It’s surprisingly easy to get people to jump off of a cliff these days. No one went over kicking and screaming. Everyone was surprisingly calm. Naturally, there was a little screaming, but that sort of thing happens no matter how willing you are. It’s like when you’re popping a balloon, and you know it’s going to happen, but it still gives you a little fright. Personally, I find that to be unbearable.
I don’ very much care for people. It’s nothing personal. I don’t specifically dislike anyone. I just have an inherent distrust for people of all ages, creeds, heights, weights, and hat sizes. You could be the virtuous bastard lovechild of Gandhi, St. Peter, and Mother Teresa, and I still wouldn’t trust you as far as I could throw you. I’ve got very little upper-body strength, so that wouldn’t be very far.
Pretty soon we’ll be restricted to trying to run sleds into trees and driving fast on black ice to get our kicks. All the girls will be wearing clothes and sneezing on you. Summer’s over. We’ll be able to amuse ourselves for a while by fashioning snowmen in pornographic poses, and throwing snowballs at cars, but it’s much harder to light the fuses on your home-brew explosives when you’re drunk and wearing mittens, instead of just drunk like in the summer.
Well, look on the bright side: when the ice on the pond gets to be 1/8″ thick, we can go skating at night.
In the city, the birds are changing color and falling out of the trees. Out on the striped lawns, third-stringers are committing holding penalties away from the play. The fellows that fill the potholes with crumbled feta cheese, dyed black, are fixing to hang the plows on their DPW trucks in order to install another whole season’s-worth of potholes. Best head on out to whatever viaduct or weir or dam or sluice or mud puddle you’ve got handy and give it one more go. You’ll be playing pond hockey on it all soon enough.