Today I almost got Killed by a Cone

This morning when it was time to get up it was still pretty dark outside, as opposed to yesterday when it was comfortably bright when I tumbled out of bed at seven-thirty. This morning it was properly autumn and I looked out the window and realised that it’s not really the early morning darkness upon us just yet, but the weather casting grey colours over everything.

I’m sure I sighed at this point in time.

It’s been an exceptional fall. I’ve spent a lot of time in the woods with my dog who loves it there. She runs around free and when I call her to keep her away from horses and other people she willingly complies because she knows I have the candy. The leaves haven’t all fallen off yet, but the path is still covered with them in places. A colourful blanket for her to chase and boy does she love chasing leaves. It’s the best thing EVER apparently.

And I’ve even been able to sit outside in the backyard and read my book during my lunch break. I’ll take a special can of Pepsi Max Lime (because that’s how I role) and I’ll get my brick of a book which is at this time Murakami’s KILLING COMMENDATORE, which I’m thoroughly enjoying. It fits me to a T at the moment. It’s about a painter whose wife divorces him and that sends him into a cataclysm of events that are, for the lack of a better word, very murakami-esque. It’s not the plot that I love about it, though I enjoy that too, with Murakami, like with a lot of my favourite writers, it’s about the prose more than it’s about what’s actually happening. It’s about the sentences that hit home so thoroughly that you have to close the book and just stare into the air. Here it helps being outside with a blue sky and only a few autumn clouds wandering over the canopy. I love that and with this book there are a lot of slow observations that fit me to be thinking about right about now.

It’s also worth mentioning that the book is very well translated. I don’t know Japanese but they’ve managed to make the book wonderfully readable at the same time that you get a sense of the original, somewhat eccentric (and I mean this in the best possible way) way that I think Japanese expresses. It reads like a book written by someone from Japan, and not like a poor attempt at making something American that it originally is not, and that’s what a great translation should do, I think.

But this morning didn’t promise any blue skies. So when I finally threw my legs out of bed to start my day I sat there for a while, in the cold, looking at the picture I placed on my bedroom wall just yesterday. It’s not one of my own. I have some of my own up on the walls, but they’re generally small and this one is big. It’s something I found in IKEA of all places as I was attempting to bring some color back into my bedroom (and no that’s not a euphemism). I bought a quilt with color but this photo was on sale as it’s currently being eased out of their collection. It’s by a photographer named Tom D. Jones and it's off a black beach (click for image) and when I saw it I instantly fell in love with it (IKEA does have remarkably decent collection of images they mass produce for people to have in their homes) and I figured that although it was big I could keep it in the bedroom. It reminds me of my roots. Not just of Iceland (I don't know if the picture is taken in Iceland, but it would surprise me if it's not) but of my writing as well. A lot of my writing starts on black sands, even the writing that has no black sand in the final product often starts on a black sand and then I sort of write the sands out of the story when fitting.

It's a reminder of me, which in a time of change is pretty good to have because at the core, when everything else is stripped away, then what is left in you?

I bought a big white frame to put it in - the color will have to come from somewhere else.

We did go for our morning walk in the woods this morning, despite the wind and the rain, the dog and I. I almost got killed (only slightly exaggerating) by a giant cone falling on me. Thankfully it hit my shoulder and not my head, that would have REALLY hurt, but otherwise the woods were quiet, hauntingly dark in places and all around very pleasant, especially as I had an old episode of THE HORRORSHOW with Brian Keene in my ears. It keeps the dark thoughts away, I only allow those to linger when everything else is relatively bright and colourful.

Now my dog is sleeping quietly on a chair beside me as I attempt to start work for the day and instead of deciding between revising the short story I wrote yesterday (it might just be a perfect story for THE CHESTNUT, so keep an eye open) or continuing with the novel, I am writing this little snippet about the grey, windy weather and about a sand on a beach far away that I so love.

I hope there is more color in your life today,

Eygló