Making friends with shadows on the wall

Hello, November.

I don't think my dreams have been worse than usual lately, but the images have been staying with me. A few nights ago I dreamed that I was in the military in the near future—not drafted, I had signed up—and I was fucking a girl I didn't love. From the next night, all I can remember is a man hanged on barbed wire against the sunset, in the midst of incredible carnage, with King Haggard's unsurprised smile. And last night I dreamed about a sailing ship full of tattered and half-destroyed books, some of them so old that you could pick up a volume and all its pages would sift out from between the covers in a snowfall of crumbled paper and dust, and an angel who skinned dogs. I had better get stories out of these.

The days, fortunately, have been better. Last week, my uncle Thomas came to stay with my family in Boston. He's my father's youngest brother, but my parents more or less raised him from the time he was thirteen; my mother still refers to him as her eldest, which has been known to confuse people. I hadn't seen him in fourteen years. I was in seventh grade when he lived with us for the few months right after he got out of the army, and I jumped straight out of one of the trees in our front yard because I'd just seen him do the same—forgetting that he'd been trained as a paratrooper and I had not—and I would have sworn that both my ankles shattered under me as I landed. They hadn't, but my mother was not so pleased with either of us. He brought me a robe stitched with chrysanthemums and a black quilted jacket with dragons for my brother and apologized for not teaching either one of us any Korean, because he didn't think our parents would want us to know most of the words he had memorized. And on Thursday he and my father were in New York City, where they had both grown up, so I went down to meet them: that was awesome. Central Park was full of the ghosts of old and fondly-remembered lawbreaking. We saw a planetarium show at the American Museum of Natural History. And I slept all the way back to Boston.

And on Saturday, there was Halloween. Or there was the pumpkin-carving party that my parents have been holding annually for the last thirty-odd years, which always involves mulled cider and a day of feverish baking beforehand. In attendance were lesser_celery (as some avatar of his elusive self), nineweaving (as her owlish book), gaudior (as the Demon of Flame Wars: in black leather, wings, and coaxial cable, she handed out little printed slips of insulting leetspeak), rushthatspeaks (as Hel, with Jormungandr), eredien (as a raven in a gilded mask), raxvulpine (as a belled cat), lignota (as Amelia Peabody, complete with parasol and pistol), weirdquark (as a mobster to whom I clearly owed money), fleurdelis28 (as the Raccoon of Furtiveness, so I'm amazed I got her on camera at all), my dear friend who does not have a livejournal (as the Devil), as well as my brother and his girlfriend and two of her siblings (who all went as varying degrees of medieval), one of my friends from Brandeis and his daughter (who were camera-shy, although perhaps I can track him down for the winter solstice), and my mother as always wore her witch's hat. There were pumpkins. There was cider. There was storytelling. There was singing. There were glowsticks. What more could an autumn celebration want? It was more than fine.

(Cut for pictorial evidence. Thanks to nineweaving for putting them up.)
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