The first day of autumn was here yesterday, and my dear God, how wet it was.

Yesterday -officially the first day of autumn- it rained all day long. I woke up as usual that day and saw the sky eerily gloomy although the alarm clock was already a few hours past seven. The downpour halted for a while sometime around noon, probably letting the monsoon gutters to take a deep breath and prepare itself for the worst of the season, and continued till the next day’s dawn.

To me, the fall season is just another phrase for the rainy days. Every time the season’s name pops up inside my head, I imagined the high splashing of a puddle of water after a midday rain as a cyclist late for his class rushes next to me.

The stains of mud and dirt near and around your shoes are the glaring image of fall. The wet and slippery road, the dark and gloomy skies, the towering black clouds that never move and the distant grumbling of thunder at the far end of the city’s horizon are all the necessities of a scenic portrait drawn to describe the autumn season.

The day that autumn came, with all its glorified melancholy and depressive sadness, was also the day that an illness struck me badly and without notice, leaving me wheezing in bed like a senile old man. Never had I experienced a fever before, ever since I arrived here at the US almost 2 years ago, and its arrival then was more than I had expected of the fall season.

Supposedly, the weekends are the days of Sabbath for students and teenagers alike. The last day of summer for this year fell on a Saturday and as I know it, Saturdays are the mothers of all that is evil and rotten and time wasting.

We should be in an endless orgy of eating more than we could and sleeping more than we should and watching movies that should never be watched and staying up late all night playing cards games that do not make sense. We are expected to be lazy and full and tired and horny. There should be no activities that require the touching of books or pens or calculators. There should not be tasks that demand thinking and calculating and drawing.

All should sit and watch TV and wait for meal times to come and that was all that I did last weekend with my roommates and I am proud to say that for myself and the other bastards.

[bin Sharin]

Message written by the suppressed persona (using the ink of distress): oh please help me seriously out of angst and issues need scapegoats need butt-jokes must resist making fun of self must resist from using self-depracating gay humor must not resort to poking fun at ed's 'laptop' entry must get help quick