The first of autumn.

Last night, Indiana experienced her first freeze of the season. My Midwestern friends and "family" all expressed to me that I should turn my heat up and put extra blankets on the bed so that I didn't "freeze to death" in the night.

It's all I could do not to guffaw.

When I got home, my apartment was so warm that random wooden objects were smoldering, mere moments from bursting into flame. My Ohioan roommate had put not one but two extra blankets on his Rhode Island-sized bed. Before retiring, he knocked on my door to tell me that I ought to get into my flannel pajamas and break out my comforter. I smiled and said that I would entertain the idea, and he trundled off to his own little sauna. As I listened to him pour water over the coals he had burning in the wee metal grill set up next to his bed, I thought about the first winter I spent in Maine, ten years ago. A newscaster was standing on the tarmac of Bangor International's runway and had a thermos full of boiling water. When he poured it out, it was ice before it hit the ground. That's because, and here's the fun part, it was -87 with the windchill. I come from a place where they routinely come on the radio and TV and tell you to bring in pets and just not go outside, lest they find your pathetic remains flash-frozen in the spring thaw. To be fair, they also tell you to bring in your cats and small dogs so that they don't get ravaged by fishers (small arboreal weasels) when they go on a rampage. Can you imagine? Finding your cat's ear in your yard and knowing that it had been slaughtered and consumed by weasels? Anyway, needless to say I am a little more tolerant of the chill than most of my Hoosier kindred. I'll probably be wearing short sleeves and my little red fleece vest until the snow flies. That gets me into trouble sometimes. Last year an older woman walked up to me while I was schlepping from class to work. She took my shoulder and looked into my eyes and said, in a voice one reserves for pets who have defecated on a silk Persian carpet, the deaf and the foreign:

"PUT ON SOME CLOTHES! "

Then she left to go back to her bog, or the sea-grotto she sprang forth from. If anything, it made me want to strip to my skivvies and roll around in some leaves. I wouldn't do that to the public, though: they've outlawed whaling, so far as I know. Well, I guess some rusty Japanese and Finnish trawlers still patrol the Arctic, and of course, native Canadians and Americans can harvest what they will. If I go missing, check Nunavut: I bet dozens of Inuit will be gnawing on my mukduk (blubber) for weeks.

It's dusk, and the bats are coming out in what I imagine will be one of their last nocturnal bug-eating orgies of the season. After the cicadas this summer, you'd think they'd all be the size of kaiser rolls by now. I think bats are wee angels. Bats, and chipmunks. If I could have minions, I would choose them. Just think: by air and by land, hundreds of tiny mammals would smite mine enemies. I would be their beastmaster. Oh yes. It's only a matter of time before I teach myself their languages and control the continental United States, all of which will bow to my precious angels. It would be like "The Birds" and "Dawn of the Dead" meshed together. Oh how glorious.

Well, I have to go to French class and "learn", by which I mean "yawn a lot and look at my watch 450 times." Taking one for the team; that's me.

All the best for a night both restful and peaceful.

Domonic (Demir)