I know how you get. The air grows cold and the leaves grow dead and you undergo a personality shift that can best be described as, from the Latin, loony toonus.

You put dead, discolored ears of corn on the door to your home. If you found these things in your cupboards, you would shriek and throw them away. But because you found them at Kmart for a great price, you display them proudly, where others can see them.

You turn into Lord Byron whenever you walk past a tree adorned with leaves that are, as mentioned above, dead. The leaves are literally rotting on their branches, but you react as though God himself came down and painted them just for you.

“Isn’t it glorious?” you will say, voice coarse with emotion. “Is there anything so splendorous and serene as all of this color and the sound of leaves crunching underfoot?”

I quietly sniff your breath because I suspect you’ve been smoking dried gourd.

Loony toonus, that’s what you are. Autumn is the northern hemisphere’s mortuary. Bring out your dead. The crops in your garden have reached the end of their lives. They will decay on the vine if you don’t divorce them from their roots and make a salad out of them at once.

Apples have bloated and turned red, like fat children holding their breath in protest. If people with sweaters knotted at the throat weren’t around to pick them, the apples would collapse under their own weight and turn into mush on the cold ground.

Intelligent creatures head south or go to sleep for nine months. The slow or stupid ones get their heads chopped off and stuffed in a freezer until loony toons like you are ready to thaw them, stuff them with bread, cook them for five hours, and set the browned corpse on a table with other deceased animals to be carved up and eaten with gravy.

Isn’t it glorious?

No. The short answer here is no. It is not glorious. It’s the end of all good things. If I were an intelligent creature, I would fly south with the rest of the wise birds. But I’m dim and poor and so I stay right here, trying to suck the rest of you down into my morass of gloom.

That, and I spend a lot retrospecting on the summer that was.

If you’ve been around, you know how this goes. It’s the time of year I start bitching in earnest because THE BIG ONE failed to come my way. It’s my perennial song and you will listen to it, mister.

No beast, with the body of a dragon and head of a mosquito, flew out of the woods to snatch a virgin and poop on City Hall.

No mothership from another world landed in Kennedy Park, where it would have been ticketed at once and towed away.

There was not one single incident that involved a spork, and reports of creatures in Lake Auburn never panned out.

There was not so much as a dead dog that sort of looked freaky, kind of, if you looked at it through one eye, at dusk, after drinking all day. There was not one incident in which a news photographer clotheslined a fleeing suspect or visee versee.

It was just another summer in the Twin Cities, with your average nimrods setting fires in the woods, toppling headstones in a cemetery, swiping purses from old folks. A perfectly ordinary summer with moms busted for peddling drugs, a dude mowed down at a carnival and an adorable cat rescued from a tree.

Oh, there were distractions. That road and crane plunging into the river was a neat trick. There was a baby who sailed out a third-floor window only to dust himself off and demand more apple juice. There was an inmate at the county jail who tried the same trick but was foiled by barbed wire.

There was a rumbling debate over loud motorcycles, and a little ditty called “The Dirty Lew” became the unofficial Lewiston anthem.

There were break-ins and brawls, bedlam and bedbugs — and then that was that. The last heat wave broke, the temperature dropped and now there are pumpkins for sale at Marden’s. The kiddies are back on the buses, flannel sheets are on the bed and you can smell wood smoke at night.

You love it, that’s what gets me. You couldn’t wait to haul out your flannel sheets and Old Navy sweaters and soon you’ll be talking about Christmas. Christmas! You talk about the death of summer, God rest its sorry soul, with a measure of glee and I just have to probe your scalp with my fingers in search of the lobotomy scar.

Seriously, how much gourd have you been smoking?

Mark LaFlamme is a Sun Journal staff writer. You can send photos of dead, discolored corn and other autumn decor to [email protected].