The Fall of Summer

 I love Fall. I always have. These are the things I love about Fall.

1. Thinking about apple-picking (but not actually doing it)
2. Little pumpkins
3. Eating DiGiorno

4. Fall-scented candles

5. People bitchin' about Columbus Day on Facebook
6. The neighbor's lawn decorations down the street
7. Slasher movie marathons
8. Daylight Savings Time

9. Little turkey cookies

10. Taking Black Friday off from work

And the list goes on...

People may think my love of Autumn is weird. After all, Autumn is when the leaves fall from the trees and everything starts to die. Autumn reminds me of the Fall of Paradise, which some may think is a bad thing, but I think is a good thing. Cos’ Paradise was a lie.

Plus, I've always been a bit Emo.

More Bad Thoughts on a Monday Morning

I need to be more pessimistic.  Maybe then things will work out.

I find that the more I fear something will happen, the less likely it is that it will.  There seems to be this direct correlation between negative energy and positive outcomes for me.  The last time I really dreaded something, it didn’t happen.  It almost did, but there was some lame-ass excuse for why it didn‘t.  And I got this peaceful feeling as though I’d just dodged a bullet.  I thanked God for my negative thinking and my pessimistic approach to life.  And I thanked God for lame-ass excuses.

My mother once said to me, “Usually your greatest fears never come true.”

I think what she means is that I need to have bad thoughts more often.

I Unsubscribed To a Girl on Facebook the Other Day

*Here is a fictional piece I just wrote that seems to fit in with the mood of my blog.  I used characters from my interconnected short story collection which I've been working on for the past few years.*


I unsubscribed to a girl on Facebook the other day. She was posting statuses I didn’t like --- talking about the upcoming weekend and how much fun she was gonna have. Screw that! I don’t need to read that shit!

I feel like I should give a little bit of history here so that you’ll fully appreciate exactly what it was that this so-called woman did that really cramped my style.

We met through a mutual friend.  Let me clarify.  This mutual friend was actually the unrequited love of my life.  He and I had grown up in the same town and gone to high school together.  We'd dated off and on for two years.  This girl was some chick he'd just met at the video store where he worked.  Apparently she was a valued customer.  How nice!

She was the one who added me on Facebook.  I didn't want to be rude. 


And then, a few days after we met, she had to go and post this as her status update.

“I can’t wait till Saturday night. Saturday night is gonna be so much fun ;) !!!

I get this awful feeling in the pit of my stomach. 

Could it be?  No.  No way.  I laugh to myself when I think about how disappointed this girl is gonna be when she finds out what my ex-boyfriend is really like.  In fact, he's probably already dumped her ass.  I'm clearly being paranoid.

Yet the bad feeling stays.

I wait for her Facebook updates so that I can ease my mind of this crushing fear and innate knowledge that something is very much indeed rotten in the state of Denmark. Maybe she’ll finally come out and admit that the exciting time she is so looking forward to is some got-damned barbeque at her aging grandfather’s house. Maybe he’s serving up her favorite dish special --- pigs in a blanket.
Anyway, I don’t get my wish.  Instead, on 1 am on Sunday morning, she posts only this:

☺

I snap.   Oh no, you didn't.  Bitch is going down!

I click on the right hand corner of the post and select “unsubscribe.” I am asked if this is what I really want to do. I click “yes.”

Her post mercifully slinks back into the Facebook Hell she crawled out of.

I am free.

Relief washes over me.

Good, I think.  That's done.


A week goes by and because I’m am such a weak-willed loser, I go to her profile to see what that silly little girl has been up to these days.

This is her most recent post.

Can’t wait till Saturday! 

My God, this woman is incorrigible. She must be some kind of sex machine, geared up to go off on the weekends.

I rant about it to my best friend over the phone the next day. I relate back the whole sordid tale.

“And on Sunday morning, she posted a smiley face,” I said.

My friend is silent for a moment.  “What kind of woman is she?” she finally says.

I agree. What kind of woman is she?

Sending Kids To Camp --- One Dollar At A Time

Today I sent even more kids to camp.  That's nice.  I always like to do my share for the children of the world.  There's so much pain and suffering out there.  I know I don't much enjoy being around the little urchins myself, but they deserve to have fun and they were meant to frolic.

But even more importantly, it gets them off the street.

I hate summer.  Everyone's up to no good.  Children are out riding their bikes through busy intersections at midnight as if they don't have a care in the world.  And why should they?  They don't have to get up for school the next morning.  It's summer.

There's those damned tourists flocking to Maine so that they can flood the highway, deplete our gift shops and eat some lobstah.  Who the hell says "lobstah"?  I've lived in Maine my whole life, and I don't talk like that. 

I want it to be fall already.  When you get to be my age, it's not like there's any real difference between the summer and winter anyway.  In the winter, you have snow.  In the summer, you have construction.  Either way, you can barely make it out of your driveway in the morning. 

I want it to be fall so that the kids will be in school and I can feel righteous anger when I see them in the food court at 11:00 in the a.m, as if I caught them doing something illegal.  It really cramps my style seeing them wandering the mall at all hours, as if to rub it in my face that they have nothing better to do than waste precious hours of their lives roaming the halls of Corporate America.  As if they're saying to me, "Why are you so ticked off?   It's suuuuuuummmmmmmer." 

So yeah, you want to know if I'll donate a dollar to send more kids to camp?  Darn right I will.  Send them all to camp.  I hope they're forced to play lots and lots of archery---the most useless sport in the world---and make bird feeders out of popsicle sticks.  And I hope when they go home, the birds all shun their feeders.  I hope the birds all say, "What the hell is this? You expect me to eat my food out of this?" 

And I hope they cry.