So I’m driving down Conewango Avenue, just after St. Paul Lutheran Church headed north. It’s that block just after Division Street. The leaves are changing. The smell of photosynthetic death is all around, which is a good smell for freaks like me, who love fall, and there’s some dude push mowing that tiny, purpose-lacking strip of lawn between the street and the sidewalk.

I’m headed home for a tick, having just posted this message to Facebook (because I suffer from the delusion that anyone cares at all): “Zipping home to get a Zyrtec because my nose is pasted shut and I am weeping involuntarily. But I still love fall and every other season can still suck it. The best season is always the one you need to be medicated for, in my opinion!”

I don’t think much of it. Or of him, more like, the guy mowing his strip. Mowing isn’t all that thought-provoking for me, although I did assess that he was taking a bold risk just plowing into the pile of beautifully toasted leaves, laid to rest beneath the moderately sized tree from which they’d fallen, on said strip. I’m going to assume it was a young oak tree, given what happens next.

That’s foreshadowing, you guys.

As I’m headed toward the light at the intersection of Fifth Street and Conewango Avenue, a fleeting thought crosses my mind: “I should roll my (passenger) window up.” But I dismiss it as quickly as it comes. That’s silly. I mean, if I were him I’d be compelled to stop mowing, at least there, until the cars are through. But then the cars on Conewango are never through and stopping at any point for oncoming traffic would mean the job just doesn’t get done.

Not ever.

“Something could fly out of that savage blade and smack you right in the side of the head,” my internal monologue insists. But what are the chances that said dude will even hit anything worth mentioning with said savage blade, and if he does, the chances of it actually breaching my window and smacking me in the side of the head are slim.

I just played a five dollar scratch off, because occasionally I feel a powerful lust to spend money wildly, and irresponsibly, and I honestly expected to win money on that scratchie more than I expect to be beaned in the nugget by a…well, a nugget.

Of anything.

I mean, all this goes through my head in the span of three-quarters of a second. This is how overactive my thoughts can be.

I don’t roll up my window, in the end, deciding that I’m being obnoxious. Even thinking to myself in a moment of, as it turns out, extraordinary presence, that if something does in fact hit me in the head it’ll be even more fateful than the possibility of getting my fiver back from the “Penn-syl-va-nia Lottereeeee.” And something that fateful is going to happen come hell or high water.

I’m an idiot.

And very possibly psychic.

I’m an idiotic psychic.

Like, I’m basically Miss Cleo, you guys.

Call me now for your free readin’.

Because sure enough, BAM.

Acorn.

To the temple.

I hear it ping the side of the open window frame and ricochet, perfectly, adjusting its course to “attempted murder.”

Of me.

I’d just like to be really clear that an acorn tried to take me down today.

I mean, I’m assuming it was an acorn. I haven’t had time to check the layer of molded plastic and paper detrius that is the floor of my car, but I’m guessing acorn.

And we’ve already established that I am, after all, psychic.

So. Probably it’s an acorn. The spirit is speaking through me.

And the spirit is saying acorn, you guys.

Brian Ferry, ever the optimist it would appear, offers the consolation that “at least it wasn’t a shard of metal, or you’d be dead,” when I return from my ill-fated journey to the land of antihistamine and immediately recount my epic tale.

There is that.

And I remain ever autumn’s dogged disciple, no matter what it tries to do to me.