I regretfully must announce that with October slowly advancing towards November, the onset of fall is undeniably upon us. Let your crop tops and cargo shorts slowly get pushed to the backs of your drawers, never to see the meek light of winter unless March has an accidental hot flash. Fall is the time of harvest, of leaves and of chilly breezes, and it's dreadful. Fall is full of cold rain, the monotonous brown of grass, leaves, and trees, and the following atrocities:
1. Campfires
The smoke always blows in your face no matter where you move, inevitably your hair and clothes will smell like burnt leaves, and someone just "accidentally" wiped their s'more covered fingers on your jacket.
2. Pumpkins
They're all fine and dandy, until you decide to cut them open for jack o lanterns. The slimy seeds are guaranteed to go everywhere, the smell of which barely exceeds the repulsive texture of the pulp.
Even if your pumpkin's guts will stay within itself, you still risk sudden pumpkin liquification some time between halloween and thanksgiving. One night you turn the porch light out to a picture perfect sunset orange pumpkin, and the next morning you wake up to a deflated, greenish grey bowl of mold that will dissolve further if you attempt to move it before it freezes permanently onto your cement stoop.
3. Pumpkin Spice Lattes
Let me be clear, I am a huge fan of coffee. Coffee is something that must be respected and revered, which is why the Pumpkin Spice Latte is a disgrace to the caffeinated beverage. If you wanted to enjoy something with pumpkin and spice, have a slice of pie. If you wanted to enjoy coffee in correlation to pumpkin and spice, drink a cup of coffee with your pumpkin pie. The Pumpkin Spice Latte is a concoction of artificial sweetener and cream with coffee added as an afterthought. Coffee deserves to have the most attention and flavor in a latte, and the Pumpkin Spice Latte would be more properly named "Coffee Tinged Pumpkin Drink".
4. Falling Leaves
Everyone raves about the bright colors on the trees in the fall, but if you live in an inner city of any decent size, you know that all the "oranges, reds, and yellows" are really just polluted variants on brown. Whatever color that may exist in the leaves for a few days is relatively faded by the time the leaves fall to the ground, where they just blow around and clutter up sidewalks and the corners of buildings until some type of precipitation pastes them all together in a clump at the base of the now skeletal trees.
5. Sweaters
Sleeves, fibers, and lint are the three main sweater components that are the absolute worst. Sweaters pick up every little hair and minuscule dust fiber and amplifies them, rolling them into little fabric "pills" that refuse to come off of your sweater without taking a small tweezerful of sweater fiber too. Every single one of the sweaters that I have bought that looks cute has been unbearably scratchy, and if you have found a sweater that is the right softness, it is undoubtably lacking in some other way. Last but not least, sleeves on sweaters are the worst because of their inability to stay up when you desperately need them to. I have been burned far too many times by a sweater sleeve slipping into the stream of water while I am washing my hands, resulting in six inches of wet sleeve and a days worth of damp wrist stamps on every paper I must interact with.
6. Boots and Rain Boots
Constricting, heavy, clunky, and perpetually scuffed, boots make the list because of their inability to feel as cute as they look. Climbing stairs with a decent pair of warm fall boots on means hauling an extra two pounds of rubber and leather up and down ten plus feet into the air. Furthermore, as durable as they look, they never really are quite as "water resistant" as they claim to be. Which is where rain boots come into play. Rain boots, while allowing the freedom to splash in puddles, also keep water from leaving your feet, resulting in smellier, sweatier, stickier shoes.
7. Starry nights
While everyone else is buried in truck beds of blankets and pillows, I am lamenting the fact that it's seven o'clock and dark outside. Fall nights are the worst because they last so much longer than summer, and longer nights mean shorter days, and shorter days means less work gets done. In fall, everything gets cold, and the entire northern hemisphere is working to be entirely more miserable.
Fall is a season that many people appreciate and enjoy but to me it's just the onset of winter, a season where the days are shorter than ever and where seasonal depression resounds in varying degrees. Fall is the dread that comes with the sunset, when even the vibrant colors cannot resolve the twinge of melancholy that a good thing is at its end. Adieu summer, until we meet again. You are my one true love, and I will endure my time away from you with steadfast patience, until spring lulls you into existence once more.
