Was it bright like God or ace-black spades?

I dreamed of a challah full of blood. Not as in blood libel; I tore off a piece to eat and the blood welled out of it as though it were live and bleeding. It was a profoundly upsetting image and the last thing I remembered before waking, which I did not appreciate. I think before then I was dreaming of some long-running popular series with a love triangle between two men and one woman that suddenly resolved with the introduction of a female love interest who wiped the field with both men by simply showing up, at which point I became interested in watching the thing, which in the way of dreams seemed to exist somewhere between webcomics and TV, and was feeling daunted by the decades of back catalogue.

I like both of these poems by Joshua Sassoon Orol: "Hatshepsut's Beard" and "Aleph Pattern."

Courtesy of legionseagle: the real Sally Bowles, who I did not realize was either a reporter and political activist or the mother of a writer I like. "You want to talk to my mother about sex? She wants to talk to you about politics."

Last night's birthday observed for choco_frosh was small but really nice, including pumpkin cake and discussions of the Burgess Shale, modern virology, and the one-man dumpster fire AU that is Aaron Burr. I am preparing to leave the house for apple-picking. I have not gone in decades. I'm looking forward.

οἶον τὸ γλυκύμαλον ἐρεύθεται ἄκρῳ ἐπ᾿ ὔσδῳ

The apple-picking was a success! It was conducted at Shelburne Farm in Stow, which does not require a three-hour round trip to get to; it took about forty-five minutes in the car with gaudior and Fox, at the end of which we met skygiants, genarti, and a friend of theirs whose social media I don't know, plus a lot of small children scooting around on pedal tractors, a bouncy pumpkin castle, several goats and alpacas, and about fifty acres of apple trees, among which we wandered with either peck or half-bushel bags while I did not even bother trying to keep the score for Guys and Dolls out of my head. We started with the Autumn Crisp and the Shizuka, which were off behind a windmill and several groves roped off from picking—which did not prevent Fox from enacting myth immemorial and detaching a forbidden fruit—and then moved on to the warring clans of the McIntosh and Macoun, with detours through various other cultivars like Cortland, Honeycrisp, there were Galas somewhere but I didn't pick any, I'm not sure we we ever actually found the Empire apple. The Autumn Crisp itself is glossy as a sucker and almost candy-grape sweet, so much so that I'm not sure I should even cook it. I am slightly afraid of the Crimson Crisp, a small, round, brilliantly photogenic apple which looked like it was auditioning for a starring role in a fairy tale. The Snow had a fine bright flavor but an extraordinarily strange mouthfeel, so dry it was like eating the prickly side of Velcro; it must be a cooking apple, which seems a waste of its china-white flesh. I tried a Red Delicious off the tree to see what it was like when not grocery-buffed past an inch of its life and the answer was, unfortunately, "a perfectly decent boring apple." It was grey and damp but not raw or raining. We split the party several times and were miraculously not lost in an unending apple maze. Every now and then tractor-drawn hayrides would rumble past. Afterward we repaired to the farm store for cider donuts, which were so good they did not even require rolling in cinnamon sugar; the plain kind were live-steam hot, cider-fragrant, and addictive. I had promised rushthatspeaks that I would get them at least one weird cultivar, so I went with the Chenango Strawberry, which is supposed to taste like strawberries, and a handful of Firecrackers, which sound like some vaguely hazardous Hogwarts snack food and are actually sort of crabapple-y with pink-red flesh resembling stone fruit. I have a peck of most of the varieties named above and plan to make a lot of pies, although not this second as all of today's stamina seems to have gone toward the apple-getting. Hooray for autumn.