What joy. There’s football on TV, on the radio and all over the newspapers. The kids are back in school and the long, yellow buses roll the streets.

Families with sweaters knotted at their throats are out picking apples and you can even spot fattening pumpkins if you look in the right places.

The days are comfortable and the nights, downright chilly. The sun sets by 7 p.m. and there’s bound to be a frost in the next night or two. You can smell wood smoke at night and some over-achieving trees are already trading in green for reds and yellows.

Autumnal offerings are already in the stores — dried corn husks to hang on your door and straw scarecrows you can prop in your yard to scare away — I don’t know, really; cowardly birds, or something. Christmas decorations will be up before you know it and various nuts will be roasting on various open fires.

Oh joy, oh bliss. Now pardon me while I weep, vomit and scream all in one great convulsive act of seasonal rebellion.

I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking I go through this every year, mourning the loss of summer while whining like a child about the approach of the bad season. And you’re right. I do. Thanks for noticing.
But prepare yourself, winter-lover.

The Blizzard of Mark is fitting to be twice as long and five times as long as normal this year. Because while my grief is always great when summer bows away, what has traditionally been simple despair will transform itself quickly into heartbreak.

When summer ends, I always miss the long days, the hot nights and beach sand that will actually cause first-degree burns to the feet. I miss shorts and bare feet, the smell of mown grass and the buzz of those freaky bugs on really hot days. What the hell are those things, anyway, and why can’t we harness them for electricity?

I miss baseball, even though I’m a Royals fan and what the Royals engaged in this summer can’t technically be referred to as baseball. It was baseball-ish, but more like some mutant sandlot game played by children whose parents couldn’t afford gloves, bats or talent.

I miss felons hanging around on street corners and hookers taking the occasional break from Craigslist to actually walk the strip. I miss the cacophony of frogs and night birds away from downtown and the clamor of street fights in the middle of it.

Ah, summer. So much to love and so many things to long for when it’s gone. And come September, you will always hear that damnable song on the radio or on the iPod of Suck.

“Morning found us calmly unaware/
Noon burned gold into our hair/
At night, we swam the laughing sea/
When summer’s gone … Where will we be?”

It’s the Doors and if Morrison weren’t already dead, I’d kick him right in the Mojo Risin.’

But I’ve told you all of this before. And every fall, you four-season-appreciating freaks go on about the splendor of foliage (The fauna is dying! How pretty!) the peace of the holidays (I don’t have a penny left to my name but at least my annoying relatives are here!) the thrill of the ski slopes (It’s freezing cold but at least I’m moving really fast and I’ll probably break my butt bone!) and a load of similar frost-bitten garbage that makes me silently wish a polar bear would fall in love with you and carry you back to the Arctic to bear its children.

But this year, prepare the Thorazine cocktail and four-point restraints because this summer, I fell in love. It was a love consummated through 5,000-plus miles of back roads, trails and a variety of mud and filth too nasty to describe. A thousand beaches and a million campfires could not provide the same level of bliss I’ve had with the Suzuki DR650.

True love, indeed. But the turn of the season will require that I trudge my love into the basement and cover it with a tarp. A tarp! Can you imagine what that kind of outcome would do to that Bobby Vinton song?

“I don’t want to say goodbye … for the summer/
So I’ll just drain all the fluids out of her body and stash her in the cellar.”

So prepare for it, is what I’m saying. Those plaintive wails of despair will rise to shrieks of the truly deranged and you will read about a man in a motocross helmet trying to ride the white landscape on a snowblower and making motorcycle noises.

Vroom, vroom, my friends. Vroom, vroom.

Mark LaFlamme is a Sun Journal staff writer. You can commiserate about the impending end of summer at [email protected].