but totally crush it in the cool air. The best part of autumn is the leaves changing and that eruption of color. No, no, that sentence doesn’t cut it. Here in the Northeast, the leaves are EXPLODING, popping off like fireworks. But it’s a slow explosion, the kind you get to enjoy for six weeks before they all fall to the ground and put a flaccid end to the sustained orgasm that this season is for me.
No one does autumn like the Northeast. Don’t even try to argue with me. The West Coast doesn’t have this–are you kidding? SoCal gets one boring ass season a year–NorCal comes closer, probably the closest of anywhere, but only in certain places. The South doesn’t have this–too warm and they’re too busy dodging hurricanes anyway. God knows the Midwest doesn’t have it, not on this level. No, the Northeast OWNS autumn. Every year it’s spectacular, and this year I’m appreciating it more than I have in a long time.
I have some thoughts as I ride this annual high of mine, so let’s get into it.
1. I did a solo road trip to the Adirondacks over Columbus Day Weekend (are we still calling it that?). I hadn’t visited them since Ex. and I were dating many moons ago. Every year when October arrives I tell myself that I want to go somewhere to see the leaves change and photograph them in full bloom. Maybe do a hike to feel the season in my bones. Then I end up getting busy because legal work really picks up in September when everyone’s back from the summer and starts going through all the tasks they ignored for three months. The wave will hit and before I know it, it’s November and the trees are bare, and I’ll be like FUCK, you missed it again! So this year I made it a priority to do this for myself, work be damned. I drove up, stayed in Lake Placid for a couple of days, and hiked Whiteface Mountain the hard way. And I do mean the hard way: the longest trail I could take, which is 9.5 miles round trip. It was fucking stupid for reasons I’ll explain in a longer post because it’s too funny to do it in a paragraph, but I’ll say this: hiking to the top of that mountain (it was more of a climb, honestly) was one of the hardest things I’ve ever done in my life, both mentally–especially mentally–and physically. I still can’t believe I did it. Then again, maybe I actually died up there, and I’ve been dreaming the past three weeks. Hopefully not.
2. Political rant incoming.
Fuck Israel. Fuck the IDF. Fuck Zionism. And Fuck the United States for unconditionally sponsoring a genocide, ethnic cleansing, and a holocaust of Palestinians. Israel is an apartheid ethnostate run by homicidal fascists. Joe Biden, Anthony Blinken, and the people who work under them–people like Brett McGurk–who enabled this genocide by unconditionally providing arms and money to a country that’s basically 1993 Serbia right now, are war criminals who belong in The Hague along with every Israeli leader. I’ll hold my nose voting for Kamala because she still has a sliver of plausible deniability for this disgrace and will hopefully change it if she wins, and because the alternative is untenable. I would not have voted for Biden if he were running.
If I sound emotional or ‘extreme’ about this, I guess that’s the predictable effect of seeing Israel shred, maim, and destroy Palestinian children for over a year now. I’ve seen video of headless toddlers, liquified teenagers, kids with IDF sniper bullet holes in their heads and chests, medical patients with IVs attached to them burned alive by Israeli bombs on refugee camps, toddlers wrapped in bloodied blankets with their parents wailing over them, orphaned children wailing over dead mothers and fathers, dead babies with blue faces and black lips–a picture of death–decomposed bodies of NICU infants who were left to die in hospital beds because the IDF forced people to evacuate or risk being murdered, kids crushed under residential buildings that Israel destroyed. I’ve seen this day after day for more than a year now. Endless death and intentional killing of children by a rabid dog that’s totally out of control.
Just yesterday I saw a video of an 11 year-old Palestinian boy in the West Bank–not Gaza, the West Bank–who threw a rock at an armored IDF vehicle that had turned around and was at least 30-40 yards away from the kid. It was LEAVING. It was SAFE from a rock, or even a grenade at that distance.
The IDF shot him dead. For throwing a rock. An 11 year-old boy my daughter’s age.
Please don’t let me suggest that any of this only started happening recently, or after October 7th. No. This has been happening for DECADES, long before October 7th. Long before Hamas or Hezbollah even existed. Israel has been intentionally killing Palestinian kids for decades, and not just for throwing rocks. They’ve been murdered for protesting the occupation unarmed. They’ve been murdered for any excuse. If it wasn’t obvious before now, Israel doesn’t view Palestinians as human, let alone equals. Israel views them as animals. Or an infection. I saw an Israeli citizen use that exact word in a video yesterday. “Infection.” They are an infection, and we are the cure. That’s what he said.
That’s Nazi talk. Israel wants to steal Gaza and its beachfront property and oil and gas reserves that were recently discovered off the coast, settle it, and push Palestinians into an even smaller tract of land, just like we did with Native Americans. They want to stick Palestinians in reservations where they can be controlled and managed like the zoo animals Israel thinks they are.
October 7th doesn’t justify this. Israel killed its own people on October 7th so they wouldn’t be taken hostage. Israel killed hundreds of them pursuant to the Hannibal Directive. It has admitted this. Google it. You don’t see any Israelis being prosecuted for executing their own people along with Hamas operatives. Regardless, no war crime by one side justifies the commission of exponentially worse war crimes for a year by the other side. There are laws of war. Israel has broken every single one of them by indiscriminately killing civilians, including over 20,000 children, killing journalists, killing humanitarian workers, and destroying mosques, universities and hospitals for no military purpose. Destroying people’s homes for no military purpose. Then its soldiers dance on TikTok holding women’s underwear stolen from these homes, playing with children’s toys stolen from these homes, all while there’s a high probability that the people whose underwear and toys they’re using to mock Palestinians are either dead or permanently maimed. Then they cook dinner in these people’s destroyed homes while Israel intentionally starves Palestinians to get them to submit to its will. I’ve seen it. They’re not hiding it.
I’ve been to Auschwitz. I’ve been to Hiroshima. I’ve seen how man can become a predatory animal when he begins to view a group of people as less than human and no better than an insect or an “infection.” Israel is not beyond this. Israel is not special. Israel is just another country of self-righteous crusaders on a rampage. Israel is committing a holocaust right now, with American help and full support. Right now. Having had a genocide and holocaust committed against you does not give you free license to commit a genocide or a holocaust against someone else. But this is what Israel has done to Palestinians for almost 80 years. What we are seeing today is another worse Nakba. It’s obscene and an absolute disgrace.
That my country is supporting it under a Democratic President no less, has me incensed. That no American journalist except one (on Fox News!) has spoken out against Israel’s wanton slaughter of 170+ Palestinian journalists, who are the only ones on the ground in Gaza because Israel has a total media blackout for everyone else, has me furious. Anderson Cooper, Jake Tapper, Chris Hayes, and Rachel Maddow whined about Trump’s targeting and treatment of American journalists for 4 years and what a big danger it was. ‘Democracy Dies In Darkness’ the Washington Post says. Where are their voices now, when Israel is intentionally murdering their colleagues in Gaza? Fucking hypocrites. Absolute frauds.
So fuck Israel.
Fuck the IDF.
Fuck Zionism.
Free Palestine.
3. Clearly I need to get off Twitter more often. But I feel like I’m living through one of the worst atrocities in history–worse than what happened in Bosnia in the 90s–and it’s being propagated by my own country, so I need to bear witness to it and speak out about it. When the true facts come out about what Israel has done, when all the bodies are counted, we are looking at possibly 200,000 people killed in a little over a year, thousands of children maimed and orphaned, an entire country destroyed, and an entire population permanently scarred. None of this would be happening without the United States. Israel is a helpless appendage without American money and weapons. It wouldn’t even exist without the United States. So this is on us as much as them, and I’m not going to ignore it like so many people are.
And it’s all happening under a DEMOCRAT. Fuck Joe Biden too. Get to a nursing home already.
4. I miss Paris. I miss Europe.
Calgon, take me away.
5. It appears that I’m developing into a desk lawyer who everyone asks to write their papers, whether I’m on their case or not. I enjoy writing a lot so I don’t mind this at all. (98% of what litigators do involves writing, all those entertaining court shows notwithstanding.) Writing is hours intensive so having people constantly feed me this work helps on the billing and income side too.
All of this got me thinking: I can do this from literally anywhere. If I have an office set-up, I can write a brief or letter or motion from northern Italy or France just as easily as I can from New York. As long as I find a way to keep the work flow going, devote myself to being a legal writer full-time, and don’t give a shit about ego or accolades (I don’t), it doesn’t matter where I live. I can work remotely from anywhere. If I need to go to the office for something big, my firm has an office in Milan, or I could always fly back.
Bottom line: if I get my citizenship, I could be living and working in Italy as soon as my daughter goes to college in 7 years. It’s actually a realistic option. I don’t need to wait to retire to move there. Or…. if I move there later on, closer to retirement, I could sustain a baseline income by doing this kind of work as long as I maintain my connections here. There’s a guy at my firm who’s in his 80s and still working prolifically. No way I’m doing that, but it’s pretty cool that I have this possibility in my life. I could be an ex-pat for the first time in my 60s. Wild.
6. I have this thing I do sometimes where I mentally take myself back to where I was a year ago or five years ago or whatever and compare it to where I am now–how I feel, how my life is, how work is, how my overall mindset and outlook are compared to back then. Does anyone else do this? It happens totally randomly. Something will trigger a thought my head, it could be the seasons changing or an anniversary or a birthday or something as simple as a song or a piece of a memory. Then I’ll think Wow, who would have thought you’d be here a year ago (or five years ago or ten). Look how far you’ve come. Look how different your life is. Look at how differently you feel about yourself and your place in the world. It’s like time traveling inside my own life. It’s not always for the better. Sometimes the comparison is a sad one, like immediately after I got divorced, or a year ago at this time. But every time I do this, it makes me feel like my life is somehow scripted or preordained. All the little decisions that got me to a particular place, it just feels like a movie sometimes, not like something I did or chose for myself, but rather, like it was laid out for me to experience no matter what I chose or wanted. As if any choice I made would have led me to the same place and the same result. Free will but not free will. As if I’m playing a role in a screenplay written by God knows who. Even the most complex video games have boundaries, don’t they? If you win, you end up in the same place, don’t you? I’m not even sure this makes any sense.
I swear I didn’t take an edible before writing this, but it sounds like I need one.
7. The second fall hit, the second it got cooler and the leaves began to change color, that mental game I referenced above started kicking in. I began having random thoughts about where I was emotionally and mentally a year ago at this time–just these flashes of memories here and there–followed by this lightning quick comparison to where I am now. All involuntary. Maybe it’s mild PTSD? It’s wild what a difference a year makes. Needless to say, I didn’t enjoy the fall last year. It went by in a flash because I was a mess emotionally, caught in this tornado of shit, focused on the wrong things, wanting the wrong things, not myself, just twisted up and bent in the worst possible way. So much of it was caused by choices I didn’t have to make but made anyway because my thought process, my self-value, and my priorities were upside down.
It’s crazy how this can happen to a person, how we allow it to happen, how we debase ourselves by trying to control people and situations that are beyond our control and really not worth having in the first place. We can’t see this in the fog of the moment, when we’re emotionally invested in an idealized version of someone who never actually existed except in our own minds. It takes work and time to restore what we so willingly surrendered. I spent the past year doing the work, first processing a lot of feelings and then untwisting that knot in therapy, which helped me see things I couldn’t see by myself and restored my focus and self worth.
Time has also done its work, as it always does. Seriously, is there anything in the world as reliable as the way Time sands the edges off one’s memory and fades pain and people out for you so you can move forward in life? It’s such a natural process, it’s downright organic. How much ink did I spill on angst and regret and simple props to occupy my time, only to find that Time, my enemy and my friend–my frenemy–has been carrying a lot of the load for me. I just had to be patient.
I really should be nicer to Time, but he’s stealing from me every day, so it will always be a love-hate relationship.
8. Right now, the thought of a relationship feels like a weight on my back. I already have so many obligations and interests pulling me in different directions that it seems impossible to consider making someone else happy at the moment. I’m filling my own cup, and I’m not that interested in sharing it or trying to fill someone else’s. I suppose we all go through phases in life, and this is a new one for me. For a long time, a relationship was all I wanted. It was all I invested in emotionally, temporally, mentally, and physically. I didn’t realize it at the time, but this investment came at a cost. It gave back to me in many ways and made me happy at different points in time–I don’t mean to minimize this–but it was also draining. It took energy and focus away from me and transferred it to someone and something else. I mean on some level that’s what relationships are, right? You’re supposed to do that, and I wouldn’t have wanted it or done it if I didn’t think the person or situation was worth it to me. Clearly they were at the time. But when it’s the right situation, it shouldn’t be draining. It shouldn’t take so much from you. It shouldn’t feel like you’re trying to catch a tiger by the tail, or that you’re forcing someone to do something they don’t want to do, always wondering if they want what you want. It shouldn’t be that hard, right? It should be secure. Peaceful. Positive. Moving together in one direction. That’s the right situation. That means you’re with the right person.
So now, I feel like I have a third eye that perceives all the hidden factors involved in choosing someone for a relationship when I’m with them. I’m seeing, understanding and looking for things in people that I never looked for or cared about before. No more diving in and chasing shiny objects. Relationship regulation is a lot like emotional regulation. Pausing and thinking before reacting, being intentional, is important when choosing someone too.
And yet, I spent a good part of last year chasing another relationship with this irrational urgency. I see now that it was all reactive. I was trying to fill an emotional hole and replace what I’d lost as quickly as possible. I was competing with a ghost. Some of the people I went out with saw through it, to their credit. Nothing I started then would have worked. It would have been empty calories and a dead end. Thank Christ I wasn’t attracted enough to anyone to jump into anything new. I wasn’t ready. I’m still not, but I do feel more centered and like I know what I’m looking for now, and what I think will work if and when I meet someone who piques my interest enough to want to continue seeing them. And I’m enjoying my journey in the meantime, giving myself what I need instead of waiting for, or requiring someone else to provide it. I feel good about that. Like I’m living my life in the right way, not the wrong way.
9. The other day, early in the morning, I heard this loud clang outside my window. I went to look, and there was a guy walking his dog really close to my next door neighbor’s yard. My landlord lives on the bottom floor. After some quick deduction, I surmised that the man had punched my landlord’s metal “Trump 2024” sign, which is prominently featured in his front yard and looked to be swaying back and forth. This made me smile. I can’t believe that piece of shit was president once, let alone that he’s the Republican nominee for a potential second term. Yes, the Republican Party is a disgrace, but our election system is a joke too. A convicted felon, Roy Cohn clone, fascist in waiting, and a clear national security threat may soon become the most powerful person in the world. Again. It’s insane.
10. My daughter is 11 and just started middle school, a new school, a bigger school, with different classes and different teachers. She’s blossoming. She likes her new independence and responsibility. She’s not bored and frustrated like last year, when she had one teacher and had outgrown so much. She’s in the last stages of her childhood, her innocence, in between being a young girl and a teenager, with all that it brings. She got her first period a few months ago. Adjusting to it during school has been…. interesting. She has a major crush on a boy in her class that looks a bit too sustainable for my taste. She has his photo as a screensaver. She went to watch him play football last weekend with a friend of hers. She didn’t want me to go with her, so I didn’t. She walks to school alone now. She’s too big for me to walk with her, she says. She doesn’t want me to embarrass her. But I get up with her at 7:00 a.m. when I have her, make sure she’s out the door on time, and then I go outside and watch her walk down our street to make sure she safely gets to the street that turns towards her middle school. One time she looked back to make sure I was there. Usually she doesn’t.
All of this is a bittersweet tug on my heart. I’m not ready for all of it, but I am present for it. I’m present in her life and trying to enjoy every moment as much as possible, because I know that Time, that thief, that frenemy, that son of a bitch, is always taking, taking, taking, even if he throws me an occasional crumb off his table.
