The Darkness

Almost October. Autumn is only ever one thing for me: Eastern Massachusetts. Aspirational like book-shopping and Commuter Rails and being teen*aged, dismal like exams and infirmaries and being teen*aged. I'm drawn in. Even as anxieties up and over an approaching winter mount, I crave wind rain and grey grey grey. I've been positively wishing away the sun (a thing I know I'll soon regret). The first Darkness has taken hold, and I am trying to conjure it fuller (heady, concussively), though it will surely expand on its own, suffocate us all until a trip to the Islands is the ONLY KIND OF FIX (thank G-d for New Year).

Though, post Yom Kippur, I'd imagined something like this. Today, I got my nails painted thus. German vamp.

What About Style?

Let's be fair. By the mid-twentieth, global outlook and style in Massachusetts may have been on the road toward joking matter (or at least I think so—John Wieners is an inscrutable spectre), but this, Salem's supposed 'House of the Seven Gables," is a gem. Real, old clapboard and real, old windows may be my most favorite attributes in any American house, and here they SING. My personal experience of this town (and general region) was a difficult one, but as an image and a notion, as a wholly separate object, this house is gorgeous and meaningful—a call for substance in style.