Gracious me and mine. When I said Hurry winter I didn’t mean immediately pour a thousand pounds of Snowtober snow down on poor New York City and all those other poor non-NYC parts of the northeastern USA, thus depriving X million people of electricity and adding complications to X thousand hipster Halloween parties. I’m sorry! I meant to urge winter to hurry here, here. For howling blizzards to instantly begin here in Ontario’s horrible Hammer, right above us here in the Hotel Fantod, down here on floor five, over here in the office, directly over my stupid hairdo.

Autumn 2011 review: Two minutes of brilliant fall colors and golden sunlight and harvest-scented evenings and bracing autumnal outdoorsy crispness, etc. Then the sun goes out and the skies open up and the temperatures sink into the third- and fourth-term FDRs and the trees eject all their leaves in unison. It has probably not been this way exactly, but my untrustworthy memory swears that this September and October have contained five to six months of rainy, foggy, chilly, cloudy, windy, ugly lint-grey ghastliness, a grimy wet sock of a season. Pelting rain and pelting drizzle and (somehow) pelting fog — whatever’s out there, it pelts. My weather notes may be impressionistic spillover from the bad books I keep attempting to stare down and the bad news the internet can’t help but keep telling me. Also skewing my season-memory somewhat: Last week I experience a 48-hour cold, which I suspect I caught from someone on Twitter, and which I defeat by taking the Drinking Cure. (It’s possible the cold may have arrived earlier than last week, may have lasted more than 48 hours, and may not have been cured.) Every morning for weeks and weeks I am greeted by those dead wet leaves sitting there on the sidewalks and streets, pasted down, fusing into a sodden carpet of slippery, sludgy, earth-toned bio-muck. Are those actually even leaves? Perhaps they are pedestrians with bad slouches. Overhead, the cloud cover is a dank basement wall. The soggy City Hall squirrels have developed thousand-yard stares. The drenched pigeons groan and cough. Give the parking lot puddles one taste of your shoelaces and they will pursue you home like jackals. Hurry winter.

Speaking of hungry Toronto horses: Above is a small, weird, ugly ornamental corbel seen at Casa Loma that appears to be depicting 1) a spectacularly gruesome jousting mishap, 2) a wince-inducing session of medieval horse-dentistry, or 3) an intervention-minded war-pony forcibly dissuading its smirking, flinty-eyed clean-freak master from Dustbustering his own fucking foot.

Another October nineteenth. This year I turn thirty-five. Here is a recent photograph of me looking revoltingly smug while a Torontonian bistro-horse devours my brains.

Sunday evening: A skeptical Laura throws a long shadow across scrap-paper Nijinsky’s kneecap. (Memory jog: Those are the Bogusławski posters described two Marches ago.)

Farewell to Steve Jobs, that fearsome creature to whom I’m grateful for inventing the brand of machines that I’ve been loyally typing on, clicking at, and staring into for the past eighteen years, more than half my life. — From The Tempest: “What impossible matter will he make easy next?” “I think he will carry this island home in his pocket and give it his son for an apple.”

A line I like from Martin Rowson’s The Waste Land (his clever, overstuffed, grotesquely-drawn 1990 graphic novel [and 2011 iPad comic] in which he winkingly redoes Eliot’s poem as a Chandleresque film noir): I’d walked in on Madame S. playing pixie poker with some arty types who looked like they’d write a haiku if they ever heard something go bump in the night.