The Weekly Meat

The Top Five Things About Fall

Baseball games that matter

After an interminably long season, finally, we are reminded what makes this sport great; what makes Ken Burns, and Bob Costas, and — admit it, you — weepy. The moments, the strategy, the splendor, the history, the national pastime: small-ball; Dave Roberts' steal, the bloody sock, taking four straight from the Yankees; the cold; the midges in Cleveland. The epic walk-offs.

And if your team is not playing baseball in October, there's always October hockey.

Leaves

Yes, the foliage, the color. The Crayola oranges and yellows, ambers and rubies; sure. But the smell of fall is what gets me. And the smell is of the turning leaves as they drop from the trees, as they dry up and crunch under foot, as they are raked into piles. And, of course, as those piles are dispersed by ecstatic toddlers.

The smell of leaves is the smell of outdoors. The smell of life itself.

New beginnings

Sure, spring has the greenery and the seedlings and the rebirth of Jesus and all that. But I was born right in the wheelhouse of fall, and I spent no less than 20 years going to school, and taught for another five, so my internal clock — and most everyone's — is well-honed to the yearly start of a new schedule each September.

Had the same job for nearly 10 years, like me? So find your new beginnings where you can — like on cable TV.

Cooking

We don't have central air conditioning in our house, so we do very little stovetop cooking during the heat of summer, and none in the oven. When fall rolls around, we fire it up once again and put on pots of slow cooked soups and stews and chilis, sauces and braises; put together some butternut squash or pumpkin ravioli; crank up the oven to max and make pizza.

We begin, once again, to cook and eat like we mean it. Oh, indeed.

Sleeping

Summer is great for shorts and flip-flops, but it sucks for sleeping. You're either too hot without the air conditioning on, or too cold with it on. Fall marks the return to cold noses, warm covers, and easy funching.

In New England, there's a saying: "Stick to your flannels till your flannels stick to you." Truer words were never spoken. The first night with the flannel sheets on the bed is like sleeping with a warm cup of coffee.

Traveling...

Decidedly vegetarian excuse, I know. More Meat to come, shortly.

Hyperbolic Chamber

I've written before about how we in the U.S. are overly concerned with being number one. Well, our preoccupation has not gone away, and part and parcel with it — honestly, I don't know if it's the symptom or the result — is that we live in an increasingly narrow world of hyperbole, both of language and of thought. And the further we descend into it, the more difficult it becomes to find our way out.

Our current economic crisis, you have surely heard, is the worst "since the Great Depression" (a phrase that nets no fewer than 21.4 million hits on Google). The H1N1 "swine" flu concern is comparable to catastrophic global pandemic of 1918, as opposed to the more recent Kohoutek-like non-event that was SARS. In politics, those on the far right and left are "Nazis," and healthcare for the uninsured (but somehow, not for the elderly) is "Socialism." Possibly even "Marxism!"

All of this, because it's easier to use linguistic clichés, apply pat labels, and to create simple (blue state/red state, say) polarities than it is to actually contemplate the once-fertile middle ground in which thoughtful, earnest debate can result in successful compromise.

The heart of this problem lies not in politics though, but in culture — where our endless affair with TV gives us the Biggest Loser and the Deadliest Catch, as well as Dirty Jobs and Man vs. Food (two shows in which the "est" is simply implied). And even National Geographic weighs in with the World's Toughest Fixes and the Discovery Channel with the Toughest Race on Earth and Build It Bigger.

With everyone using the exaggerator's suffix so freely, superlatives have become as devalued as the ubiquitous giving of "110 percent." And, face it, that whole 110% rhetorical idiocy is just the un-satirical sports equivalent of a guitar amp that goes to 11.

It's not just about the words. Watch any SportsCenter and you can see why steroids are here to stay: we want hyperbolic athletic performance. We want massive performance-enhancing-drug–fueled home runs, concussion-inducing hockey and football hits, backboard-shattering dunks. We want to see epic bloody sock performances, and expect them once a week. And we want to believe that a skinny cancer survivor can win a grueling three-week-long bicycle race seven times in a row without doping.

Please. Spare me.

Have we really gotten to the point where we find the merely different or difficult so banal that we indeed require all of the extremity we are so willingly fed? From extreme sports to extreme food, architecture, makeovers — you name it — we have indeed. Because we like to think ourselves more exciting than we actually are. More capable of perfection. And what could be more perfectly exciting than the hyper-realism of TV. What, I ask you?

The weather?

Well, yes, occasionally. At least on TV. Once the awkward fall-back conversation piece of introverts and strangers, weather now commands a disturbingly large percentage of our newscasts, its own cable networks, and our post-Katrina attention. Sure, I can buy that global warming is causing more frequent weather "events," but to label and overstate them as "extreme" is to miss the point of weather itself, which we should know by now, humans cannot control. So we throw hyperbole at Mother Nature rather than admit our own smallness in the face of natural events such as hurricanes and tornadoes.

And, secretly, we love it. We have become addicted to life in high definition, to über-everything, where all is categorized and exaggerated as the best and the worst, the biggest and the greatest (yes, admittedly, this Weekly Meat post follows on the heels of my "Top Five Punk Albums of All Time"). We need to just get over ourselves and our fascination with perfection, the biggest, the best, and the end-all. For if we do not — those prone to hyperbole might say — we will all surely perish in a shit-storm of fire and brimstone.

I can see the redundantly-named TV show now: The World's Deadliest Hyperbolic Hell-Deaths!