Ain't no cure for the wintertime blues

I took Lucky for a walk the other night and I noticed a chill in the air, a little bit of fall nipping at my nose, with leaves turning beautiful colors and pumpkins on doorsteps and the sky a smogless blue, the way it gets at only this time of year.

It made me want to throw up. Because you know what fall means? It means winter is coming.

The walk itself was okay, other than the foreboding coolness in the air. Lucky was in fine form - she peed on three mailboxes, took a crap in an overgrown yard and got into a fight with a yappy furball that looked like Don King’s hair. All in all, just your average half-hour with Lucky.

Lucky doesn’t mind the impending cold, as she has a natural sweater, and a big new pile of hay out back that she likes to burrow down in. And of course when it gets cold in the evenings, she’ll come inside to snore and fart all night, for our amusement.

People say stupid stuff like, “I like having different seasons.” Well, I do too, and here are the two seasons I like – early summer and late summer. There’s your seasons, right there.

Some folks enjoy seeing the leaves on trees turning brilliant colors in the fall, and that’s great, except that means they’re about to fall off. I have about 15 trees in my yard, so I’m raking and bagging leaves from Halloween to Thanksgiving. I’m thinking of cutting them all down and replacing them with artificial trees. Might look right nice.

And next weekend, of course, we’re going to turn our clocks back, so it will get dark even earlier. This is not a good idea. I say we turn them forward again, and give us an extra hour of daylight, not one less. Let’s keep doing this until it stays daylight until midnight. Who cares that it will be dark until around noon? I’m not a morning person anyway.

This was bad planning, by the way, on God’s part, to give us less daylight when it’s colder. It’s like he thought, well, they won’t be depressed enough by the freezing cold and all the dead trees and the grey skies. Let me turn out the world’s lightswitch at about 5:30.

(In case God is reading this, I didn’t mean it as a criticism. I’m just funnin’, I swear. I would never imply that you didn’t know what you were doing when you were creating everything, and I would not dare to question it. Though I would like an explanation as to why you created a few things, like fire ants and PMS and the University of Florida).

I suppose that since I live in Georgia, I can’t complain about winter too much, since ours is fairly mild. We get about a half-inch of snow every year, at which time we all go crazy, and it rarely gets below freezing for more than a few hours. But still, winter is winter, which means it ain’t summer, which means I don’t like it.

Yet even if I had a Moses experience and got to talk to God, I don’t think I’d complain about the winter. He’d probably just tell me to move somewhere warmer. He helps those who help themselves….