April? The cruelest of months? Give me a fucking break. T.S. Eliot clearly never experienced October in New England. It’s “blustery”. Lilacs breeding out of dead lands and mixing memory and desire? Nothing compared to “blustery”. It’s one of those words that sounds like it would be really cute, and then when you go to pet it, it attacks your eyes. Or your crotch. Or something. Sufficed to say, it’s cruel. If I had a choice, I wouldn’t go near anything that’s “blustery”.
But in fact, “blustery” is the least of our problems. Because “dull roots stirring with spring rain” has nothing on Daylight Savings Time. Sure, it sounds like it would be cool and all, setting your clock back one hour. One extra hour of sleep you think. Wrong. One extra hour of a confusing time paradox where 2 a.m. happens twice. Legend has it that whatever you do in that first 2 a.m. you have to do again in the second 2 a.m. or you get stuck for the rest of your life living in a perpetual February 29th. It’s true, if only because there is no other way to explain how the October Revolution of 1917 ended up happening on November 7th. It’s like a combination of Groundhog Day and that Kurt Vonnegut novel I never finished. Needless to say, its scary shit and we’d be better off if Daylight Savings Time never happened. Oh October, you can be so cruel.
Another sign that October is the cruelest of months is that it is also the name of a bad 80s album by U2. Only a cruel album like October would make The Edge play piano when he is clearly a guitarist. But the main reason that this album is terrible is because Bono kept all the lyrics to his songs in a briefcase that somebody stole, forcing U2 to improvise new songs on the spot. This is probably why one of the songs has a chorus sung completely in Latin. And nothing is crueler than having to listen to Bono make up lyrics off the top of his head
Also, Satan once fell into a blackberry thicket and cursed the plant for scratching him. Each year, he returns to poison the plants by urinating on them. Afterwards, it is not recommended that one eat blackberries. When does this go down? On the Feast of St. Michelmas, October 11th. Shit is hardcore. Hardcore cruel.
Now maybe some of you would come to October’s aid and say that October isn’t the cruelest of months. This is probably because you are confusing October with Oktober. Oktober is a German word that means “the act of waking up on a curb in the middle of Munich with your lederhosen around your ankles, having no idea how you got there or why your mouth tastes like mustard”. But Oktober is not to be confused with October, which means “blustery” in Gaelic. They are two very different things.
In short, October is the cruelest of months. And not just because Christopher Columbus killed my father.
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