My Friend Autumn and I

I told you about Autumn being my friend this year. Another friend of mine - from the tropics - asked me to post some pictures of Autumn, as she has never seen what he looks like. OK, so here are some pictures of us inside our local park…

This is my friend Autumn. He really likes leaves, but thinks that green is boring. That’s why he changes their colours into various shades of yellow, red and brown. I often challenge him to do blue or pink, but that’s just a no-no: He usually says he’s an artist and that there are certain colours that just don’t go down well with his general appearance, political mission and interior personal landscape. It’s a long standing discussion between us…

This one he really liked – the technique is apparently called juxtaposition: “Wait until I bring in the wind and all the leaves mix --- everyone’s equal in a leaf-pile…”, he nods significantly while I quietly mumble a ‘smartass’ in his general direction, wishing that I could do something like that...

This guy lives in the park and just overheard my friend’s artistic comment. He said he had thought about this and other fundamental questions of life and death for a long time now and has eventually come to think that if Autumn really thinks so, he must really and actually exist; probably as an entirely separate substance from any body and therefore wholly distinct from the nature of anything physical, i.e. as an incorporeal, indivisible, non-spatial, unextended thing, which is entirely distinct from any object and would therefore not fail to be what it is even if every object in the world would cease to exist…
“Who’s existing now?” Autumn laughed, blasting two dozen leaves off some random, innocent tree - just because he can…

This is Schneeeule (pronounced "Shnoile") and she knows Autumn for quite some time now. She thinks he is generally ok, but she actually prefers the real thing --- Winter. “Not good,” I thought, because for sure this Winter is now out to kill my good friend sooner or later...

“I never really wanted to be a migratory bird. I just didn’t read the small print when I applied for a job as an entertainer in Europe and even though I don’t even care about Autumn or any of that seasonal nonsense, I could imitate it if you gave me a 10er. I’m saving up and working 24/7, hoping to someday wriggle out of my contract in order to fly back to my tropical home...” Those are the working conditions for professionally trained parrots inside our local city park. Truly shocking, but Autumn couldn’t have cared less…

This is me in front of the arboretum. Autumn just made some bad and politically incorrect joke about all those trees waiting to get their leaves stripped - just to take a stupid picture of me…

But usually he is good to be around with, especially now, while he’s still joyful and full of colours…