How the World Series Will Kill Your Children, and Why

So . . . I am almost forty-three years old. I've been around, I've seen some shit. I've been in places I shouldn't be at times when I shouldn't be there with people who do gnarly stuff. Then I grew up and have had to be the protector sometimes because, ya know, I'm a dad and a dude. I'm not afraid of shit, is what I'm saying. I mean, sure, I am uneasy around certain large-ish spiders. And bodybuilders make me uncomfortable, not because they're strong but because they look like their skin is going to explode. And lately I'm not so sure about the Amish. But I'm not afraid of anything, not really. Which is why it's a little disconcerting that, as I begin to write this, I've been sitting at my desk for almost an hour, reluctant to go back to sleep because I just had the WORST NIGHTMARE EVER.

Admittedly the details are a little fuzzy. I was in a crappy raised ranch with a bunch of people who were, presumably, my family, except they were all characters from the shows I grew up watching in the fabled seventies: sideburns doctor from Emergency, Grandpa from The Waltons, Agent 99 from Get Smart (we weren't related, I think she was dating my uncle, that dude Gopher from Loveboat). Peter and Jan Brady, my two least favorite Bradys, were my brother and sister. Typical. I have such lousy dreams. Anyway, for some reason there seemed to be a bunch of what we used to call "mental patients" in the house. They mostly kept to themselves and were, of necessity, heavily medicated. I'm guessing it was sort of like those people who have like nine foster kids at a time, and the state pays you to take care of them. I mean, honestly, if you're mentally ill, there's nothing better than to be strapped to a twin bed in the home of a modern thermonuclear family. At least that's how it was in the seventies. I'm pretty sure we loved our crazies.

So, alright, here's the thing: I had this sense of foreboding the whole time. Premonition, really: I knew the fat guy with the mustache, the one wearing the grey sweatpants and the stained t-shirt, was going to go berserk, with foreseeable consequences. I think I saw this coming because, scamp that I am, I was the one who for some unknowable reason . . . unfastened his restraints! Oops! That was me, I guess, rebelling against the middle-class upbringing I never had. So, yeah, I set the monster free. And very slowly, with no expression on his face, with very little fanfare, in fact, he went about butchering my entire made-up seventies television character family. And guests (sorry, Agent 99). I was outside by then, watching strange things happen through the picture window. Of course, windows work both ways, and as he was flaying Mr. Bentley from The Jeffersons, the crazy guy looked up and saw me standing in the yard, looking in. He headed for the door. Then I woke up, and except for my already enlarged heart pounding out of my chest, I lay perfectly still, lest the real-life murderer know I was awake and ready for him. I. WAS. TERRIFIED. And then, from the desk eight feet away, my phone buzzed, not the usual three buzzes that let me know I have a message, but five, six, seven -- I stopped counting, it just kept buzzing and I was too busy filling my pants to care anymore.

So I got up, and I went to my happy place -- ESPN.com. Turns out that wasn't safe either, because the first thing I came across was an article discussing how politicians and health officials are urging Major League Baseball to ban the use of chewing tobacco during the World Series.

I have a few thoughts on this subject. The first is this: Stop. Stop. Stop stop stop stop stop stop stop. Stop! Fucking cut it out already! Seriously, just stop! Cut the shit! Please. Stop. Please.

Here's the article: http://espn.go.com/mlb/playoffs/2011/story/_/id/7118541/2011-world-series-senators-urge-baseball-ban-tobacco. (I don't know how to make that a hotlink, maybe blogger will do that for me?)

Here are more of my thoughts: stop telling people what they shouldn't do to themselves, and stop saying you're doing it for the children. That is unmitigated horseshit and it offends me more than most other horseshit you could name. Here is a direct quote from the letter sent by a group of US Senators to MLBPA union head Michael Weiner: "When players use smokeless tobacco, they endanger not only their own health, but also the health of millions of children who follow their example." Are you fucking kidding me? If this argument were only specious, I could dismiss it and say, "Yeah, nice try." But this is witch-hunt shit, man. I'm sorry, let me get this straight: your child's health is at risk because he saw somebody doing something? Burn them! Burn them!

Okay, let's get some facts out of the way, see if we can't feel better about this. The combined population of Texas and Missouri (it's the Rangers and Cardinals squaring off in the World Series, in case you missed the news), depending on who you want to believe, is probably about 32 million people. Take out the typical non-baseball demographics -- NASCAR fans, eighty-one percent of football fans, professional dancers, exterminators, and potters, and that leaves a whopping 174,000 people in those regions who are likely to watch the games. Factor in another 80,000 people worldwide, some of whom are diehard baseball fans (like me), the rest, meh, they're somewhere, the game's on, they're sort of watching, but it counts. That's about a quarter-million people who will probably watch these games on TV (sorry, Fox, can't win 'em all -- good thing you have football, eh?). And of that quarter million, guess how many are kids? Well, here's the thing: the revenue is in the prime-time slots, and you want to push the start times as late as possible to get the west-coast viewers home in time for the third inning, so that means late starts, so you're likely to have a whopping 3,500 kids worldwide watching any or all of these games. That's right: 3,500 kids. Even if every single one of these kids has his eyes glued to the set the instant Chris Carpenter is inadvertently caught on camera stuffing a wad the size of a small raccoon into his cheek, and even if each of those kids wakes up the next day and tells two friends, and each of those kids tells two friends and . . . wait, where was I going? Oh, yeah: where are the parents?!

Yeah, I said it: where are the parents? Assholes. Look, it's time to stop expecting everyone else in the world to raise your kids. Because of course that's not really what you want, is it? No, it isn't. Here's what it is: parents fuck up. My parents did, as did theirs and theirs. As have I. Your kids grow up to do stupid, sometimes terribly unfortunate, things. And isn't it nice to live in a world where everyone -- even the government -- is willing to make it somebody else's fault. "No, Mrs. Jones, it's not your fault Little Jimmy killed all those people. Those eighteen years of nagging and whining and passive-aggressiveness and neediness didn't affect him at all. It was The A-Team." It's not your fault, Will. It's not your fault. It's television and video games and role models gone wrong. Have another gimlet, flip through the family photo album, and think about how sad you are that the world failed you so completely that Jimmy smokes crack and Joanie is a teenage prostitute. Write a letter to your congressman. Let's fix this shit so no one else ever suffers your particular pain again.

George W. Bush may have said several intelligent things in his life thus far; I am aware of only one. In response to complaints about television programming some parents deem inappropriate for their children, he chirped, in a purely George W. Bush turn of phrase, "Turn on the off button." Parents, if you are truly afraid your children's health will be compromised by what they might see on television during the World Series, turn on the goddamned off button. You know, once upon a time, in a land much like this, there was a very special off button that kept you from ever seeing anything bad on TV: it was called radio. Yeah, that's right: people used to listen to baseball games on the radio. In fact, I think if you dig around, you might find that technology still exists. Back in the day, it was a good thing all they had was radio: I'm pretty sure both corner infielders for the 1919 White Sox -- Chick Gandil and Buck Weaver -- were actually smoking cigarettes while fielding their positions. Imagine the children seeing that on your sixty-four inch flat-screen. In HD, no less! Gosh, I almost fainted.

Being a parent doesn't mean telling everyone what to do, it means telling your kids what to do. And being a senator doesn't mean you're America's parents. You're supposed to be our cool older brothers and sisters. Start acting like it, you bunch of self-satisfied, overly earnest dweebs.

By the way, I just checked my phone to see what all the buzzing was about. There was a text that read, "You have insufficient funds to send a message." I haven't been this terrified since I walked out on The Blair Witch Project.

Make 'em laugh . . .

Shifting gears today, from a dark-eyed Southern dame to a sixteenth-century Frenchman who told a lot of dick and fart jokes. If you've never read Rabelais, don't worry, you're not alone. Nobody reads him anymore, although if you're a writer of anything even remotely comic, you should. At the beginning of each section he wrote a few lines of verse addressed to the reader, and I particularly like the lines he wrote to introduce Gargantua. I don't know the source of this particular translation (it's different from my edition, which is only about five years old), but I like it better than any other I've seen because it's less prosaic and seems to speak more to the spirit of what Rabelais was saying:

Not that I sit here glowing with pride
For my book: all you'll find is laughter:
That's all the glory my heart is after,
Seeing how sorrow eats you, defeats you.
I'd rather write about laughing than crying,
For laughter makes men human, and courageous.

I couldn't agree more. But don't be fooled: he's being appropriately disingenuous. Like any satirist worth his salt, Rabelais' work is sprinkled with, for lack of a better word, humanity -- some dark, some poignant, some sad. In the heart of every blisteringly funny wit lies the memory of a dead puppy. When his puppy died, I suspect Rabelais looked at his friend and said, "Now I have something to give your dead baby on his first birthday." And they laughed, and then they got shitfaced. I'd give up modern medicine, air travel and internet porn to go back in time and be his roommate for like six months. That'd be a party.

I know what you're thinking right now -- you're thinking, "What's your point, Bear?" Because it's a blog, so I must have a point, right? As a matter of fact, I do. And I am indeed getting to it.

I hold a handful of solid beliefs, some of which are unpopular, some contradictory, some just plain inconceivable to friends and loved ones. I won't lay them all out right here and now, but I'll give you one meaty example. I believe politics is flawed in the same way religion is flawed: they are systems of belief that are based on the assumption that people are fundamentally better than they are. In fact, they depend on that assumption, to the extent that it's really more of an assertion. I think the world is actually at least half-full of dinks (and believe me, I know sometimes I'm one of them). But even the ones who aren't really dinks are, by and large, still lacking in the sort of virtue that ideals like democracy and christianity ultimately require. That's not the problem, though. The problem is that too many people either refuse to acknowledge that reality, or they are incapable of recognizing it.

For a while I thought we lived in a unique time, unique because it appears to be lacking in anything that could be considered an ethos: a collective sense of who we are, what we believe, what we want. I've only been around since the very late sixties, so as I considered this question, I thought maybe this is what we get post-God, post-feminism, post-industrial, post-globalization. Maybe this is what we get from too much television and MacDonalds. Don't get me wrong, I'm not assigning values to any of these things, I was simply brushing my fingertips against touchstones and asking, "Was it this?"

Reading Rabelais' Gargantua and Pantagruel, books written almost five-hundred years ago, I find myself pleasantly reminded of the thought that seems too often to be standing at the back of the room, reluctant to raise its hand -- perhaps because it shouldn't have to. That thought is this: nothing's changed. Humankind possessed no more or less sense of its collective self five centuries ago than it does now or has any time since or will any time in the future. We are, by and large, shaved apes who can drive cars and make omelets. We are collectively stupid about so many things, it's amazing we invented the sundial, let alone the smartphone. But here's the thing: we did. Now think of every dumb thing you've ever done with your smartphone. Impressive, right? And if you think about it, you know there had to be some Babylonian dude who looked at the sundial and said to his buddy, "You know what'd be really funny?" We are knuckleheads, boobs, doofuses.

And ultimately, I guess that's why I kinda like us. I'm willing to bet Rabelais felt the same way. And Mark Twain and Groucho Marx and Lenny Bruce and George Carlin and Larry David and Louis C.K. and on and on and on. We are spinning through our lifetimes in a live theatre of the absurd. And thank goodness for it. Anyone who knows me well knows I joke constantly. Sometimes it's hard to tell I'm joking -- I almost never laugh out loud, laugh mostly with my eyes, in fact -- but it's a rare occasion when I'm not cracking wise. Because I have to. Because there's no world I can even imagine that would be bearable without it. The idea of a world that settles its nonsense, gets its head out of its ass and achieves the truly noble objectives of peace and equality and health and prosperity is beyond laudable. But I'm not going to lie to you: I kind of hope it doesn't happen in my lifetime. Because did you ever hear the one about the guy who was perfectly happy? Nah, me either.

Okay, so if you're paying attention, you'll know what I mean when I say this is the kind of day where the writing was like a big, fat, angry slice that loops deep, deep into the woods to the right, gone. Wrote for shit. But that's not the end of the world because, well, this is America and we have lots and lots of ways to pass a shitty day. I am so glad I'm not a Visigoth: they had like one thing going on -- invade shit -- and the rest was all just lonely, frustrating downtime. I read a little Flannery O'Connor (because I like to be able to say things like, "Oh, I'm reading Flannery O'Connor" and watch people's eyes glaze over), I perused some news of the world (dumb fucking world), played a little sudoku to keep my mind sharp for my golden years (fuck you, Alzheimer's), got some Chinese food and have spent the last couple hours watching episodes of Louie. I don't know what you're doing right now, and unless you're my daughter, who should be finishing her homework, I don't really give a shit, here's what you should be doing: watch Louie. Louie is the brilliant sitcom featuring Louis C.K., who might be the second smartest guy to ever speak extensively about his own masturbation habits. He is easily the funniest. I saw one episode last year sometime, and recently my friends Chili and Peaches, independent of each other, told me about another episode they'd seen, so I pulled up the Hulu (because I am poor and I live in a cave without an actual television) and watched. That was last week. I loved it. So tonight with no pep, no zing, no unbridled enthusiasm, I decided to pick my way through the series to date (he's in the midst of season two now), and holy shit is this a good show. It's not just that it's funny, believe me. I mean, yeah, Louie's character is your typical fumbling mess who finds himself perpetually in the midst of awkward moments often not of his own making but, shit, he's a bit of a clod, so ultimately isn't everything a little bit his fault? Aside from that, though, the show features these smart, unexpectedly touching exchanges that, unless you're a heartless prick, give one pause to consider some of life's more complex questions. I don't want to ruin the experience by telling you too much -- just watch the goddamned show. You won't regret it, unless you're a bland, humorless person who takes everything personally and you're only happy when you're critiquing somebody else's bad behavior or, like, tattling on somebody. Watch it. It's on FX, too, but I don't know when, so you'll have to do your own legwork if it's that important to you to actually watch it on your television. Go do it. Now.

Tee It Up

I was talking to a friend about writing yesterday. I had written well and was feeling ebullient as a result, and because every positive emotion conjures its opposite, as though my brain can't help but hold good things up to the mirror of let's not kid ourselves, I'd spent some time, as I so often do, contrasting that afternoon's high with the frequent overwhelming sense of doom and distress that accompanies failures. "It's like golf," I told my friend. You see, I am a passionate but lousy golfer, and like most amateurs of my particular stripe -- I've never taken a lesson, I rarely waste time at the range, I step up and hit the ball without much preamble -- I shoot consistently around a hundred. That's not terrible for an unschooled hacker, but of those thirty or so extra shots, the great majority of them tend to be the kinds of efforts after which, in most other pursuits, one would say, "Wow, I am very bad at this. I should stop wasting my money and other people's time doing it." Worm burners, three-putts, shanks, fliers, straight-up whiffs -- I've done it all. And yet I don't specifically remember a single one of those shots: I only know I've mis-hit in those and many other ways because my scorecards have told me so. What I do remember are the shots where everything came together in what can only be described as the confluence of chance and divine intervention. With rare exceptions (and believe me, in thirty years, there have been some painfully exceptional rounds), there is always a little cluster of those magical shots. I hit a hole-in-one on a 130-yard par-three in a light drizzle. I've knocked down sixty-foot triple-break putts. I've pulled out a seven iron and hooked a ball up and around a sprawling maple, landing it utterly improbably on the front edge of the green. My best round ever was an 87, which felt like all the good to great shots from an entire summer's worth of golf had come together on one magnificent Sunday afternoon and said, "Have your way with us, you big stud." And have my way I did. My point is this: I've had my moments, as every crappy amateur has, and those moments are what inspire duffers like me to climb out of bed of an early Saturday morning to lace up his spikes and spoil a good walk.

I am, for all intents and purposes, no less an amateur as a writer, although I'd argue that I'm much more proficient in this realm than I am on the fairways: not a scratch writer, but probably about a ten or twelve handicap, meaning that I don't execute perfectly with every swing, but I tend to recognize where I went wrong and know how to adjust and make up for it with my next swing. In golf, I'm not convinced there's any such thing as a natural. There are simply too many variables, and the most obvious consideration, athleticism, often turns out to be somewhat of a curse: gifted athletes, with their ease and grace and flexibility and balance, tend to expect those attributes to translate into instant success. I've seen the game of golf chew those people up and spit them out on the first tee. There may or may not be naturals in the sphere of writing, I don't know, but I certainly wouldn't say I'm a natural as a writer. I am the equivalent of the aforementioned athlete: I was born with a pretty sharp mind, and I was fortunate to be exposed to an array of experiences that honed that mind in a particular fashion. I developed an aptitude based on the combination of a gift and a lot of years of incidental education.

I don't remember a time in my life when I didn't write, but I do remember the moment I decided I wanted to be a writer: it was the first time somebody adored something I'd written. I was a sophomore in college, nineteen years old, and I'd written a sad, haunting little piece called "A Splash in the Lake" for my Creative Writing 201 class, which was taught by Jenny Boylan, who at that time was known as Jim. In the story a young married couple are vacationing at a rustic lake house, enjoying a brief respite from their new adult life of too many bills, not enough money and, as I imagined it, insufficient joy. They had a child, a toddler, and while the child napped, they stole a few intimate moments together, moments that lingered into a sleepy insouciance that was interrupted by a sound that may or may not have been the closing of a screen door. As they lie there slowly coming out of sleep another sound greets them: a splash in the lake. Yeah, a bit heavy-handed, but well received by a room full of young young adults, none of whom had ever been married or had (and lost) a child. This was a beginner's writing class, so actual bare-knuckles criticism was rare, which is too bad because that story could have used some thoughtful commentary. The good news, though, is that I benefited from the experience of having impressed a handful of readers. Don't ever let anyone kid you about this: we all want to be loved, and if we're even the least bit thoughtful, we want to be loved for the things we do well. When I sit down to write a story, I'm not thinking about who might read it and then admire me a little. But I'm definitely thinking that when I finish the story. I want to put my little stories out there, knowing full well the world is filled with firing squads, but knowing too that there might be even just one someone who reads them and her eyes light up in the same places mine did when I wrote them.

Actually, there has been one notable exception to the statement that I don't start from the perspective of writing to win affection: I spent a solid year and a half writing exclusively with an audience of one in mind. My day's work didn't end until I felt like I'd written something I could show her in the vain hope it would make her love me. And god was that a terrible book. But I kept at it as though I thought it would save my life. I was almost devastatingly wrong. After the fallout, after the dust had settled over everything and I started writing a new book, I didn't immediately realize I'd managed to reshape my approach. For the most part, honestly, I was just writing, unfettered, as it turns out, but not necessarily conscious of that. It wasn't until months later, after I'd finished a first draft of the book and I showed one of the stories to my most trusted reader, that it finally hit me. She read the story called "Teachers," and when she reached the end she looked at me and said, "Dad, your writing is brilliant." I was unprepared for what it felt like to hear those words from the person I admire most. But I'm smart enough to know I want to hear her say them again and again and again. And so I write, and I keep writing until the story is finished, and then I hope the right girl loves it.

Most days the writing falls somewhere in the range between the uninspired knock-down five-iron that does little more than keep you out of trouble while moving you closer to the green, and the topped second shot that trickles into the pond, thus negating the value of a stellar tee shot, leaving you cursing and muttering while you dig another ball out of your bag and drop it roughly in the vicinity of where the last one went to get wet. But then there are those occasions when you're just tapping away at the keys and find yourself turning an exquisite phrase, dropping perfect words from a character's mouth, or taking a scene somewhere you didn't know it could go (or you could take it), and it is the equivalent of stringing together a long, straight drive, a solid approach, and a chip-in from the fringe to eagle the toughest par five on the course. For those extended moments while you wait for your partners to putt out so you can make your way to the next tee, you replay those three shots in your head, recall nuances of stance and grip and swing, smile a little to yourself, and hope some of the mystery of what you just accomplished remains when you step up to the next hole and tee it up again.

Indian Summer

Three days ago the sun shone all day and the temperature reached somewhere in the low eighties. That evening I turned the corner and strolled in the direction of the river to buy smokes and felt the day's heat radiating off the brick buildings that line the sidewalk. A three-quarter moon sat just above the spires of the Two-Cent Bridge. It's Indian summer, that stretch of sneaky gorgeous days I can't imagine happening anywhere else but here, at least not with quite the same alacrity. There's an essence to these days that, I kid you not, some part of me longs for the other three-hundred-sixty or so days of the year. Not even the most tranquil summer afternoon reaches me the same way as these un-fall days. It is autumn interrupted, the annual promise of slow death and deep freeze punked, if only briefly. If I believed in Mother Nature or god-hands of any ilk, I would be hard pressed not to admire her/their whimsical exuberance in the midst of Indian summer.

And so it is October, a month that, for as far back as I can recall, has always sort of sung for me. It's the month when baseball crowns its champion, and half the times my beloved Red Sox have found their way to the World Series in my lifetime, they've won -- way better numbers than either my grandfather or my father could have dreamt of. It is the month of frost rising from the grass in the morning and wood smoke hanging heavy in the suddenly dark early evening. It's the month in which I met, over the span of eight years, my first great love, my last college girlfriend, and the mother of my daughter, and although all of those relationships faltered and ultimately blew apart against the rocky shores of conflicting desires, something important came out of each one: teenage sex, a taste of grown-up life, and my absolute favorite person in the world (respectively). And each of those experiences began with an encounter that will always be inexorably linked to the light and sound and smell and feel of October. I am built for this month, it is my speed. I've sported some form of beard most of my life. I favor pants over shorts, shoes that lace and tie and have soles with treads in them, shirts that button, with worn, rumpled collars that flop almost impudently over the neckline of a sweater. I like throwing on a sweater. I like knowing I'm almost certainly going to need a jacket. October, you are my jam.

This is a new kind of October, though. This is an October of grim and bitter first anniversaries. In the twelve intervening months, the details -- as they should and must -- have grown less interesting, less compelling, and yet we are a culture that marks time by the recollection of events both good and bad. We grow collectively pensive on September 11, just as our grandparents once did on December 7. I've witnessed couples gazing unabashedly blissfully into each other's eyes twenty-five years to the day after they were married. Every June 15 at eight-forty-three in the morning for the past sixteen years, I've tipped my hat to the universe for an experience that left an indelible mark on me. As the years roll by, we raise glasses to fallen friends and parents, to lasting joy, to the sacred and the mysterious, the sublime and the inexplicable. However we choose to do so, and whatever our reasons, we take note of the days that stand in our past like signposts on roads that have long since been paved over.

In the interest of full disclosure, I should tell you that I spent much of last October engaged in a cycle that, with little variation, looked like this: drink beer, smoke cigarettes, listen to sad or angry music, punch holes in walls, smash things with a baseball bat. I did mix it up a little. When my Louisville Slugger splintered upon meeting, for about the twentieth time, a once solid doorframe, I replaced it with a wooden softball bat I don't even know why I owned. I broke that one, too. I spent a delightful evening heaving a cupboard full of teacups and saucers against the wall of the smallest room in my apartment. It was glorious. Some days, just to get out of the house (and thereby avoid going crazy), I carted my laptop down to my favorite bar and sat with my headphones on, listening to the same songs I'd been listening to at home, drinking PBR and playing online sudoku. For hours. Also glorious. That party started right around this time last year and went on, almost unabated, into mid-November. Then it got bad.

As early October got going, a friend who'd been there for the whole ride asked how things are going, and I told him I wasn't looking forward to the inevitable trip through those memories the month would bring. "Nah," he replied, "you've got to deal with it one way or another. Can't have that sort of experience and then pretend it doesn't have resonance later on. But it's not much resonance. You made a mistake, fell in with the wrong girl, let her scramble your brain, and ended up in a psych ward for a few days. It's heavy, but it's not the end of the world. It's not even the end of the story. So, you know, buck up." I thought about that for a while before I hit "reply" and wrote a one-word response that to anyone else might have sounded flip, but which I suspect my friend understood expressed everything that needed to be said: "Indeed."

There was a time, of course, when it did feel like the end of the world. Felt like, but wasn't. I like to say I'd rather be lucky than good every day of the week, but of course that's me being grotesquely glib. I was (and continue to be) lucky, and for that I'll always be grateful. But the words I just quoted remind me of something else that same friend said to me some months after everything went very quickly to hell. It was early March by then, and somehow on the heels of having so successfully shoved my head up my own ass, I'd managed to write a book. The aforementioned friend wrote these words to me shortly after I'd finished: "Remember, (she's) a bitch and she nearly killed you, but without her, you don't have a book." I wouldn't have put it in precisely those terms, but the sentiment was spot on, and that's why these dark days of October, as well as the darker days of November still to come, deserve the same solemn recognition as all the days of joy: because without last October 3rd, 4th, 12th, 14th, and 23rd, there never would have been last March 6th. And without last March 6th, there might well not be today, or tomorrow, or next year. Again, I was lucky, but truth be told, I'm awfully glad to be able to say I'm also pretty goddamned good.

By the way, if you look it up, you'll see there's a secondary definition of Indian summer: "A period of happiness or success occurring late in life."

Welcome to the autumn of my content.