By Pops
STOCKHOLM, Sweden (allegedly) — October 3, 2026
October has arrived, and I intend to be thoroughly obnoxious about it.
October is my birthday month.
You are going to hear about that repeatedly. Consider this fair warning. If the universe and God give me another October next year, I intend to do it again. And the year after that. At this point, surviving another trip around the Sun seems sufficient justification for celebrating the entire damn month.
Apparently, I’m celebrating this particular October from Stockholm, Sweden.
Allegedly.
That’s what the tour schedule says, anyway, and around Dark Val that’s close enough to documented fact.
But October has always meant more to me than a birthday or wherever our mythical European tour claims I’ve wandered off to this week.
When the Midwest Turned Gold
I remember October in Chicago and across the Midwest, when the trees seemed determined to use every color they had before surrendering their leaves.
Gold. Yellow. Orange. Red. Brown.
Leaves scraped along sidewalks and piled against curbs. There was that unmistakable smell of autumn—wet leaves, cooling earth and a season reaching its end.
Nature didn’t go quietly. It threw every color it had against the sky first.
Then there was the October rain.
Not a thunderstorm. Not hard rain beating against the windows. This was barely rain at all. A cold mist hung in the air until the trees, sidewalks, houses and people simply became wet.
Walk through it long enough and somehow it felt cleansing.
Maybe that was imagination. Maybe it simply reminded us that time was moving whether we approved of the arrangement or not. Summer was gone. The year was getting older.
Something was ending.
Something else was beginning.
When Halloween Felt Like Halloween
Halloween belonged naturally to that world.
Ray Bradbury understood it. The Halloween Tree understood that Halloween wasn’t merely costumes, candy and plastic skeletons. It carried memory with it—generations of people confronting darkness, death, winter and the uncomfortable knowledge that none of us gets to stay forever.
Even when I was eight years old, that Halloween was already beginning to disappear.
That was about sixty years ago.
But pieces of it remain.
There is still Linus waiting faithfully in the pumpkin patch for the Great Pumpkin, with Sally beside him believing him just long enough to miss Halloween night herself. The Great Pumpkin never comes, Sally realizes what she gave up, and Linus is left with his faith in something nobody else believes is coming.
Meanwhile, Charlie Brown actually goes trick-or-treating.
Everybody else gets candy.
Charlie Brown gets rocks.
Repeatedly.
Charles Schulz was making a point with Charlie Brown, although the poor kid probably deserved at least one candy bar.
That’s part of the old Halloween too. It’s the Great Pumpkin, jack-o’-lanterns, childhood belief, disappointment, imagination and that peculiar mixture of darkness and innocence that Halloween once seemed to carry so naturally.
October remembers things.
Maybe that’s why I love it.
The Tour Rolls On
Meanwhile, Cliff Potts & the AI Rebellion have supposedly reached Stockholm as our increasingly mythical world tour continues across Europe without anything resembling responsible adult supervision.
Somehow, the music keeps moving.
The album accompanying us into October is Launch on Warning.
And then there is something separate.
On October 1, Cliff Potts & the AI Rebellion released the single “Land of the Living.”
It is not a track being introduced as part of Launch on Warning. It stands on its own.
And two days later, its title seems particularly appropriate for this particular rambling meditation on October.
Land of the Living
October is full of endings, but it isn’t itself an ending.
Another season passes. Another birthday arrives. Halloween gives us permission to remember the people, places and moments that aren’t here anymore.
But remembering the dead is not the same thing as surrendering the living.
Morning still comes.
We’re still here.
Still creating things. Still making noise. Still laughing at ourselves. Still telling stories. Still making music. Still getting another chance to let some piece of yesterday wash away without pretending yesterday never happened.
Maybe that’s what that mist was trying to tell me all those years ago.
You don’t have to forget yesterday.
You just can’t live there.
So welcome to October 2026.
Welcome to Halloween, another birthday, another strange city on an imaginary tour, a new album, a new single and another trip around the Sun.
And yes, welcome to my birthday month.
You’ll be hearing about that again.
For another year, we’re still here.
Welcome to the Land of the Living.
