Or maybe it's just that I'm completely indifferent verging on hostile toward fall stuff that other people seem to enjoy, like football (literally couldn't care less. It wouldn't bother me in the least if football and everyone who played it disappeared into a black hole tomorrow), colored leaves (I like flowers better, and you don't have to rake them), and pumpkin flavored everything. Blech.
I will admit to liking tweed. I like tweed a lot. However, I'd give it up in a minute for the non-necessity of wearing it.
Times like these, when autumn raises its withered hand over the Midwest and starts killing everything that I will drive my sleek European roadster down to the riverfront, get out, and stare down at the Mighty Mississippi churning its way inexorably south, and I think to myself, "You know, if I just sailed down it, eventually, I'd hit the Gulf of Mexico. Where it's warm. And if I kept going, eventually I'd hit the Caribbean. Which is a little less oily."
Such thoughts put me in mind of my great-great-great-great-granduncle, Gideon DuBuchet "Ol' River-Rat-Mustache" Palmer, the famed Mississippi River Pirate. Ol' River-Rat-Mustache prowled the Big Muddy in his trusty pirogue (by sheerest coincidence, also named the "Raconteur," just like my luxurious 180-ft yacht today) with his equally larcenous sidekick Osage Phil, looking for plunder. Or booty, if you prefer. Whichever.
Ol' River-Rat-Mustache wasn't a particularly successful pirate. Nor a politically correct one. In his declining years in the Old River-Pirates' Home, he bored his fellow retirees to tears with endless repetitions of the same story of his biggest haul: "D'I'ver tell you fellers 'bout the time me 'n' Phil took six silver dollars offa two half-breed Choctaws in Natchez?"
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