Positive Cynicism – Things I hate about my favorite season
Aaron R. Davis |
Autumn is officially here. It’s been my favorite season ever since I was a little kid: the leaves change, the air is crisp, everything is pumpkin-flavored, the new TV season starts and we count down to America’s best holiday, Halloween.
But, as you may have gleaned from the title of my column (or a couple of years of reading it), I’m cynical even about the things I love. So, as an antidote to my usual fawning over the season, I’m willing to admit that I take the good with the bad. As every silver lining has a dark cloud, so too does every seasonal grandeur come with an utter annoyance.
Inconsistent weather.
Are we still allowed to say Indian Summer, or is that not PC anymore or something? I haven no idea what’s PC and what isn’t these days. But either way, it’s Indian Summer big time right now, and I hate it. Just two weeks ago the low was 32. I broke out my jacket, bought some new pants and started wearing layers. I was glad to do it. I like wearing layers, and I’m sick of the air conditioner both adding more money to my electric bill and cutting me off from the fresh air. Yesterday it was 85 and totally stagnant. No breeze, just sweaty heat. Ugh. I even shaved my head the other day (poor impulse control, don’t ask), and I was still sweating from the heat. It’s October, damn it! Enough with the summer temperatures!
College kids return to town.
As I’ve complained about on many occasions, I live in a college town, right across the street from the stadium. Now, football season is something I’ve learned to endure, especially since my apartment property managers put in newer, thicker windows. But I still hate the college kids. They drive too fast, they walk across the street in clusters regardless of whether they have the right of way, they take too long to learn where they’re going and they have parties. A seemingly unending amount of parties.
Now, I may be a cranky old man, but I understand the idiot need kids have to congregate and drink and listen to shitty music. But, dude, when it becomes four in the morning and it’s still going on, yes, I’m going to call the police on you. I just am. On principle. I’m trying to sleep and you are making it impossible. 2 a.m. is pretty much the threshold for me. After that, you are subject to my crankiness. Oh, and pro tip? When you decide you’d rather stand around in the parking lot or on the building’s back stairs, people can fucking hear you. And we don’t want to hear you laugh too loud in another miscalculated attempt to get laid, or hear your sob story about how your daddy left your mommy the week before Christmas. We just want to sleep and, somehow, standing right under our window doesn’t magically create a soundproof barrier just because you’re drunk.
Hipsters who refer to the fall as “hoodie weather.”
I hate hipsters. I actually hate hipsters more than I hate hippies, and I hate hippies as if they were a low order of insect. Stop piggybacking on my joyous season and trying to make it hip just because you get to dress more like your favorite soon-to-be corporate sellouts. Try enjoying something unironically for a change instead of just because it makes you look cool. I know, I know, the gay-hating Owl City douche bag has a scraggly beard and wears a hoodie, so this somehow validates you or something. Find an identity, assholes. And stop watching New Girl, you’re just encouraging it to stay on the air, and it’s awful.
The harvest is over, and only the hardier bugs survive.
And every single one of them wants to be inside my house right now. You know what especially sucks about the last gasp of warm weather? It’s hard to want to open up the windows and try to get a breeze going when seemingly every fly, hornet, grasshopper, ant, spider, box elder, Asian beetle and moth in the county is crawling all over the screens, trying to get at the cool air inside. Now that the crops in this farm county are being harvested, the bugs have to find somewhere else to go, and apparently the place to be is in town and on peoples’ porches. Until things really get cool in November, it’s going to be a carpet of insects out there, desperate to find a way in.
Having to think about Christmas during Halloween.
Look, I love Christmas, and for me, the more commercial the better. But when you go into a store in late August and see Christmas stuff being hauled in, it seriously just makes Christmas depressing. When stores decide that the Halloween stuff and the Christmas stuff can comfortably occupy the same aisle, that just pisses me off. Let me immerse myself in the comforting, candy-coated, red-dyed waters of Halloween before I start having to be reminded that I have no money and barely any job and can’t afford to do jack for my family for Christmas. Let me have a holiday I enjoy before the usual year-ending symphony of not feeling like I’m good enough, okay?
JesusWeen.
I don’t want to turn this into a religious rant, but it’s irritating enough hearing about the non-existent “War on Christmas” every year without having to get Halloween involved in some person’s genuine fear that a person might not be thinking of Jesus every second of every day. Now some people who have no concept of unintentional hilarity are pushing a Jesus version of Halloween which seems to really just be Halloween with Jesus shoved into it.
Dude, my advice would be to let this one go, especially since after decades of listening to you go on and on about razor blades in apples and poison candy and kids being sacrificed to the devil and other things that don’t actually happen on Halloween, you look like humorless alarmists. But if you really can’t be persuaded from this kind of embarrassment, could you at least change the name? “JesusWeen”? Really? Am I supposed to think of the Christian Rock-oriented indie covers band, or what a second-grader would nickname Jesus’ genitals?
And, dear reader, I will leave you with those words: Jesus’ genitals. Happy autumn!
Aaron R. Davis lives in a cave at the bottom of the ocean with his eyes shut tight and his fingers in his ears. You can contact him at samuraifrog@yahoo.com