Tim Chitwood: Lighten up as another year drifts away

A lot of people get excited about fall, with football and school festivities and Halloween-Thanksgiving-Black Friday, which together seem like one long holiday now.

But it bums me out when the days shorten and the weather turns cold, because it means another year's down the flusher.

To me we have only three seasons, summer, bummer and spring. Fall and winter blur together.

This is not to say I get the "holiday blues," a concept that has become a popular custom in the news business, where we do annual reports on people who get depressed during the holidays.

I've heard these stories so many times I now add sarcastic advice like "You people need to lighten up! You're RUINING Christmas for everyone else!"

And you know that bit about more people committing suicide during the holidays is bull, right? We used to perpetuate that. It's not true, but if people believe that and you tell them it's not true, it bums them out. Still, statistics show suicides are lowest in December and pick up during the spring and fall.

I've found one way to fight the autumn blues is to get out on these crisp fall weekends and experience local culture.

For example, I was driving down First Avenue's left lane the other day when someone pulling out from a parking space on the right drifted from the right lane down the middle of the road and then slowly slid left, across the lane in front of me, to make a U-turn around the median.

At no point in this Lincoln Continental drift did the driver signal a turn.

In days gone by, I would have laid on my horn and shouted obscenities.

But many autumns since have passed, and I have learned in my autumn years that if you want someone to get out of your way, making noise doesn't help. Sometimes it so startles oblivious motorists that they just stop, blocking the road, as if they're in shock and thinking, "OMG! I had NO IDEA other cars were using this busy street!"

Plus you never know who's packing heat, these days when people are so paranoid about public shootings they're all taking their guns out in public. Sometimes the only way to stop a good guy with a gun is to honk your horn and shout obscenities at him.

Heck, Georgia may have a law allowing shooting for that. ("He called me a@er, your honor!" "Oh! Well in that case you CAN shoot him, under Georgia's 'Needed Shooting' law. Case dismissed!")

Still you have to wonder who just pulls out in front of other cars like that. And what's with driving down the middle of two one-way lanes? Are muscle trucks and Crown Vics too wide for one lane? Do they drive that way in Atlanta?

So get out and enjoy this brisk, invigorating fall weather, else you may never have such thoughts to keep your mind off the melancholy prospect of shorter days and cold nights, as autumn drifts toward winter like a clueless driver on a one-way street.

Tim Chitwood, tchitwood@ledger-enquirer.com, 706-571-8508.

This story was originally published October 18, 2015 at 9:17 PM with the headline "Tim Chitwood: Lighten up as another year drifts away ."