Okay, autumn. It’s almost October. I’ve always considered you my favorite season, but enough with the David Chase routine — let’s get on with it. I want to see red and yellow leaves. I want to feel a chilly breeze sneaking into the sleeve of my jean jacket. The postseason starts tomorrow. Hurry up and get here. Quit stringing me along.

I need pants weather over here, and I need it pronto. I don’t think I can bring myself to wear shorts for even one more day; I have gotten so thoroughly sick of all my pairs of shorts that I can’t even begin to tell you. Every summer, I start out with seven or eight suitable pairs of shorts, and by August, five or six of the original pairs have dropped out of the race for whatever reason — the pockets spill change out every time I sit down, or it has a weird waistband, or I can’t sit cross-legged without giving the world a front-row seat to my underpants and prompting my grandmother to look up from knitting in front of Days Of Our Lives out there in the great beyond and grouse that “a lady does not sit Indian-style, Sarah, for heaven’s sake” — and only two pairs remain, shapeless from endless washing and wearing, and I hate the very sight of them in the morning, and no, I can’t just “wear a skirt instead,” because if I wear a skirt, I won’t have any pockets, because it is inconceivable to the fashion industry that a female might not want to spend an eon digging through her bag for money or smokes instead of simply reaching into a pocket, like, God forbid we waste three square inches of valuable fabric on a measure of convenience, and I might also add that choosing to wear a skirt does not circumvent the need for me to shave my legs, and I do not want to shave my legs anymore, not because I hate doing it that much per se but because my knees simply refuse to get with the program, and right now one of my knees looks like Robert De Niro in Rocky & Bullwinkle and the other looks Sonic The Hedgehog by way of Evil Dead II, and I have tried every razor and every shaving cream and every possible directional vector, up to and including scraping all the flesh from my kneecap, only to find on the gleaming ivory surface of my patella a sprinkling of four or five stubbly hairs that will! Not! Leave! WILL NOT! So, yeah. I crave corduroys.

I crave corduroys, and I crave not giving a second thought to my toenail polish for the next six to eight months. Either a cat hair gets stuck in one of my big toes and ruins the effect or I do a flawless job but then stub my toe to bleeding five minutes later, but either way, I’ve had it. All my sandals have had it right along with me. We’ve got straps coming off, we’ve got stinky heels that smell like cooked hair, we’ve got worn-down soles, and we just want to lie down in the back of the closet until next April and rest. Bring on the thick-socks-and-knee-boots-with-a-mini weather.

And let me put away my t-shirts. Please. I beg of you. My t-shirts have all gotten baggy and saggy and floppy and pilly, and unless I plan to appear on COPS, where a t-shirt with a stretched-out neck and no apparent shape is wardrobe staple, I’d like to go back to hoodies and turtlenecks, thanks. I can pull a turtleneck up over my double chin and pretend I have a swan-like neck. I can pull it up over my entire face in the event that something stinks. I like that flexibility. I like layering. I like boots. And I just bought a bunch of new fall clothes, and when I buy new clothes, various compulsions which I’d rather not go into right now require me to wear said new clothes immediately, except that I can’t right wear any of my new clothes right now because it’s still too warm, so there’s a really cute charcoal-heather cardigan hanging in my closet right now that has super-long sleeves and will look insanely good with my new pair of black boot-cut pants with the racing stripe, and who’s getting any good out of it? The cats. The cats discovered a few nights ago that one of the super-long sleeves of the charcoal-heather cardigan doubles as a nifty ladder to the top of the closet, the better for them to get stuck up there and whine for help, then gurgle all pissily and pedal their back feet when I help them down. Lather, rinse, repeat. My charcoal-heather cardigan has seven hundred and sixteen pulls in it already, and I’d love to wear it even once before a certain pudgy feline with an unquenchable thirst for spelunking stretches the left sleeve out to scarf length, if you don’t mind.

But one of the reasons I love you, autumn, is your myriad favorable effects on the cats. When you arrive, they puff up with fur instead of shedding it, which makes them cuter and fluffier as well as cutting down on my vacuuming time. At the moment, though, it’s warm during the day and sort of an indecisive temperature at night, so they puff up and shed and puff up and shed and puff up and shed and all three of us live in the eye of a dandercane right now, so send the temperature down and leave it there, because following the cats around with the Dustbuster is amusing, but only for a couple of hours. Plus, when the temperature goes down, I can finally sleep. When it’s hot, or warm, or warm-ish, or “not cold” in any way, the cats roam around the apartment at night, stalking invisible bugs and knocking things over and feline-death-raying me from the bedside table and getting all complainy and bored, and I spend the night yelling at the cats, threatening to throw things at the cats, stuffing the cats into the bathroom, letting the cats out of the bathroom, showing the cats that they have kibble, drugging the cats with catnip, feigning enthusiasm for cat toys at four in the morning, attempting to psych the cats out by lying down on the couch, and not getting much rest at all.

But when it’s cold, I get into bed, the cats suction themselves to my legs, and the whole family gets a functional eight hours, so let’s have a cold snap, because if I can’t sleep, I’ll have to while away the nighttime hours somehow, and if I don’t feel like reading or watching TV, I’ll have no choice but to work on tiny little Halloween costumes for said cats, and I don’t know if seasons have pets and whatnot, but if you do, and if you have cats, and if you have ever tried to Scotch-tape black construction paper shapes onto an already somewhat hostile orange cat and then stuff him into a harness in the service of taking him out trick-or-treating dressed as a jack-o’-lantern, you will understand that the likelihood of my bleeding to death is great indeed, and if you think that’s bad, just wait until I have to explain to Little Joe that he’ll have to go as the red M&M again this year because all the stores have sold out of the adorable little Mike Wazowski outfit from Monsters, Inc. that he had his heart set on. I mean, do you want that on your conscience — a disappointed red M&M with a tail and multiple transfusions? I don’t think so. Frost that pumpkin, buddy.

What’s that? You say you’ve already instructed the stores to carry Halloween candy? But Halloween is nearly a month from n– daaaaaaamn. I don’t think I’ve ever seen that many Goldenberg’s Peanut Chews in one place. I used to live on Goldenberg’s and Diet Cherry Coke while writing papers in college, but I paid a price for a craving so specific, because either the vending machines in the basement wouldn’t have any Goldenberg’s because nobody in the world liked them except me, or The Lip would have beaten me to the last DCC earlier in the week, so I’d have to undertake a barefoot dorm-to-dorm recon and hope I didn’t run into any boys I liked with my hair in paper-clipped pigtails and no bra on. A whole bag of Goldenberg’s, acquired without a midnight raid on 1940 Hall? It’s almost too good to be tr– ew, they still make Sugar Babies? I can’t believe, with all the suing of fast-food companies going on, that nobody has filed a class action for lost fillings. And excuse me, but I think the Sugar Daddy is well overdue for a name change, because, well, yuck. I mean, kids eat those. It’s gooey, it’s phallic…I don’t know. Oh, hello, tiny little Snickers. And hello to you, forty-six more tiny little Snickerses whose calories don’t count because they come in such adorable form.

So, yeah. It’s time for you to arrive, autumn. It’s time for me to rotate the clothing. It’s time for me to write “get on couch with book, arrange blanket over legs, arrange legs around cats, and doze off” in every Sunday box on the calendar between now and March. It’s time for ALCS histrionics on FOX. And most of all, it’s time for homecoming — specifically, the homecoming of the gingerbread latte at Starbucks. I love the gingerbread latte at Starbucks. I want to marry the gingerbread latte at Starbucks and make an honest coffee out of it. The gingerbread latte at Starbucks is better than crack. It’s so much better than crack that even crack itself is like, “Hey, I’m just crack. That shit is caffeinated crack — with whipped cream on it. Game over, man.”

Anyway. I can’t wait to see you again, autumn. I’ve got a bitchin’ new pair of clogs with fleece linings, a big-ass bag of candy, and two short but capable assistants standing by for my series of “Static: The Crackly Killer” experiments, so, you know, any old time is good for me. Drop by whenever. I’ll wait.

September 30, 2002

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