Here’s an example of what I mean: As I write this, we’ve still got the better part of a week before the summer officially ends. There still isn’t a lick of falling leaves on the ground outside my house. In fact, most days it’s still warm enough for me to go out in a t-shirt, shorts and sandals (assuming, of course, that work allowed me to wear the latter two garments). But then I got home from work tonight to find that my parents already had the Halloween decorations up: large plastic jack-o-lantern in the window, fall-themed wreath hanging on the door (which, as usual, Mom hung too high so that it’s blocking the view through the peephole) and a family of cutesy-looking scarecrows to decorate the bench on the porch.

As much as it may seem like I am, I’m not opposed to any of these decorations on their own. But why on earth do people want to rush the passage of time so badly by putting them up nearly a month before everyone else? It just seems like people don’t dwell on the here and now (or even on the recent past) anymore, like there’s some stench of death hanging out around it. For Christ’s sake, December 26th rolled around last year and there were already used trees on the curb ready to be taken away! It’s depressing, and it’s embarrassing to us as an entire species.

Then again, though, this is probably what Doc Brown’s mindset was like when he came up with the flux capacitor…