Try to remember that melancholy mood associated now with September with that sound of the Fantastiks and cramming into that off-broadway setting to reveal the mysteries encoded on flatted vinyl disc before rushing off the end still untold to the port authority still a sewer of the sorts of people who feed on the sorts of people discarded by where they come from to catch a long slow train with heavy bags for such a pudgy boy to the middle of new jersey to a nest of friends and foes and adolescent woes for another try at dink stover’s brass ring and another failure to exemplify the reimagined golden boy childhood of an unwanted boy himself alternately caressed in velvet like a stewed prune or scourged for the sins of an orphan boy himself discarded by his own kin and sent to live with sadistic irish religious to nurture ingrown scars so horrific they could not not have been visited on the second and third generation.

Try to remember that time in September when the worst of the August heat and humidity give way as the leaves turn golden brown and briefly drape the filth in beautiful tattered rags and one of the two good seasons back when we had season commences and the harried teeming people on the street breathe deeply and sigh and release almost that tension hooked at the close of the shoulderblades and forgive each other their trespasses and slide deftly past the unbagged dogshit and skip mindfully over the slumped ragged human form stretched out on cardboard and sleeping mercifully in the midday shade.

Try to remember the feel of September in a land where every day is the same and December through September feature sun and not enough rain and blue skies and white clouds and sometimes it’s too hot but usually it’s fine but everything is too dry and everything is getting hotter and where did the year go and how is it fall already and what happened to my youth let alone my childhood and why were those records so melancholy and is it fair to expose children to the emotional power of music rooted in forces and drives they cannot reckon with yet like the nephew who felt so deeply the baritone of old man river and demanded to understand how and why it was making him feel so terribly sad when a deep vibrating voice singing stylized phrases evoking a minstrelsy tradition and hinting at the deepest most potent sins in the makeup of this land of the free and home of the exceptional can holographically download this original sin and the theft of the humanity of a people and the coverup and the denial well then who could blame him for weeping those bitter tears?

I’m trying to remember why I love September so much. It contains the birthday of my beloved older sister and it’s colored orange in my mind and tastes of nine and seven and it’s the month before my own birthday and I’ve got virgo as I think a rising sign, so I got that going for me.