Run for your life from pumpkin spice

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I have a confession to make. It’s not so much a confession as a fact, but admitting to it this time of year is likely to get me banned for life from the “cool kids” club. Here goes.

I hate pumpkin-flavored anything.

That’s right, I said it. I hate pumpkin flavored anything, you can’t make a stringy gourd sugary enough for me to like it, and I won’t be fooled by the copious amounts of cinnamon and nutmeg, either. Pumpkin flavoring is a filthy lie, and I won’t participate in the madness.

I don’t know who started this business, but I can assure you the first pumpkin ever eaten wasn’t savored with the satisfaction of the person I watched have a conniption in Pilot when she saw the coffee attendant putting out pumpkin spice creamers.

“Are those pumpkin spice? Oh yay! I’ve been waiting for this!”

Since I’m making confessions, I’ll go ahead and say yes, I judged her. To my credit, it was early in the morning, I hadn’t had any coffee, and I hate pumpkin spice, so needless to say my judgment was harsh. I automatically assumed this person probably owned at least one pair of Ugg boots and went to yoga for fun on Saturday mornings. I went on to see her, rejecting whipped cream on her pumpkin pie, like some kind of freak, so she could savor the pumpkin flavor instead of drowning it out with sweet dairy goodness. I know, it gets mean inside my head — it’s a personal fault I freely admit to. (Human being here – work in progress.)

The only way to eat pumpkin pie.The only way to eat pumpkin pie.

The first pumpkin ever eaten was consumed eons ago at Grog and Janelle’s Annual Tar Pit Dinner, where the pumpkin centerpieces were consumed after T-Rex Catering Company failed to show with the mastodon ribs. (Everyone knows you can’t trust T-Rex Catering with mastodon ribs.) The guests became irate, and nothing is worse than hungry cavemen, so a quick-thinking Janelle offered the centerpieces she made herself, complete with aromatic cinnamon sticks, as her main course. Consequently, Grog and Janelle were run out of the stone age social circle, and some very nasty things were pictured about them on the local cave walls.

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That’s more than likely a filthy lie, but no one really knows for sure, so we’ll classify it as possible filthy lie until further notice.

So everyone’s getting all excited about pumpkin-flavored Doritos, but no one’s really mentioned the $100,000 raised for Special Olympics at the Guilty by Association convoy last weekend. I found it incredibly newsworthy that someone would pay $17,200 for the first spot and $11,000 for the second spot. I nearly fainted, and I wasn’t even bidding. The last count I got was 372 trucks in attendance, which smashes the record from last year and set the bar super high for our friends up North next year. And I know how we’ll get CNN to come out – we’ll have a banner made that says, “Pumpkin-flavored Special Olympics Convoy 2016…”

It’ll work, hide and watch.