Swept Into

Hurricane Debby has left the State of Georgia - and good riddance to it - and is expected to spend the next several days over South Carolina, where it is forecast to drop 16 to 20 inches of rain. God is obviously trying to wash the likes of Lindsey Graham and Tim Scott and Nancy Mace off the map and if there's collateral damage in the form of other human lives, God doesn't care - the Old Testament proves that he's a sociopath anyway. "Abraham, go kill your son to prove you love me" - who talks like that?

Anyhow, with a tropical cyclone beating down on us, it's hard to accept that today is the last day of summer, but that's exactly what today is according to the Universal Solar Calendar. Old Angus MacLise divided the year into five seasons - Childwinter, Spring, Summer, Fall, and Hagwinter - and Summer begins on what the Julian calendar calls May 26 and ends today, on its August 6. 

Tomorrow is officially the first day of the Fall (tadumpatrumpadrumphadump), and the public school systems seem to agree - classes for the 2024-2025 school year have already begun, and those cholesterol yellow school busses are clogging the arteries of our city streets once again. I see groups of parents waiting for for their children at the bus stops, because today's kids are apparently incapable of walking three or four houses from the stop to their homes alone, and when and how did that start?

With the changing of the season, this blog, WDW, is changing its avatar. The fertile, verdant spring season was represented by the young Earth Mother, and hot-girl summer (now officially "brat summer" as I understand it) was represented by the blonde Sun Girl. I need a new avatar for the autumnal Fall season. I'm tired of young girls as my avatars and wanted a male figure, and youth with its vigor and vitality seemed the wrong choice for a season poetically associated with death and decay. 

I experimented with wizardly old men but the images didn't scream "Autumn," and I tried for Fall colors with scarecrows and harvest festival figures but they seemed too "niche" for use on the broad range of names in the USC. I needed an avatar that looked like he was in the autumn years of his life but could also fit into a wide variety of situations.

That's when I got the idea of using myself. After all, what is this blog if not a celebration of my ego? I took a headshot, had an AI adapt it to a virtual image, ran it through some filters to bring out the browns, reds, and yellows of autumn, and came up with "Fall Guy," which is sort of me but also not quite me. The images above show Sun Girl morphing into Fall Guy, which seems appropriate for her last day, "Swept Into" (since it's my face, I found the middle, transitional picture particularly disturbing).

Anyhow, goodbye Sun Girl, hello Fall Guy, and welcome to the Fall (badonkadonkadinkadoink) of 2024.