The Fall

These are, to be sure, the days.

There’s something strangely cruel about the fall. Nature’s finest foreworks — thunderstorms notwithstanding — are reserved for these final days of warm weather. Outside my window, the trees are brilliant with reds and yellows and oranges. It’s beautiful. But it’s fleeting. In a few days, it’ll be over. The city will be cast in gray. We will have fallen.

Fall is my favorite season; the leaves, the sky, the air. It is, I guess, my own personal harvest. It’s the culmination of my year’s work. I spend all year readying myself for the marathon: short runs, duathlons, triathlons, half marathons, long runs. And I spend all year preparing to release a new record (my last three LPs were released in November): writing songs, playing shows, recording, mixing.

Today, then, is the cusp. Tomorrow I run my sixth New York City Marathon. Next week I release my tenth CD, “Heartland.” I am standing on the edge of months of my preparation. What does it look like?

It looks like pajama bottoms and a Blogger T-shirt. It looks like clean laundry (including four pairs of jeans, and thirty-three pair of boxers — all blue). It looks like “Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind” on DVD. It sounds like Wilco “Kicking Television” on CD. And it smells like yogurt.

It feels like, well, I’m not sure. It feels tranquil. It feels quiet. It feels good. It feels like I’m ready. For all of it. For anything.

Here we go…