Ambient Music For Driveways (Autumn Revisited)

Sentimentality and romanticism cloys at some, I know.

But when the Moon is such a monster, up there like it is tonight, I care not for the eye-rolls of the un-enchanted.

Freed souls, lost souls, neither-here-nor-there souls, souls swept up in the gloomy glamour of frayed detritus upon hardened dirt, dried mud and frizzed grass… Here we are. The heart of October. It beats, up there, in the sky. Sounds like a song.

Ray Bradbury proclaimed October to be “…a rare month.” Verily.  

Winter: Gray. Spring: Green. Summer: Orange

Autumn: Everything at once! With darkness dashing in…

A time when minor keys sound beautiful, not mournful, when overcast skies are as welcomed as the first snowflake in December or when cinnamon could go with nearly everything.

You know it all too well.

But that moon up there that the world is ignoring each night, too many shut away into their rooms with their screens as it glows, resolutely up there, this lunar sentry, the look of a gaping, pale portal up there, its iridescence made faint by the fluorescence of our nervous, active, busy, loud cities with their signs and streetlights glaring upward into the misty skies, criminally sapping away mystique…

….that moon, above the clouds, amid the clouds, illuminating the clouds, is all but screaming, no…of course, it’s HOWLING…howling at you to get out and enjoy the night, be the night, for Autumn’s sake, just breathe it all in, these colors draining from dead leaves in the night, all insects absent, the lawnmowers now muted, the abominable air conditioners under nylon tarps, the quiet can start to reverberate mightily…

…if you just stand still, in the slight cold, in the dark night, for just five minutes longer, you mad lost soul, you neither-here-nor-there-soul, swept up in the gloomy glamour, as you should be, because what are you really missing, in there, back there, the clamor, the repeats, the status updates, the shared links, the latest MP3’s of who knows who and the chitty-chat/this-and-thats of the every-day-you-know-what-they-say…

Out here, there’s that monster moon. And the quiet reverberates – and it becomes like music, like everything pure can, with your whole viscera suddenly awakened like a tuning fork inside of you, swirled into a piqued, romanced vibrato, harmonizing with the nightsides of you, the dreamsides, as only the special keys struck by the notes of Autumn can…, those sides of you where you’re nostalgic inner child still runs to breathlessness, but then there’s the side, awakened only in Autumn, where you’re just at a strange sort of peace…

because the lights are off,

because its nearly time to retreat from the vicious snows, (but not yet),

because you can not only feel time, in Autumn, but you can see it and taste it, smell it and hear it…

It’s why Autumn is the most enlivening time to listen to music, to share music, to make mixes, to return to old favorites, to lose oneself in a song…

…because Autumn, like the perfect song, will trigger every emotion… in such a brief burst of otherwise fleeting time.

And I tell myself that that Moon will be as beautiful as it is, now, later on, in the colds of January.

And I know that’s just not true.