Soon it will be October.  Taking a bike ride into town yesterday, I looked for the seasonal Halloween decorations that households and businesses create to celebrate the October 31st children’s holiday.  Halloween is second only to Christmas as an event to be anticipated.  Who doesn’t love to “dress up?” Monster costumes are popular.

Children are acquainted with nightmares.  We all had them.  In sleep the mind works, and from our imaginations in sleep we “see” what we most fear.

Truth be told, nightmares do not stop upon adulthood.  Adults are able to recognize them for what they are, give them a label, and bring them up occasionally with trusted friends, or with your therapist.  Human beings are fragile, life is short, and we depend upon Nature and upon others for our lives.  It is a balancing act, our attention and resources are spent to keep everything in balance.

Many children enjoy monster stories, scary tales.  There’s the adrenaline rush and then the joy of relief upon resolution, the main character survives, the danger is past.  As a child I did not enjoy such tales.  In retrospect I now understand that I faced a number of persistent real-life monsters.  Children by definition are limited in how far they are able to run, and a child certainly does not have the defensive skills of an adult.  Not every child enjoys scary movies, a scary story read by an adult in a darkened room.  I for one preferred the light of day, where nothing could be hiding in a basement.

Here are some photo’s that I took yesterday while on the bike ride.  The first photo of skeletal hounds, and master holding the leash, reminds me of the classic story, The Hound of the Baskervilles, a crime novel by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.  Ironically this tableau of bones is displayed by a chiropractic business.

I am always intrigued by any dam across a river.  A dam concentrates the flow of a river.  As one approaches a spillway to view the downward plunge of water, there’s a palpable sense of danger.  You are enfolded by the roar.

There is a break in the dam at the old Champion Windmill factory in Batavia.  Yesterday I got a close as I could to the spot, to photograph the thundering cascade of water.  I stood on the very edge of the wall, and leaned over.  Scary, very scary.

The ride home was pleasant.  The sun appeared translucent behind a dingy grey cloud cover.  It seemed as if the sun was on the far side of a smeared pane of glass.  I stopped to capture the picture.  I wondered if above me were the particulate residue of thousands of tall trees rendered into ash by the wildfires out west, a smoky sky borne east by high winds?  I felt a foreboding.

A final note.  We are remain in the throes of a pandemic, north of 200,000 individuals who have been claimed by the covid-19 virus.  There’s been no assertion of national leadership.  Proven measures such as social distancing, and the wearing of a mask have been ridiculed by the president.  These life saving actions are ascribed as political statements and sections of the country actively resist the life saving measures.  Our losses could have been in the 80,000 range, similar to that of other affluent western societies.  A monster resides in the White House.  The loss of 120,000 is a butcher’s bill.  Monsters are not only  fabrications of a dream world.

A real monster is a human being who just does not care.

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What about the music?  I’ve offered this tune before but I need it now, again.  The anthem is truthful to the conditions of life for many white working-class males in this country.  I think that we’d be well served to choose a new ‘national anthem’ every one hundred years, music and lyric that expresses the truth of life-as-a-citizen in the time in which we live.

Born In The U.S.A.

Born down in a dead man’s town
The first kick I took was when I hit the ground
You end up like a dog that’s been beat too much
Till you spend half your life just covering up

Born in the U.S.A.
I was born in the U.S.A.
I was born in the U.S.A.
Born in the U.S.A.

Got in a little hometown jam
So they put a rifle in my hand
Sent me off to a foreign land
To go and kill the yellow man

Born in the U.S.A.
I was born in the U.S.A.
I was born in the U.S.A.
I was born in the U.S.A.
Born in the U.S.A.

Come back home to the refinery
Hiring man says “Son if it was up to me”
Went down to see my V.A. man
He said “Son, don’t you understand”

I had a brother at Khe Sanh fighting off the Viet Cong
They’re still there, he’s all gone

He had a woman he loved in Saigon
I got a picture of him in her arms now

Down in the shadow of the penitentiary
Out by the gas fires of the refinery
I’m ten years burning down the road
Nowhere to run ain’t got nowhere to go

Born in the U.S.A.
I was born in the U.S.A.
Born in the U.S.A.
I’m a long gone Daddy in the U.S.A.
Born in the U.S.A.
Born in the U.S.A.
Born in the U.S.A.
I’m a cool rocking Daddy in the U.S.A.

lyrics by Bruce Springsteen