Autumn has always been one of my favorite seasons, because it comes at just the right time. (If it came in April, it just wouldn’t be autumn, would it?) But really: We’ve all noticed that time seems to pass more and more quickly as we get older. Where weeks used to fly by, now it’s months, and I can actually envision a time when it’s in danger of being years if I’m not careful. There are many possible contributing factors: the acceleration of time in general in these crazy modern times, the busy schedules we tend to keep, the routine of adult life, and so on. But one that often gets overlooked, I think, is that ever since we left school we’ve been becoming slightly unhinged. Adult life loses its seasonality.

Admittedly, holidays come along at the appropriate times, and we find that Christmas cannot be taken out of its seasonal context any more than Labor Day barbeques can be taken out of theirs. Trick-or-treating wouldn’t be the same if there weren’t so many fallen leaves to kick on your way from house to house.

The cyclical comings and goings of the seasons provide a very necessary anchor to a larger pattern. Think of what summer meant when you were in high school, how the elusive and infinitely far-off the approaching summer seemed in mid-April, the first day someone asked to open the window in the classroom, and then soon enough the windows became more often open than closed, and the smell of the first lawns being mowed would drift in, accompanied by the far off sounds of mowers and leaf blowers and occasionally bicycles. And how it progressed: The last day of school, the reckless frantic pursuit of fun in all its forms, the long warm June afternoons and the evenings that just wouldn’t end. And how July felt so much different from June, and August from July, and as the end of August approached you had to start pyschologically preparing yourself for the end of all this freedom. Only 14 more days ’til school starts, only 6 more days, only, man, it’s tomorrow! Where did this summer go?

And soon enough, always sooner than you expected, fall arrived, accompanied by sweaters, and collectively we bundled ourselves against the impending winter in the nostalgia of flannel and the melancholy of wool sock. Clear fall days, as today was in Washington, DC, when the air is clear and cool and even the weakest of breezes untrees bushels of leaves, there’s a feeling of transition in the air, and glances between strangers passing on the street at two-thirds their usual hurried pace confirms that these serenely beautiful afternoons are so precisely because we know what’s coming next. We know how ephemeral this beauty is. Things will soon become softer and darker and colder. We will hide indoors for months, and the light will continue to angle its way in obliquely.

I lived in Santa Fe, New Mexico for five years. Every Santa Fe day’s clear blue sky makes even the winter feel pretty summery. People are often surprised to learn that it snows there (I think they get it confused with Arizona), but at 7500 feet, it gets surprising extremes of temperature. Blizzards blow through from the neighboring mountains, and then the next day if the sun is out you can walk around town in a flannel and shorts if you choose and watch the snow melt. I wore my sandals for a good part of most winters. As Santa Fe approaches late September, the distant yellow of the aspens in the mountains suggests that autumn may be near, but the nearby juniper and piñon, ever-green, stay mysteriously tightlipped about the passage of seasons—if they have managed to survive the summer drought.

I moved to Santa Fe in part because I could no longer bear the long, miserable, gray and frigid Chicago winters I had endured for my whole life. And it was a fine choice. The hopelessness that had lurked in the dark hours of every January during every winter I could remember did not follow me there. It didn’t know where to look, and could not avoid drying out in the perpetual sun. But at the same time, in clear serene sky-blue New Mexico, where you could count on 330-odd cloudless blue skies a year, I came just a bit unhinged. The long slow slide into winter by means of kaleidoscope never happened. Winter was summery, and every day was a variation on the same theme. After a couple of years I began to miss the sense of closing and reopening that the rest of the world had to go through every year.

So it has been that, after a long absence, autumn and I have been reunited. Ephemeral or not, these days will ease me into winter well.

The Economist, champion of the free market and all things economically conservative, whose delicious motto is “established in 1843 to take part in a severe contest between intelligence, which presses forward, and an unworthy, timid ignorance obstructing our progress,” has (albeit lukewarmly) endorsed John Kerry for president. All level-headed, non-Bible-thumping evolution-believing-in conservatives should take note of the implications.

From this morning’s New York Times:

“Mr. Bush used all the trappings of the presidency to generate enthusiasm and dominate Florida's airwaves. In the morning, in the first of four scheduled appearances in the state, Mr. Bush swept over a crowd of 12,000. As his helicopter, Marine One, landed in a jammed stadium, the music from “Top Gun,” the movie about a risk-taking Navy pilot, blared over the loudspeakers. And it wasn't just any stadium: It was the field where the Boston Red Sox—hometown team of his rival—play their spring training games.”

So was it “Highway to the Danger Zone”? Or did Karl think “Take My Breath Away” more appropriate?

Having a hit counter occasionally affords me an interesting glimpse of my audience’s psychology. Not only can I tell when and how often certain loyal members of the audience stop by, but I am also informed about the key words of the search that has ushered strangers to my door.

For instance, just yesterday a thoughtful citizen was wondering about whether or not the Bush tax cuts are conducive to economic growth, so he opened the MSN search engine and typed, “Are the Bush tax cuts conducive to economic growth?” Knowing that Strange Proportion would be an excellent place to find the answer to that and many other questions, MSN took that poor lost soul’s hand and brought him here. And since I haven’t specifically given an answer to that question in this forum, I should be clear and blunt about it now: No, thoughtful citizen, Bush’s tax cuts are not conducive to economic growth. That’s just an ex post facto justification during an election year. The rich are out there spending money no matter how the economy is doing. And if the extra $500 in your pocket from the child tax credit is enough to buy your vote for global imperial domination, then we need to talk.

Then there’s the woman who has a rectangular sunroom and can’t quite figure out how to decorate it. (Is it sexist to assume it’s a woman? I thought long and hard about it before I chose the word, and in the end I decided to use the feminine because the likelihood is so low that I or any of the other male creatures I know would even think to look for decorating advice on the internet.) But I can understand her frustration. Unfortunately, my sunroom is perfectly square, and the decorating guidelines are completely different. In fact, if I had a rectangular sunroom, I probably wouldn’t even know where to start. It’s really hard to get a feel for how the feng shui is going to bounce around in a rectangular room. It tends to collect in the corners, I think, but I’m not an expert. In fact, I would probably have to resort to opening up a Google page and typing “decorating a rectangular sunroom" in the search field. Unfortunately, Google would bring me right back to Strange Proportion and I would end up learning nothing.

Last week, a lonely tourist, in Prague for a weekend or maybe just a night, perhaps a little randy and looking for company, went to an internet cafe and typed “Prague whore” into a search engine. But, having discriminating tastes, he didn’t click on the first, or even the five hundredth, escort service site he found. He scrolled way way way down to the bottom, below all the Prague Post classified ads for prostitutes, and found Strange Proportion. He didn’t stay for long.

I’m not sure what yesterday’s search for “coitus clips,” was about, nor do I particularly want to know. But I do feel honored and privileged to have the top Google rank for “dysorthographia,” my favorite disability.

Update (10/28): My new favorite search engine query referral of all time came last night. “What are somethings [sic] that i can do when watching supermodels?”

Well, I finally did it. I joined a gym. After cracking untold numbers of jokes about people who line up to sweat on cue, I am among them, sandwiched between the fat and the vain. This is not the first time in recent months that I have found myself a member of a club that wouldn’t used to have had me as a member, or rather, it’s not the first time lately that I will have become one of those people fun of whom some former incarnation of myself that it’s becoming increasingly difficult to remember always used to make. This is one of the pitfalls of having a memory like a small sand pail with a hole the size of a large sand pail in the bottom: As one changes and progresses, as all people do (or at least should) in one way or another over time, especially those for whom change and progress are such important components of being alive—whether they take the long and winding road, as I have, from one identity to another by means of yet others as they search and wander, often forgetting where they came from or who they were intending to become by the time the next crossroad approached—I’m reminded now of one of my favorite Talking Heads songs, from Remain in Light (which was produced by Brian Eno and thus had a sound much different from most of the Talking Heads albums which might come to mind when the name is first mentioned) in which David Byrne sings

He would see faces in movies,
on TV, in magazines,
and in books.
He thought that some of these faces
might be right for him.
And through the years,
by keeping an ideal facial structure fixed in his mind,
or somewhere in the back of his mind,
that he might,
by force of will,
cause his face to approach those of his ideals.
The change would be very subtle.
It might take ten years or so.
Gradually his face would change its shape:
A more hooked nose,
wider, thinner lips,
beady eyes,
a larger forehead.
He imagined that this was an ability
he shared with most other people,
that they had also molded their faces
according to some ideal.
Maybe they imagined that their new face
would better suit their personality,
or maybe they imagined that their personality
would be forced to change to fit the new appearance.
This is why first impressions are often correct,
although some people might have made mistakes.
They may have arrived at an appearance
that bears no relationship to them.
They may have picked an ideal appearance
based on some childish whim, or momentary impulse.
Some may have gotten half-way there,
and then changed their minds.
He wonders if he too
might have made a similar mistake.

—as I was saying, as one changes and progresses, it’s difficult, even with a perfect memory and a mindful approach, to get a clear view of the series of incarnations through which one has passed and thereby deduce just a bit about one’s own overarching, lifelong development of self that is never quite apparent except perhaps at best as a symptom or a shadow in any particular phase of one’s life. ‘Incarnations’ may be too strong a word, but ‘personas’ is too weak, and ‘selves’ is too cliché, but there’s a real question there, and we all have to wonder from time to time: Who was that high school poet with a predilection for hallucinogens? Who was that naive girl who married the jerk? Who was that man who wanted so badly to become a photographer? There’s a tendency, after we grow up, change directions, or trade in old stale dreams for new ones, to write them off as immature or ignorant. But to dismiss with a wave of the hand and a “What was I thinking?” someone you used to be—someone whose only real fault is a lack of the hindsight that allows you to sit in such comfortable judgment now—is an ineffective attempt to pack the past up in a box, label it, shove it in the attic, and pretend that it will stay in the past. Those old misguided selves don’t disappear in the transition, and they shouldn’t be allowed to. They continue to hint and whisper and offer necessary advice as you continue to make silly decisions you may later regret. But then you have to wonder: Is there some culmination of self, toward which people work—drift? evolve?—or is it just a series of isolated events? You know what I’m getting at. Is there a main course? Or is this just one long hors d’oeuvre table? (“Ooh, the salmon plate is coming out. I’ve been waiting for this moment ever since the mini-wieners.”)

This is not the first time I’ve joined a gym. I tried it once before. I plunked down some embarrassing amount of money for three months of unlimited use of the Genoveva Chávez center (the first word of which, until I called there once, I did not realize is actually pronounced HEN-oh-vay-vah in Nuevo México. I’m sure I went at least five times during the first two weeks, and then suddenly I became very busy—frightfully busy, if I remember right, superhumanly busy. Busy men with much to do, important men rushing from place to place like the wind on a really windy day, or a recently-decupboarded cockroach in a tap dancer’s kitchen, cannot make time for exercise when the rest of the world demands so much of them so often.

But this time things are different. The shoe is on the other foot. I can feel it in my bones. Because it is quickly becoming apparent that the life of a research analyst is not one in which the heart beats regularly, if at all, in the course of an average day (nor do the eyes blink, but that’s not a condition for which exercise is an appropriate remedy), and possibly more important to the motivation of this particular research analyst, because there are only so many hours in the day that one can spend writing code and scrolling through data tables, some with literally 50,000,000 rows or more, something must happen in the middle. Don’t get me wrong: The job is interesting, challenging, and cool, on a level more abstract than that to which I have become used, as the accomplishments now accomplish themselves (with my help) on a scale of weeks or more, rather than in hours or minutes as it has been with previous jobs.

It also helps that this particular gym is more like a “health club” than a “gym.” At times I find myself worrying that they’re going to figure out soon that I snuck in and am using the whirlpool, but then I remember that I’ve paid for it, and that no one is coming to kick me out. Long gone must be the days when my friends and I would pack a backpack with swimsuits and six-packs, tuck our least crappy shirts into our least crappy pair of jeans, stroll confidently into the El Dorado hotel, acting very much as we imagine four-star hotel patrons act, and immediately take the elevator up to the rooftop pool, to which we would gain access using a key card stolen years before which had been passed down through numerous hands as carefully as the last frozen embryo of an extinct species.

The floors at my new health club are made of marble, and there are lots of plants and executives strewn around. And so it is that I now spend half of almost every lunch hour running on the running machine that’s not quite a treadmill, but nor is it a Stairmaster—because I have quickly deduced, from curious glances thrown my way when I did use one, in combination with my own observations, that only women use Stairmasters. So many rules to learn in this new and foreign world with its gender-specific exercise equipment! After spending some time trying to read the daytime TV closed-captioning as I bounce up and down on the gender-neutral running machine I chose in the end, I move over to the weight room and work out the pecs, abs, and lats for another half an hour or so until I hit the steam room, the showers, and then return to my computer and spend the afternoon finding new and clever ways to kick the data’s ass. It’s a nice existence, but one that I never before really considered would be mine.

But there’s some bad news, too. I had my first of three complimentary consultations with a fitness trainer yesterday, and can you believe it? He told me, after pinching me here and there with some device that supposedly measured my body-fat percentage, that I’m “out of shape”? In fact, he said, judged by body-fat percentage, my health is “poor” (the worst of the five possible health categories). He even showed me a chart that laid out the various health categories, and pointed to my position at the bottom. And so I have to ask, as one whose trade is in tables and charts: Isn’t health too esoteric and nebulous a concept to be shoved into rigid categories such as “good” and “poor”? Isn’t that just one more example of arrogant monkeys thinking they can dissect the knowable world into little chunks that their puny little monkey brains can digest? I think so anyway, and I’m sure you agree.

“This time it was Mr. Bush who wavered between defensiveness and aggression. He stood there, scowling, with drooped shoulders and mouth pulled tight, listening to Mr. Kerry with all the attention and pleasure of a man clenching a dollar bill between his buttocks.”

—The Economist

Fall was here. C. was here. Now it seems that both are gone. Well, one of them is actually gone. That’s not really something about which much speculation is necessary. The seeming goneness of the other is simply due to the frigid cold (I could see my breath!) today. The cold damp leaves are stuck to the pavement like fish scales.

We went hiking in the Blue Ridge Mountains last weekend. Having no car, we had tried to arrange a small rental one for a day. It was the only autumn weekend C. could manage here before returning to the autumnless desert she calls home, so we planned a trip. The rental company, however, ran out of small cars and we were upgraded to a black extended-cab pickup truck with tinted windows. We were headed into rural Virginia, so to be safe I donned my faded black “United States of America” tee shirt. Those camo-clad guys with the beer guts who lined the highways with their wives and their yard sales can spot a commie pinko like me from miles away. Clad in patriotic garb and driving a huge made-in-the-USA pickup, I almost felt like I could fly under the radar unless I had to open my mouth for some reason. (My voice sounds so flat and dry in response to a deep nasal drawl rumbling from beneath hick jowls.) Then again, the nerd glasses and abstract forearm tattoo probably give me away long before my polysyllabic and abstruse vernacular.

George Soros has launched a website in support of his new campaign in the month leading up to the election, a campaign designed to focus voter attention on the war in Iraq and take his case to the American people for changing the direction of American foreign policy. You should read the whole text of his September 28 speech to the National Press Club in Washington, DC. Even if I didn't already agree with him, I'd still find it quite persuasive.

Or, if you prefer to laugh, you can just watch this instead.

The wind took it! No, wait. The sun was in our eyes! Rumsfeld’s new answer to whether or not there was a connection between Al Qaida and Saddam Hussein: “I have seen the answer to that question migrate . . . over a period of a year in the most amazing way.” How exactly does an answer ‘migrate’? Does it set off poorly-shod down the road with its children running behind? Does it pack all its things into the back of its minivan and careen down the highway? Perhaps it just recamps seasonally in search of good soil. Has he found his inspiration in the seasonal movements of birds? Or perhaps in the sun-parched hands of illegal Mexicans harvesting fruit?

Whatever the inspiration, that is now officially my favorite excuse, toppling Reagan’s “Mistakes were made” from its years-long top spot on the list. Admittedly, Reagan’s was more succinct, but in the name of succinctness he sacrificed many poetic possibilities. Good work, Rummy.