Well, here it is the last week of August. Summer is more or less over. Did you have a good summer? I think I had a good summer. My impression is one of a big bright full summer season that walked by at the proper pace. There were no adventures or vacations or life changes. No interesting stories to relate. No great projects embarked upon. It was a much-needed boring summer, a summer of air, of free motion, of wide open spaces in our after-work and weekend schedules — a summer of staying in with all the windows open and rereading books and magazines in massively-windowed sunlight-flooded breeze-kissed rooms with bottomless cocktails standing by. Erasing all M-F 9:30-5:30 hours from memory, losing ourselves in text and weather.

Anyway, a fine first summer, here at the yuppie ant farm, but we now must gear up for our second Hotel Fantod fall and winter, both of which are on track to be nightmares. Daylight hours have started ebbing conspicuously. We’ve started waking up into dimmer mornings. Each evening the sunset creeps a little further south. Tomorrow will be two minutes and forty-six seconds shorter, says the internet tonight. The curtain is coming down. The leaves are loosening. The stores’ sale signs cheerfully scream BACK TO SCHOOL at us. We are all still students. What lessons will the cold teach us this year?