People often ask me why I choose to live in Bibleburg. Seventy-degree days in late October have quite a bit to do with it.
I slipped out for a pleasant afternoon ride yesterday. Took the arm warmers, just in case; never needed them.
Lots of people were playing hooky. Dog walkers and joggers, moms pushing strollers, folks just slouching along, soaking in those last few sunny moments before it all goes sideways and snowy.
At one point I was high up on the south side of Palmer Park, looking west across town at the mountains. You can’t see the vacant storefronts, unpatched potholes and tinfoil-beanie wingnuts from up there. It’s all fall, all the time, green, orange and gold on a blue background.
This morning I streamed the new Tom Waits album, Bad As Me, and it included a poignant number, “Last Leaf.” The refrain goes:
I’m the last leaf on the tree
The autumn took the rest
but they won’t take me
I’m the last leaf on the tree.
Good stuff from start to finish. We’ll be adding that bad boy to the Waits library when it’s released on Monday.
Mad Blog Media 
That is a poignant number.
Ever read Level 7 in H.S., Patrick?
K, I don’t believe I did, which surprises me, because I basically had my own study track in Apocalyptic Fiction going on — stuff like “Farnham’s Freehold,”, “Alas, Babylon,” “Pebble In the Sky,” and so on.
Why do you ask?
Alas, Babylon
Boy does that bring back HS memories. Some friends thought our making a movie of it would be a great senior project (we lived in Babylon Long Island). Unfortunately the movie rights owner was “jealous of their perogatives”.
Spent senior year drinking beer instead of filming.
Level Seven was the last leaf on the tree. Just was thinking about that for some weird reason as I read the line from the poem. Probably has something to do with where I live.
Read Alas, Babylon, too. After all, like Patrick, I was a kid in the depths of the Cold War. One of my best friends had a nifty fallout shelter in the basement. Played in it often as a rug rat.
Shoot, I guess I’m gonna have to dig me up a copy. I hate to be one nightmare behind.
Remember the good ol’ days of duck-and-cover under your desk at school as the air-raid sirens blared? Good times, for sure.
When we got transferred to Bibleburg from Randolph AFB, Texas, mom and dad looked mighty hard at a house just west of Bear Creek Park that had a bomb shelter. Being as you could chuck a rock at Cheyenne Mountain from there it seemed a little like Wile E. Coyote holding up that teensy parasol in hopes of warding off the giant boulder headed his way.
Oh, man, that brings it all home.
I, too, got out yesterday and will again today to bask in this glorious fall. Temps in the 50’s and bright sun make for great mtb riding. Funny thing was that yesterday, I saw no one riding, just a few hikers. I’ll probably ride some gravel today just for the heck of it and the joy of being outside!
Were those folks really “playing hooky” or (more likely) simply unemployed with nothing to do? No worries about weather down here in Sicily, though it did cloud up and rain for about 10 minutes midday yesterday. Today I’ll drag the wife down to the market with me, she’ll get some creative ideas on what too cook…and we need to find the “vino sfuso” place for some cheap (but good) vino.
Larry, they could be “resting,” as the theatrical crowd might say. Unemployment’s still pretty stout here in Bibleburg, and I expect that underemployment is too.
Meanwhile, the city has granted a 30-day permit to the Occupy Bibleburg crowd encamped in Acacia Park — quite a change in attitude since the last antiwar rally I attended got tear-gassed.
Methinks the city fathers are focused on pimping the image of Bibleburg as something other than a bolthole for the tinfoil-beanie/apocalyptic Christian crowd.