State of the Apocalypse: Mid-October 2017 Report

If I’d knocked this post out on Sunday like I sorta wanted to (but not badly enough, apparently) I could have called it the Ides of October Edition. Like that means anything.

Storms over the Sangre de Cristo range. All of these photos were taken during the last days of September, which was rainy, windy, and all around messy for a place that’s supposed to be a high alpine desert.

As it is, its been a stormy start to autumn in the high valley, in more ways than literal. I was excited for the resurgence in pageviews due to my posting photos of the high valley scenery around where I live, and posting it to local groups on Facebook. Once I recovered from my initial giddiness though, I quickly realized I can only do so many photo essays. It’s just as well we had that hard freeze after the 9 October snowstorm to brown all the leaves that had changed. 

In the same general location in west Alamosa Country off of US 160, looking south across the highway.

Looking in the same direction across the same highway, but eight miles west, on the far end of Monte Vista, looking at the swaths of color on the San Juan Mountain foothills.

For a while I felt somewhat obligated to take my camera everywhere I went. It’s rather nice now to just go out on a walk and not have to stop to get a photo of That Really Pretty Thing That Shines in the Light Just So. Although there are plenty of locations worthy of extended shoots that I expect I’ll get to sometime, I know I won’t be throwing photo essays up with enough regularity to justify it as part of my planned Patreon fundraising.

Boughs catching their cold fire beneath gloomy skies.

How to go about running my Patreon campaign has been tormenting me for the last couple of months. I won’t go much more into it than that. It’s just something I have to deal with until it’s dealt with.

The quiet poetry of fallen leaves along a sidewalk. They’ll chatter merrily enough once the wind picks up.

Meanwhile, there’s the book to finish writing, or at least get as far as I can until I absolutely cannot avoid rattling my cup and passing the hat for one more minute. So far, so good on that. I don’t know what else to tell you.

In August I was startled by the bright red flash among the green. Here it’s completely gone over, but by the end of the weekend it was bare.

I like how I’ve got the Ghosts of Autumn Past, Present and Future in this shot.

Like a splash of blood along the fence. Autumn’s sanguinary sacrifice...okay, yeah, that’s troweling it on a bit thick. Enough!

What with the foreshortened autumn after a too-brief summer, finding the waterlogged corpse of a feral kitten in our yard after three straight days of cold rain and wind, and me now closer to 60 than I am 50 years old, the melancholy streak in the fabric of my reality is a little wider than I’d like. Still, we soldier on, and take our rainbows where we find them.

SOON.