Fall: Quite Possibly My Favorite Season, for Ridiculous Reasons

Football season is coming, which means Autumn is also on its way. This is one of my favorite times of the year, and I'm sure many people share that same sentiment. Many enjoy this season because of the transitional period that has been made famous because leaves change colors and fall on the ground, forcing children doing community service to gather them up for the elderly. (My parents attempted to raise me Catholic, and I had to be confirmed whether I wanted to or not, and the congregation felt that me raking up leaves for five of my twenty required community service hours would do me a solid as far as getting in God's good graces. At the time I wasn't as brash as I've become, so I went about my business without questioning the authorities that were forcing it on me and raked up some leaves for elderly people, which is insane, because the only elderly people who give a baker's fuck about their lawns hire someone to care for it, which would make it a lot less than a neccessity for us to rake their leaves. So, we were raking leaves for people that didn't give a shit. If I'd had the same attitude then as I did now, I'd probably ask my Sunday school teacher why we had to rake the fucking leaves during the Steelers game while the priests were feasting on spinach dip and alter boys while listening to Myron Cope. Sorry that was such a long parenthetical rant. I dont' think I can do footnotes on here.) Then, sometimes little kids jump in the pile of leaves, scattering them about again and forcing the person who raked them to do it all over again.

Obviously, this isn't why I like fall. I could care less how pretty the colorful leaves are. My mother once suggested that we take a tourist's train ride through Pennsylvania to check out all of the colorfull scenery, and that was--allegedly--the first and last time I showed a woman my left hook.

Truth be told, I don't think football makes it my favorite season either, because I'm a much bigger fan of basketball and spend most of the football season brooding over my home team (the Steelers) decision to continue to pamper and play an overrated fuck with a butt-chin who happens to have a pretty hott sister (Ben Roethlisberger). I used to play football, but was never that great--I was a 2nd string quarterback at one point, so I can compare myself to Matt Sarrassin and Jonathan Moxie--and I still love to watch it, but I don't think it's what makes me love fall. The only sport that can make me fall in love with a season is women's beach volleyball in the summer, which is automatically discounted because I refuse to let a woman's sport be the reason that I love anything except hidden locker room cameras.

So then, logically, I move to my birthday--November 6th in my case, which takes place during the heart of Fall. Some people get really psyched about their birthdays, and I guess this year I kind of am...I'll be turning 21, which is the most epic date of birth anyone can experience--at least in my opinion, but I'm drunk right now, so what does that tell you?--but normally, I don't get too excited. Sometimes, I'm completely irrational, but I think my viewpoints on birthdays are completely understandable: why would you celebrate the day that you were born? You didn't do a fucking thing, really. It's like celebrating winning an Olympic bronze medal because the Polish guy who initially finished third called the judges fat fucks and threw his medal on the ground whilst on the podium, leaving them no choice but to award it to you, the fourth place finisher.

Call me crazy, but shouldn't your mother be the one that celebrates this day? I mean, she did do all of the pushing and went through all of the pain for you to be born on this day, which I hear is pretty painful. Even your dad has more justification to celebrate than you, because he was in on the process and probably cut your umbilical (yeah, I actually spelled that right, I just checked) cord, so he can play a little cameo in the day's celebration. Then they had to put up with your shit for as many years as you've been alive. You shouldn't be getting presents on this day, you should be pouring out some drinks for your parents. So, birthdays are out.

I'll finally get to the point now, which is why I like Autumn: Halloween.

It took me a long time and an in-depth conversation with my friend Bryan to deduce that this is, in fact, the reason I love the season so much. As a younger child, I loved it because you had reason to dress up as someone that you weren't for one day out of the entire year. You could be an FBI agent clad in a Canadian tuxedo that carried a cap gun in a makeshift shoulder holster; you could be a Nascar driver; you could be the serial killer from Scream; you could be a fucking Power Ranger. (I was each one of these in my younger days.) You could even be a character from Sandlot with all of your friends, while one of them dressed as a gigantic dog and chased you around an urban area. (That's what I hope to do this Halloween.)

Oh, and you got free candy for being someone that you weren't. It's the most absurdly rewarding experience a child or adolescent could ever hope for. It was the pinnacle of the year, outdone only by Christmas, when you were celebrating someone else's birthday. That would be Jesus', which I guess is kind of acceptable because his birthday is different. His mother still went through labor and everything, I guess, but he was a miracle. That's way off point.

Then, as you got older, it was the one night when pointless and narcissistic vandalism was socially acceptable. You could throw eggs at the houses of the people who gave out carrot sticks and popcorn balls as treats, and on this night they were the evil miscreants who were to blame, not the kids plastering their siding with yolk.

Then, as you got to late high school and a college stage, and even into adulthood, there became another reason to love the holiday, which is why I love it so dearly now: Seemingly normal and non-promiscuous women were able to dress as complete and fantastic sluts, and it was socially acceptable.

Now, you might think that this is a terribly perverted and uncalled for reason to love any of the four seasons, but I don't think I'm alone on this. In college, dudes look forward to Halloween and put a lot of thought into what they'll dress as. So do women. They decide to dress as prostitutes thinly veiled as nurses, Catholic schoolgirls, secretaries (or sexcretaries, I coined that), ets. You get to party like a fucking mad person on Halloween, regardless of the day it takes place on in the week.

I was very skeptical about acknowledging my love for the holiday and Fall based on this simple matter, but during my freshman year it was proven to me clandestinely, and I didn't even notice it until years later. Initially, in college, I played basketball. We started practice on October 12th, and the worst experience of my life went on through the night of Halloween. The day following, we had a 6 am walkthrough, which consisted of my sadistic coach making us run around like fucking idiots before our 8 am class. And some people say that Halloween is the devil's day and is sacriigeous. I'm forever indebted to the Halloween of 2006 for convincing me that I loved viewing seemingly normal women dressed as pornstars and also convincing me to question certain religions that seemed hell-bent on extracting fun from the lives of teenagers. Shortly after missing any Halloween hedonism because I was asleep at 11 p.m. and dreading my early wake-up call from an inexplicable douchebag of a man, I quit the sport I'd loved for most of my life. I'd matured into a man that hated extremely unneccessary physical exertion and loved seeing women in short plaid skirts and tube socks. I've yet to look back.

Halloween gives young men hope. They see the girls that they have crushes on strutting about inches away from indescent exposure, and they feel that they may have a chance. They catch a glimpse of the inner sex kitten that encapsulates the minds of young women coming into their own. Regardless of how they act on the other 364 days of the year, guys can see that girls really want to let loose, and probably would if it wasn't for the whole slut/manwhore double standard, which will hopefully someday be miscredited by a fucking holiday that is really otherwise meaningless (except for the candy, toilet papering and mailbox bashing, of course). They get the feeling that they can somehow find that pseudo-slut that is hiding somewhere in most normal girls, and it is an undeniably beautiful thing. They know that these women are just like them in the way that they wouldn't dress up like Marilyn Monroe if some part of them didn't actually want to act like a chick that would bone a married United States President. Just like I wouldn't spend sixty dollars on a pair of PF Flyers and dress like Benny "The Jet" Rodriguez if some part of me didn't want to steal an autographed baseball from a blind man or steal homebase in adult hood after I grew a masterful mustache.

It goes both ways, too. For every normal and prudinistic (I'm fairly sure I just made that word up) woman, there is a contradiction. There are girls who embrace promiscuity year round, and are not afraid to show it. They show plenty of leg at any party they go to, and won't hesitate to wear a skirt with leggings--a weakness of mine--to a first-year seminar class. If you're out on Halloween and you're not feeling philosophical or daydreaming about what these one-day-a-year-skin-showers might be like if you got them into your dormitory shower, take this advice: the women that aren't scantily clad on Halloween are more often than not the ones that are extremely scantily clad the rest of the year. They're the ones that dress like they're looking to get paid to perform fellatio after Easter mass. These are the women who are not inclined to tease you, because they can do that with the rest of their year's wardrobe.

So, Halloween is a time when you can (usually) very easily tell the kind of person that someone is, and it's the one day in the year that effectively removes the gray area of wonderment that boys torment themselves over every other day. This is why I like Halloween.

And, this is why I love Fall.