the flip side of fall

My motivation has been extremely low of late. And by this, I mean it's been low pretty much across the board. I'm tired of the job, tired of trying to find a date, tired of writing...and basically, just plain tired.

Though this time of year tends to feed into the low motivational gulch that I find myself in. I love the fall, but by this point in the autumn months, things start having a depression tinge to them. The beautifully colored leaves are now mostly laying on the ground rather than the trees. The gray, slate skies bring omens of snow and the bitter cold to come, and now that the clocks have been set back, it becomes pitch dark starting at around five in the afternoon. And as I sit here typing, even the post Halloween doldrums are setting in...and I'm not even a real Halloween fanatic. Those days of Halloween excitement ended around the time the neighbors began withholding candy because they felt that I was too old to be out trick or treating...the ageist bastards! Since then, I've been forced to purchase my own Mounds and Snickers bars...and purchasing stuff isn't nearly as satisfying as getting it for free.

And to add to my fall funk, even the birds are all fleeing in droves to sunny skies and warmer climates, leaving behind their now empty summer homes. Yet, there is one family of birds that take up residence in the rafters of my parents deck every year that continually leave me baffled. In essence, the nest they build there is very similar in size to a small haystack. Now either these birds are the size of elephants or they are some genetically mutated Frankenbirds.

All of which leads me to wonder if animals can have the same disorders that humans have. Really now, are their such things as anorexic aardvarks who refuse to eat ants with the rest of the pack because they fear that they're fat? And I swear that I saw some 20/20 episode years back that reported on narcoleptic bunnies...or something like that. Playful little rodents that would be frolicking around one minute, then drop off asleep in mid-leap. So could these monster-nest building birds simply be obsessive compulsive? I've heard stories of humans that simply could not throw anything away. And once dead, relatives have found stacks of old papers and pizza boxes lining the walls, bags of trash and broken appliances creating a maze throughout the rooms of their house, and decades worth of junk mail and flyers for Chinese takeout covering every square inch of floor space. Maybe these birds simply have this same problem and every piece of straw, string, and strip of paper gets collected and added to their home...never satisfied, however, they keep adding, and adding, until the place has to be abandoned because there just isn't any room for the birds to actually reside in.

Whatever the case, here's hoping for a better November.