For all my romanticizing the coming of fall it’s heartbreaking to think summer’s nearly over. You forget how much the next six months are ass. The sound of kids playing in someone’s yard well past sunset tonight seemed an apt last call for summer, this Labor Day. Bed bound for three days, the weekend that wasn’t, I got in touch with the sounds of birds and squirrels outside our bedroom like never before. A nearby hawk I identified with my phone and first found exotic but soon hard to bear, its insufferable screeches and don’t-fuck-with-me persistence, hither and thither, death from above. At one point while playing Fortnite the damn thing flew right into our window screen just an arm’s length from me, then rested on a branch looking cool and nonchalant like “I meant that.” Dawn got a shot of it, here.

There’s a feature on Fortnite I recently discovered that shows your total playtime with the game and last time I looked mine was something like 83 days. That means 83 actual 24-hour days of me playing the game if you added it all up. A whole summer, basically. Now, it’s been five years I’ve been playing it and the only game I play and there was a lot of lost time during Covid of course, especially since I was still smoking weed and just learning the game. I’ve stopped looking at that feature that lists the game time. I’m not nearly as good as I should be by now, either.

Lying in bed with Covid I took to watching videos from serious gamers proffering advice on how to optimize your inventory loadouts and whatnot. Fortnite’s been running an OG series now for a couple years where they go back years earlier and feature old game maps and weapons, the original points of interest on the island. In this way it’s a kind of time warp to flip between the new season and old. And intensely uninteresting for me to convey to Dawn, along the same lines as trapping moles. More of an isolating topic than anything else.

Just like clockwork, the NyQuil kicks in after 30 minutes and I go fuzzy from the antihistamine. The green is the color of absinthe and about as thick. When the dark settles in and the kids go inside you can hear the Canadian geese in the distance and some dog barking at them overhead. When the geese start honking like that you know, it’s time.

Categories: Creative Nonfiction, Memoir

Tags: Creative Nonfiction, Memoir, pacific northwest