The Haunted Weekend

[norton ash]

Every Labour Day weekend in memory (except for last year's strangely uneventful one) has been synchronistic, eerie, magical, anything-can-happen for me. There’s always been the bittersweet end-of-summer aspect since childhood -- but since I’ve been an adult Labour Day weekends have been fraught with strange emotional scenes, ships-that-pass romantic flings, old friends appearing out of nowhere, health or accident crises, arm’s-length deaths of acquaintances or far relatives, strongly-rhyming coincidences, repressed people getting rhapsodic, confident people going quiet, mysterious strangers with magical, archetypal personalities appearing...

I wonder if it’s collective consciousness at work, egregoric, North Americans programmed from childhood with the summer over-school begins emotional swirl (anxiety, anticipation, resentment.) The desperation underlying the cottage scene, the emptying-out of the city. The preparation for a change in family dynamic for families with school-age kids.

HST’s intuitions about autumn have always resonated with me. I have felt what he describes intuitively, fearfully:

Autumn is always a time of Fear and Greed and Hoarding for the winter coming on. Debt collectors are active on old people and fleece the weak and helpless. They want to lay in enough
cash to weather the known horrors of January and February. There is always a rash of kidnapping and abductions of schoolchildren in the football months. Preteens of both sexes are traditionally
seized and grabbed off the streets by gangs of organized perverts who traditionally give them as Christmas gifts to each other to be personal sex slaves and playthings.

Most of these things are obviously Wrong and Evil and Ugly —— but at least they are Traditional. They will happen. Your driveway will ice over, your furnace will blow up, and you will be rammed in traffic by an uninsured driver in a stolen car.

But what the hell? That's why we have Insurance, eh? And the Inevitability of these nightmares is what makes them so reassuring. Life will go on, for good or ill. But some things are forever, right? The structure may be a little Crooked, but the foundations are still strong and unshakable.

Hunter S. Thompson - Kingdom of Fear

But this is more akin to the dread I feel October/November, Halloween and onward into darkness, which is the time I think HST’s talking about. Football/homecoming weather, golden and underpinned with... black.

Labour Day I never dread. There’s a road-trip, spiritual retreat, LSD-trip feel to it... anything can happen, be watchful, listen... and I’m seldom let down, and it’s not projection or confirmation bias when I honestly check my head and compare what’s going on to other weekends.

So, it’s the typical fascinating weekend here, much of it troubling (trying to help an addict who’s suddenly appeared in town, while lying and pussyfooting like hell around his family with whom I’d already made a Sunday social engagement) sudden car trouble interfering with that social engagement itself, a phone message from someone I haven’t spoken to in years, unbelievable green-light flirtation from an acquaintance which truly stirred up my faithful heart and sneaky libido, a MAD rambling narcissistic server at a restaurant dinner Saturday night who a friend and I barely knew like 5 years ago and who was getting insanely familiar with us as though we were all great friends... and when I’ve dogwalked I’ve been stopped by two strangers who wanted to talk and seemed very lonely. Looong, soul-searching existential relationship conversation with my partner -- started in an argument, ended in growth. Three sorry-to-bug-ya calls from my boss related to work crises. Meanwhile my overriding emotional response is one of love, compassion and wonder, and not the irritation or lack of sympathy I would too often feel otherwise.

There’s always a COLD day in the mix, too, last night it went down to 3 C/38 F, and it’s cold and windy today. Oh yeah, the wind is full of witches’ laughter as well, but I’ve come to expect that.

Maybe it's all written on an obscure calendar I’ve never seen. Or maybe North Americans just get wacky on Labour Day and the big kaleidoscope spins into a temporarily skewed and oddly beautiful new pattern.

Happy Labour Day, workers, and thanks for letting me play ‘didja ever notice?’ like the world's most boring comedian (or the world's most lightweight gnostic celebrant) while I wait for mundane-meaningful-tricky phone calls from humans and eagerly and uneasily await more taps on the shoulder from something beyond.

[Jeff]

Thanks norton, that was very evocative.

The weekend is an odd one. For me a sense of vague regret usually hangs over it, going back to my going back to school days. Wasted summers, fucked up romances, plans that didn't come together when I had the time, and now I'm out of time and need to restart the cycle. That sort of thing.

In Toronto, there's also the ritual of the CNE airshow, which conveys both wonder and dread for me. Friday comes, and I think I hear thunder, and then think Fuck me, Labour Day weekend. I was on a nature walk in High Park with one of my kids today, and that put us on the flight path to the waterfront. So we were on these trails hunting cicadas, watchful of coyotes, forgetting we were in the city, and then CF-18s would roar overhead, seemingly so close we could think they were crashing. I didn't find it so objectionable before we had a bent government with a military fetish.

Now I'm mostly glad to get it over with.

[norton ash]

Thanks, Jeff. I didn't know about the TO airshow, must be... jarring.

[Laodicean]

Sarah Vaughan is hauntingly beautiful. And so are you, dog. Thanks.

[Project Willow]

I didn't know Labor Day was North American.

August is the terrible time when people (formerly as children) like me would spend the longest periods in the labs, usually right before the new school year began again, or, as in my case in adolescence, band-camp. It was at least a week or so of pure torture.

I've spoken with more than one survivor about the loathsomeness of the summer months, an endless time of vulnerability for some who, without the intervention of the school day, suffered the full onslaught of their family's vices. Personally, I fear the fall far more, yet I wonder why really. I know I was put through far worse tortures in the labs during the extremes of August than any fall family cult ritual but for some reason, in terms of visceral reaction, fall weather is more of an immediate trigger to extremes of horror than August. Maybe I'm just not there yet, or perhaps for some idiosyncratic anomaly, my summers were relatively tolerable except for the labs in August.

And so I am grateful for our extended summer here this year, which in its late onset and visitation is unusual. Most Labor Days mark uncannily reliable portals back into the perpetual fall weather of the Northwest, just not this year, apparently.

Kisses, hugs, and well wishes to all who embark with me now into the second most reviled season of the year, fall. Let us hold hands together and persevere.

[norton ash]

And here's how the weird continues... an e-mail from the addict's wife, lying like a rug about what he's up to and where he is becuase she doesn't know I saw him. Those two aren't ready to change, it's got to get worse for him and I hope he doesn't die, and I sadly wash my hands of that situation for now.

Meanwhile a 'reply all' e-mail began circulating between my siblings and me around 10 pm about the things we want from my parents' house as we move my mother into a residence.

All I want is the full 1903 Encyclopedia Americana. I can't use the furniture, the knickknacks and objets are not beautiful or interesting (just depressing) I'm not sentimental about things... but I gotta save that bound paper, because it was the magic book of my boyhood. One volume is missing as it was propping up a spavined snooker table when the basement flooded.

The entry on Judaism from 1903 says that anti-semitism in Europe is fast becoming a thing of the past... it remains a magic book by way of its versions of history, the forward-backward comparisons. It has beautiful coloured rice-paper maps of American cities.

I know you rider
Going to miss me when I'm gone

[Jeff]

I didn't know Labor Day was North American.

I didn't know this:

The first big Labor Day in the United States was observed on September 5, 1882, by the Central Labor Union of New York. It was first proposed by Peter J. McGuire of the American Federation of Labor in May 1882, after witnessing the annual labor festival held in Toronto, Canada.

[norton ash]

News to me too. Far out.

Jeff, you're one of the doctors here on left-labour history, I'll leave it with you! EDIT: Meaning I'm compelled to look up the roots of Labour Day, but I have to be up at 7 tomorrow..to labour.

[Project Willow]

Hey Norton, hey Norton, sometimes peace is the first refrain. Hey Norton, peace, my friend. Peace.

to you and to all whom you love.

[norton ash]

Namaste, PWillow. Love to you and yours.

[Luther Blissett]

That's an unbelievable post.

This Labor Day was strange in that my girlfriend and I spent three days straight walking back and forth across the city and didn't see a single person that we knew. The feelings that you describe always do accompany this close of summer / beginning of autumn, but this one was eerily silent.

[IanEye]

Great post, Norton!

i took a little trip yesterday, which you can read about here.

cheers.

[norton ash]

Thanks, IanEye. Quite a saunter.

winterlocking cold breeze
of an old new
england crime on the nape
boneache always underfoot
now the failing sun and plangent
dance of winter birdsong
they know it's time
evening up
to leave it to the crow swamp alders
or other ones who'd own a web
of tears thrown to the wind
so long ago they froze

[Luther Blissett]

Your search - "winterlocking cold breeze" - did not match any documents.

Fuck.

[norton ash]

It was a one-off, Luther, an original for Ian... aspiring to speak his language!