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November, and in particular this November, is a strange time of change and transition. Spooky season has passed, and for most people the fascination with all things horror has passed as well, leaving the macabre, the grotesque, the gruesome, and the frightening to us true believers. The annual changing of the clocks returns, this time turning the hands back one hour so that the night follows the end of work so much more closely that many of us return to our homes in darkness. How much more fitting for those of who keep the spirit of spooky season year-round.
In the United States this is the end of our prolonged and endurance-testing election season, which more and more is not a season but a nearly endless state of affairs. For our English cousins it is a time of bonfires and fireworks as they celebrate an unsuccessful coup so many centuries past.
For writers, November used to be the time of community, when scribblers of all sorts of talent and competence entered into the contest to compose a novel of at least 50,000 words by the 30th of the month, but sadly controversy has ended that community and no collective has yet replaced it. I tried once, many years ago, to participate, but that grueling pace was one I could not sustain.
For me personally, November is a time when the workload at my day job begins to expand exponentially. My division deals with members enrolling onto our Medicare Advantage plan. During most of the year the work is steady and sometimes even quite slow, but each year the enrollments for the following calendar year begin to arrive in a tsunami of work. Overtime becomes available and often right on through first month of the new year there is lots and lots of work to be had. I make quite a bit of cash, but it is taxing, and November is the start of that marathon.
This is also the month when I revisit the Estonian folk horror film, Rainer Sarnet’s November, a dazzling and hypnotic black-and-white work of art that is more vibes than plot, more atmosphere than story, and endlessly fascinating.
The days are growing shorter, the nights are growing longer, the air cools, and in this time that so many find bleak I find a renewed vitality: welcome, November.