I was driving through my neighborhood today and saw a couple houses that were decorated with plastic jack-o-lanterns and styrofoam tombstones and, as I do every year at this time, found myself wanting to ring their bell and ask, "Are you fucking stupid?"

As online and catalog shopping have been eating into the martket, retail stores have been featuring their holiday displays earlier and earlier. When I was a kid the Halloween merchandise did not appear in stores until October first. Now they display Halloween shit the second week in September and Christmas crap before Thanksgiving.

Because we Americans are such a mindless, media-influenced scociety, we believe it is Halloween (or Christmas of Easter) season just because the stores tell us it is. Do you mindless jackasses not remember that it is STILL SEPTEMBER???

Last year I saw two houses that had Christmas decorations up before Thanksgiving and didn't take them down until a week after New Year. They still plugged in their lights a FUCKING WEEK after New Year. That means that to them, Christmas season lasted nearly a sixth of a year!!!

Am I overreacting? Probably but I become so frustrated by the lack of free thinking that goes on in our scociety. I shake my head in dismay at the shallow, mindless people who seem to make up the masses. I want to puke when they announce the birth of a celebrity baby on a network news cast. Have we as a country devolved to the point where J-lo's kids rank with the Iraq war in importance? When I see people blindly decorating their houses because they are too stupid to look at a fucking calendar I see a symptom of my biggest gripe with Americans.

I'm ranting and actually getting angrier as I write. I'd best stop and distract myself before I rupture an artery in my brain. Maybe I'll go pick out a Christmas tree.