Like any red-blooded Midwesterner, who both despises and excels at producing buckets of sweat, I love-love-love it when summer ends. And in this magazine, every fall, I write a love letter to the season, blatantly gushing like a dorky, non-self-aware 13-year-old boy confessing his dorky love for Angie Schultz in front of the whole dang class, embarrassing everyone within a 100-foot radius.

    So be it. I like fall. Most of you probably like it, too. However, as all this autumn love swirls around us, let’s mix it up a little. Let’s go crazy. Let’s get nuts, man. Let’s turn this season on its ear and find something to complain about – because we can. Autumn’s gotten enough good press over the past few thousand years, agreed? Good.

    OK, now I’m gonna break down the hate into bitter, bite-sized chunks. Here’s what’s not to like:

The Friggin’ Sun
    How about a little astrology lesson? Once a year, the earth’s rotation and position in relation to the sun is dramatically altered by invisible space giants. We don’t know where they came from, but they were probably accidentally unleashed by ancient sorcerers. Their sole purpose is to annoy living crap out of people in our part of the world every autumn by positioning the earth at the perfect angle to make the sun shine right into our friggin’ eyes as we’re trying to drive a car somewhere.

     If you’re like me (and why wouldn’t you be?), your neglected car windshield has spent the summer collecting an appalling amount of insect splatter. So as this menacing sunlight blasts upon the glass, your view magically changes from tolerably transparent to bright white and opaque, all but ensuring a huge vehicular collision.

     Thanks, invisible space giants. Thanks, fall. You guys suck.

The Friggin’ Leaves
    Yes, yes, the leaves are spectacular and gorgeous. And yes, leaping gaily into a giant heap of crispy, fallen foliage is almost worth the effort of raking it all up into said giant heap. But once the sightseeing and pile-plunging is over, someone’s gotta clean it up, and that someone is me. What the hell am I supposed to do with all these leaves? My compost bin can’t take it. I’m out of plastic garbage bags. I don’t live next to an empty lot. I don’t have a trailer. I’m stuck with them. Thanks, trees. You suck. Why can’t you bee more like your brother, the mighty pine?

    Plus, it’s not like those leaf piles are all that much fun, anyway. Half the time, you end up jumping onto a lump of dog poop, a rock, a sharp stick, or a dead and half-decayed squirrel. If you do manage to miss all those landmines, a few minutes of frolicking converts all those dead leaves into little pieces of dead leaves which then get stuck in your underwear. No thanks.