Some people have seasonal allergies.  I have seasonal Asperger's.  As Summer wanes and winter closes in, the outer world recedes and that dark inward expanse, like Dante's selva oscura, envelopes me.  I used to fret at finding myself in the woods again, after having stumbled through the sunny glade.  Now it all looks so familiar.  Going around in circles.  No longer lost, just nowhere else to go.

Each season has its wicked charms.  And there is something mysterious and magical in those first tentative but inevitable steps back into the thicket of darkness.  The seasons move toward us as we're drawn into them.  Each has something to lure us, a tease, a bauble in its fist.  We reach for it.  Open it up.  Too late.  It always turns out to be a pandora's box. 

For me it's a relief when the days shrink back and the nights grow long.  I don't like the darkness, but right about now I'm tired of the light.  I don't want to see or be seen.  I'm ready to go underground, incommunicado.   And as for human warmth: even at the current exorbitant rate, heating oil is cheaper.

Everyone is different, of course, but I started noticing three or four years ago that my libido dropped off with the onset of autumn.  At first somewhat gradual, like wading into ice cold water, it's become so sudden and precipitous lately, it's like diving right in. It's so refreshing, in fact, that I find myself in those rare lucid moments of summer actually longing for it.  It's like a cold shower after a long, hard ride.  The closer you get to home again, it almost seems to be the point of the whole exercise.

And so it is that my romantic year, like the fiscal one, ends around this time.  And looking back on the one just past, I can tell you, without tallying them up: the romances were short, but sweet.  Well, sweet enough for a guy who prefers salty.  It goes without saying, I'm too old — and too young, perhaps — for tragedy in my erotic affairs, but I've even exited the age of farce.  It's all slapstick from here on out. 

I was thinking about it on the ride into town this morning when I was almost run down by one of those lunch trucks that park on the curb at construction sites.  The ones full of sausages.  Not a bad way to go.  Better than being run over by a Prius, anyway.

Thanks to the screams of a meddling fellow bicycle commuter, I escaped harm completely, but my entire erotic life flashed in front of my eyes (which probably explains how I ended up being a full forty minutes late to work).  I was left visualizing the arc of my sex life for the rest of my ride. 

I don't know if you've ever done this.  I recall reading a book by Kundera years ago — was it Laughter and Forgetting? — where one of the characters comes to the realization that he has just had sex for the last time.   I'm not quite there yet, but there are days when I look forward to the day I am.

I haven't done the math yet, but off the top of my head I'd say I reached the peak of my sexual Everest a couple of years ago.  It depends on how you look at it, of course.  If variety is the spice of life, on the Scoville Scale, I went from naga jolokia in 2003 to cream of wheat in 2006.  If we're just talking sex, I actually peaked in my cream of wheat period. 

I'm not going to lie: now there are days I feel like my johnson's a vestigial organ. I wouldn't want to part with it, and I still like to sit sometimes and admire it, but it's not as useful nowadays as it used to be.  Or seemed to be.  It's kind of like downgrading to a smaller place, as I had to when I moved back to Boston, but keeping the old Biedermier armoire.  You can still hang your coats in it, but that's not really why you keep hauling it to smaller and smaller apartments, up narrower and narrower staircases, around more and more impossible corners. There are just some things you can't part with.

The problem is you get used to chasing tail.  So used to it that even when you lose interest — well, you can't teach an old dog new tricks, can you?  You're too old by the time your testosterone levels drop off, as studies have shown it begins to in your early twenties, to mend your evil ways.  And so machismo kicks in to compensate...

After all, you can't bring up relative lack of interest in sex in our culture of constant craving without setting off alarms.  But personally, I look at it as a respite from a social disease.  I used to mask my lack of interest with talk of tactility, but nowadays even tactility seems too grand a word for what seems more like handling to me.  The needs that people bring to being touched so outstrip their ability to feel, you might as well be stroking wood (and yes, that's something like a quad entendre there, for those of you keeping count).

One quarrel I've long had with Thomas Nagel, whose essay "Sexual Perversion" is among my all-time faves, is his contention that "bad sex is generally better than none at all."  But if you know it's bound to be bad, then the time you could be spending ironing your underwear or learning to play ukulele instead is already a waste. 

The truth is, bad sex steals more than time from you.  Like junk food, it dulls your taste for the good stuff.  And nine times out of ten you feel like throwing up afterward.  Remember what mom used to say: "you'll ruin your appetite!" She wasn't talking about sex, probably, but you get the point.  And don't get me wrong, I'm all for eating when you're hungry.  But if you can afford Morton's, why go to McDonald's? 

I've found that when desire drops from DEFCON 1 to peacetime levels sex is better on the whole. This is the time of year I switch off the infrared goggles and get back to feeling my way through the dark.  But, for the record: I'm not averse to a bump or two in the night.