First Saturday in September

Talking about the weather...bashing the Millennial bashers...a funny highway cleanup sponsor...the leaves are not the only things a-changing.... 

I’ve lived in Colorado Springs for seven years, and my observation of the seasonal transition is that is stays hot as hell’s anteroom throughout June and July before cooling to tolerable levels in August. By mid-September, the fronts start rolling in. Most of the time these fronts don’t even have clouds associated with them, but they serve to drop the temperatures ten degrees at a time until winter sets in.

This time around, the summer never got terribly hot, not as bad as some summers in which even the basement became unbearable. Remarkably, our warmest day of 91 degrees was just before that first front rolled through on Wednesday, with September all of three days old.

Our very capable local meteorologists had predicted this days in advance, so I was able to get up to Frontier Park behind my house to glimpse the face of the thing that killed Summer 2014 dead.

This monster not only knocked the temperatures back 20 to 30 degrees, it dropped some rain on us in the bargain. I’m aware I haven’t lived here long enough to know what “normal” weather is like, and that the state is only now emerging from a long and exceptionally severe drought. Still, it seems strange to wake up and drive through chill fog on a Saturday morning this early in September. Not that I’ll ever mind a bit of moisture in this parched and flammable-as-old-newspaper state.

She’s comin’ on fast.

Ready or not, Fall 2014 ignites before our eyes.

The tree by my mailbox, on the way back from Frontier Park. Wednesday, 3 September, and the leaves are beginning to turn.

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I had to get up early to drive my daughter in to her photography gig. She’ll photograph sports teams in Woodland Park until noon, then go straight to work at the big-box home improvement store near her apartment on the north side of Colorado Springs, where they pay her all of $9.75 an hour for her full-time cashier’s position. 

She’s really happy for this, and not just because she makes a full dollar more per hour than the other cashiers. Getting a full-time position in this store is like winning the lottery. People work in this place for years and are never asked to come on board as full-timers, with a guarantee of solid hours, and use-’em-or-lose-’em sick-day bennies. It turns out some key people quit, or were fired, and my young adult daughter was in the right place at the right time.

Which is all to say, if anyone ever in my presence starts in on this “Millennials are lazy and worthless” spiel, so help me God...thankfully, this idiocy seems confined to the Internet, which most Millennials are too busy to interact with besides social media, if even that. It’s root hog or die in the Neverending Recession. Most of the people my daughter knows work more than one job. The pay is always sub-subsistence, and they need the hours.

Oh, and I forgot to mention: my firstborn works until closing tonight. When she’s done with her Saturday she’ll have worked from 8 a.m. to 11 p.m. Lazy Millennials? More like lazy op-ed writers who couldn’t be bothered to raise their own spoiled-stupid children right.

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On a lighter note, I saw along the way that a medical marijuana dispensary on Fillmore Avenue had adopted a stretch of I-25. Good for them. I laughed to see the green MMJ cross on the highway sign. It’s not a place you expect to see such things.

If marijuana was finally destigmatized, let alone legalized, one could imagine the store logos with the green crosses on the same signs that announce food and lodging. Now you know you can stop and pick up some pre-rolls before checking into the Super 8.

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I’ve been going nuts on Twitter the last couple of days. I’ve followed, and been followed in return, by a lot of fine horror sites and horror aficionados. 

She’s setting up shop early this year.
“Autumn” Copyright © 2014 by Matt Dixon

I have a theory, based on nothing but drunken musings, that I should be able to sell at least 100,000 copies of either one of my books. The zombie-loving reading audience can support that, if not far more. I simply need to reach some people. I need to network. I need to “provide value,” i.e., reply to other’s tweets, or even simply retweet.

In following all these people in turn, it’s jarring to see the few outlaw journalists I follow writing about Ukraine and other stuff in my feed, which, frankly, concerns me not in the least. I have a house and family to save. I’m going to have to say goodbye to some old friends. Nothing personal. Just business. I already know the world is a cruel hellscape, and the bad guys are winning because the good guys are dumb, weak, and trusting. 

If I’m going to try and sell zombie horror books I need to immerse myself in horror. Real world horror is simply depressing, and there generally isn’t anything you can do about it. In fantasy horror, we at least get to play with the controls, and maybe learn a little about why we’re all such sick little things.

In any event, I need to change things up. 

It’s Saturday night. Back to work.