Put on your Neko Case albums because autumn is scary as hell. Everything pretends to die and turns a gorgeous color. The fields are golden. Somehow the light is perfected to display the colors that all the plants turn, and the effect can sometimes be paralyzing for me. Van Gogh killed himself in autumn, but his painting was fantastic. It's the crows that do it for me.
Fall is inherently scary: Increasing darkness, wind, lack of further opportunities to reap, deep golden colors, duvets, empty pools and all of the other things related to fall are uneasy. Obviously every animal in the Temperate Zone should be afraid of fall because it is the precursor to the winter, the old man who culls the herd. All the plants decide to disappear and the food source turns pretty brutal. I don't know that deer don't start eating each other in the winter.
Maybe fall should just be a prelude to horrors, but you know that \Alien"" was scary as hell before you ever saw that awkward space demon. It's corny to invoke such a clich??, but it's so true as to be necessary. Fall leaves you enough time to get frightened, whereas winter pummels you and doesn't really give you a chance to get scared.
Really though, there are scary things about every season. ""Texas Chainsaw Massacre"" made me scared of the summer. Winter is empty and howling with wind. Spring is rainy and muddy and crawling with life and ultimately creepy in a very base Frankenstein way. Summer is hot and delusional. I'm sure there are things about each season that aren't scary. I can't think of them right now. It's too scary outside.
I figured out why fall is so scary and worthy of it's own scary holiday. It's that whole cycle thing, and if you look at it you realize that the fall is really the end of things and winter hardly even exists. Winter is like a dream, but fall is important. Whatever you don't get done in the fall isn't going to get done, ever. The grain isn't going to get harvested later. Your house isn't going to get cleaner while it's shut and full of fire. You have to bury the dead because soon the ground will be too hard for a shovel. So people reflect in the fall. They begin to realize everything that they didn't do. We itemize and find what's lacking.
So that's what's really scary about fall to me. Of course I find the existential terrifying. What's better than drinking apple cider and realizing that your life is completely unfulfilling? I'll tell you what, eating pumpkin pie and thinking about the corpses of the dead and how they can't do anything anymore is a pretty strong rival. Opiates won't help because you start to realize that you're wasting important time. Weed will make me scared as all hell; all the crows start to bother me. The only thing to do is drink a lot and pretend that everything is fine. Stuff probably is fine, it's just hard not to worry when it's fall.
Do zombies have regrets? Are Komodo dragons evil? Do mice haunt people? I want the scariest 550 words that the good students of Madison have to offer. It can be existential dread, a really short story, stolen Hemingway about stillborn babies, a description of a falling apple, or Steely Dan lyrics; whatever you think is scary as all hell. Just write it and e-mail it to me and I'll use it as my column the week of Halloween. I'm lazy, you're scary, let's get together.
