It's The Most Stenchiful Time Of The Year

I hate autumn.

Yah, sure, I see the flaming quality of the leaves as they transform, the heartrending beauty of the cyclical river of nature as it flows relentlessly through death and rebirth, the majesty of 106,000 drunk crackers crammed into a stadium in Knoxville to puke on the visiting Florida Gators, the timeless and eternal suck of the Washington Redskins, and I am, of course, duly moved, in what I am sure is a very profound and spiritual way.

That's all cultural, even the nature parts (because we pile into the wilderness to go take in the flaming quality, poke dead things with sticks, etc.). I hate the reality of autumn.

It's death. It's decay. It's moist bleakness, which has additive properties to the death and decay. It's fungi and molds and spores and allergies that are, for me, as cavity-pressurizing as any spring produce of tree sex. It's cold, but not cold enough to inhibit the march of dank. It's wet, but in a persistent, clinging, stinking way that doesn't wash away sin and corruption, merely lets it fester and brood and molder.

And it fucking stinks. It smells like shit, because it is, in every sense that matters, shit. Every morning this week I have emerged from the house and encountered a different fucking stench of autumnal decay. Seriously, five different seasonal stenches, ranging from simple manure to baby poop to dog poop to something akin to what the pens under the fucking Colosseum must have smelt like.

No vaguely heart-twanging undertone of wood smoke, no piney holiday comfort, nothing reminiscent of food, at least in its pre-digested state. Just decay. Decay and poop.

For the scientifically inquisitive among you, I checked. It's not me. Nor is it Bam-Bam, who is almost always at my side when I emerge in the morning, because the reason we're emerging at fucking 7 AM every day (the boy is eleven; to get him a sufficient night's sleep, I have to chunk his ass into bed at 8:30 each night, and call him to colors at freaking 6:20 AM, which process involves a lot of squirming and stubborn burrowing/nuzzling, and, non-trivially, the eternal stench of morning breath) is to throw his ass on the bus. Nothing died in my garage, or on my driveway, or in the bushes we provide in front of the house for dirty hippies and other unsavory criminals to lurk in. It's just the smell of my fucking perfectly well-ordered suburban neighborhood and the surrounding minor woods on an autumn morning.

I hear you. "Fuck you, Landru," you say, "Fuck you and your whining, and your sinuses, and your allergies, and your magical sensitivity to odors that didn't originate in your own stupid colon, as if there are any other odors."

Yeah, I hear you, and I'm hard-pressed to disagree. But still.Whatever. Fuck autumn.

Hearkening back: I promised you here, right up top, that I'd report on the outcome of some science I did. I am pleased to report that the stimulus provoked the hoped-for response, eventually. In fact, the named individual told me that the very same staff member who forwarded him a link to that very post was the person who had done up the (allegedly) ball-sucking tags. Hans purported gratitude that he didn't have to be a meanie about the tags, that I had done his dirty work for him; sadly, his minion didn't get it, and Hans was lamenting that he'd have to be a meanie anyway.  Because, y'know, I'm an actual Web professional and shit, and when I say your tags suck balls, your tags suck balls.

Asserted without warranty for my own ball-sucking tags, mind you now.