I’ve been busy for the past few weeks and my blog has paid the price. Those afternoon naps won’t take themselves. I have decided to break my blog fast with a few seasonal observations, before we get inundated by television commercials that will end up running for the next year. As soon as I finish this, I’m going into hibernation.
Pumpkin Spice
I have no idea who came up with this quaint flavor but starting in the middle September it becomes part of our culture. It is also being offered by every coffee shop, doughnut shop and most restaurants. I’m pretty sure my health provider is offering a pumpkin spice flu shot. Doesn’t it make you think of cool temperatures, trees changing color and the smell of burning leaves. Wait, sorry, that’s our California brush fires. Another seasonal event out here. Damn all that rain we got last winter, which helped fill our reservoirs, raise our water table, gave us a very green spring from all the vegetation and broke our drought. It seems we can’t have anything nice out here in California.
I myself can not partake of pumpkin spice. It gives me terrible heartburn. So does one of my favorite fall desserts, pumpkin pie. My body doesn’t do very good with spices. I will grab my bottle of Tums and have a slice with whip cream, but I have to limit it. Oh my suffering.
Fragrance Commercials
They start appearing on television in mid-September. Whether you like it or not, these commercials for very expensive fragrances are the gateway advertising for the onslaught of Christmas commercials to follow. Eventually the commercials will become more blatant. Before you know it there will be the toy commercials, credit card commercials, imploring you to spend far more money than you truly have, and cars with big bows on them. It will also mean a continuous supply of Hallmark Christmas Movies. They may not look like commercials but it is a devious way for the greeting card giant to get you to buy and send their Christmas cards to unsuspecting family and friends. In return the recipients of these cards feel obliged to send a card and the vicious circle begins. It will extend to the next year and it continues to grow from there, like a cancer. Am I making too much of this?
Political Commercials
I know, I know, the national election is still more than a year away. That’s not stopping some very ambitious and also very unknown Presidential hopefuls from flooding our televisions, and any social media we might be on, with messages of how bad things are and how much better they will make our lives. Honestly, these candidates really don’t have a snowball’s chance in hell to get elected to the highest office in the land. They are obviously running for other reasons, like being appointed a cabinet member, an ambassador to some cushy post overseas or in an effort to sell a book. The story about how they pulled themselves out of the doldrums of being born to wealth and how they overcame that to become even richer. The problem with these political commercials is, they don’t go away. They will spread like a pandemic and ravage the population of this country until it runs its course, well over a year from now. I need to find a pile of soft sand to stick my head into.
Football Season
I’m a Chicago Bears fan. Enough said. I also like flogging myself with a cat of nine tails. What am I going to do until the Superbowl? I guess I can always root for the Packers and Cowboys to lose. I could find a team with promise and follow them for the rest of the season. I could just go into hibernation and come back when pitchers and catchers report to spring training in February. That will give me a month of false expectations for my favorite baseball team. Life is cyclical.
Positive Outlook
Fall is my favorite time of year. It has started to cool off and I like it cool. No more of those 90 to 100 degree days, no more heat stroke, no more paying huge electric bills due to air conditioning and back to long pants. Many people are coming up to me and thanking me for that last one. I thought I had good legs.
I do love fall and most of the things that come with it, except for four things I listed at the beginning of this column…and no, I am not a curmudgeon. Just observant.
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