I write this from my desk overlooking a yard full of trees. Leaves to my left, leaves to my right, leaves everywhere I look are starting to blaze. Deep red, yellow, orange. And it is just under 80 degrees. Which does not seem right, to this Ghost, at all.
Yesterday morning I ran in the fog. The mysteries of the earth really seem to hover over creation when the fog comes, and, somehow, it was just what we needed here to feel autumn's warm, cooling embrace. The world hides in the fog, and what is hidden always feels like such a celebration of Halloween.
At the Ghost's haunted house, interior Halloween decorating remains on hold for a few days, as life has thrown us new furniture and such we are in the process of assimilating. Nevertheless. October carries on, and I have been putting up what I can.
Again last night, about midnight, I poured myself some apple cider in a wine glass-- why not?-- and followed up "Frankenstein" with Todd Browning's 1931 undead classic, "Dracula." The sets. The ghostly nature of it all, looking so far back into the past; somehow, this film gets better each year, and each time I watch it. Toward the final half of its short running time, the day began to catch up with me, and I started to fall asleep. Bela, his Count Dracula, Mina and Renfield and Van Helsing and Jonathan Harker, somehow, all showed up in my dreams. "Dracula" is such a dreamlike film, falling asleep to it, which is something I have done before, seems like a particular type of black magic. When I woke, Van Helsing was standing above the Count's coffin with a stake; I rewound the DVD and watched the last half in its entiriety, before retiring, dark and dreary, to my bed.
Sadly, I did not dream of vampires. That I remember.
