October is one of my favorite months. It's generally, depending upon what part of the country I may be in, not too cold, not too rainy, but cool enough to dress like an adult. (I still believe that shorts, while they have a place, should mostly be worn by women and children.) We always called it "gettin' right for the weather" and I still look forward to it. Plus October is the beginning of the death of the year, so to speak, and that has it's own attractions creatively and psychologically.
Maybe it's a holdover from years of "hallowe'en indoctrination" as an American, but October brings with it a certain taste of death. For Al Davis and Steve Jobs more than a taste this year. Culturally this is when we are allowed, even encouraged to seek out darker impulses, physical or spiritual. Americans don't really deal with death well, individually or collectively. We tend to either romanticize or demonize our dead. But we lack a cohesive mythology as a nation, so "national" deaths become political. On second thought, I take that back. Politics is the national religion of America.
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