I try not to be superstitious, honest, but as one gets older they creep in. It’s like when people once referred to diseases by whispering, or the way some people pray before take-off. Mostly foolish. Mostly harmless, a small dam against the unknowable and uncontrollable. But there is one medieval, superstitious belief I hold onto and it’s that springtime is weird. Shit goes down in the spring. Excuse my language, but this is serious. Mistakes are made. The fukú reveals itself. The karmic bill comes due. Beware the Ides of March. All that. 

Perhaps it’s just when the statistics catch up to me, or when they are revealed to me, the stochastic churning of the gyre briefly visible underneath the sidewalk, but there does seem to be something about the spring, by which I mean the period between Spring Break and Memorial Day. This is when the accidents happen, the expulsions, the seemingly random deaths, the It-like instances of small town terror, the enactment of scenes from Donald Barthelme’s story “The School.” Spring is when Artax is swallowed by the Swamps of Sadness. Every March I tell my kids: “Don’t catch a case of the Dumb Ass in spring, because spring keeps the score.” They roll their eyes. It has recently been pointed out to me that I repeat myself. Very well, I repeat myself. 

I know what you’re going to say. And sure. But old man yells at cloud because old man got electrocuted on the golf course that one time. The reason Ahab storms across the shipdeck is because he knows who ate his leg. It was spring. The clock-digesting crocodile in Peter Pan? That’s spring. The old men are angry and terrified and feel the phantom injuries from springs past, and no one will listen to their raving. 

There’s something about the pollen in the air, the histamines, the promise of summer or graduation. When I was in high school, I had friends commit impromptu acts of vandalism just before graduation. Of course they got caught, and thus began the intense negotiations between parents and school administrators regarding continued enrollment and hence pending graduation. I had friends who stole props from the local goofy golf course. I think it was to impress a girl? Back in the 90s, grownups wore ties and such acts were not tolerated. Maybe this kind of chaos happens all year long but the consequences arrive in the spring. But even that implies a causality that is not consistently apparent. That’s what makes it all the more unsettling, the lack of clear structure to the misfortune. This ambiguity is what makes me superstitious and makes me harangue my children, this paranoia over somehow angering the gods. 

The thunder shakes the windows more. I hate astrology. I hate hippies. But, like, I feel it in the air, man. There’s something about spring. The truth is out there. Thankfully, it’s almost over. But still, be careful.