Everyone Needs to Calm the Fuck Down About Pumpkin Spice

It’s fall, y’all! That time of the year when the leaves are changing, the air has a bite to it and every single fucking thing that you eat is flavored like pumpkin. Some pumpkin-flavored things are great! Pumpkin pie? Cool. Pumpkin muffins? Also cool. Pumpkin ale? Glug glug glug! Very — hiccup — cool. But pumpkin spiced everything? You food producers have got to take a pumpkin-sized chill pill.

In the future, I predict that people will talk about 2013 the same way people in the 1400s talked about the Black Death — only it won’t be the plague that half of us died from. Instead we’ll all be killed by Pumpkin Spice Fatigue (PSF). Imagine it: our entire society destroyed, all because Mars, Inc. couldn’t restrain themselves from releasing a pumpkin spice-flavored M&M. Or because Starbucks started advertising their pumpkin spice latte as early late August (that’s still iced latte season, son!) and by the time autumn ended, we had all consumed so much pumpkin that our tummies exploded and all that was left of us were a few chunks of flesh and the perfectly formed jack-o’-lantern that formed in our digestive system.

The post PSF future is grim, folks. Don’t believe me? Well, I’ve looked into the future and this is what I saw:

“Tell me about mama,” a small boy says to his father as they huddle over a barrel fire in the shadow of New York City, a once great, now crumbling metropolis that has, in the wake of the PSF epideminc, been overrun by raccoons.

“You’ve heard that story a thousand times,” the father replies, but the boy begs to hear it again. “Fine. Your mother — or Womb Walker, as we say now — was a kind, beautiful woman. She worked in a field called PR — that is until the Spice took her. They say it was the pumpkin pie vodka that finally did her in, but she actually took to eating chunks of raw pumpkin in the end so who knows…”

The father and son fall into a tense and thoughtful silence as they chew on the bones of the weak, old raccoon they managed to catch earlier that day. A fortnight later, they are murdered by marauders.

As of now (September 2013 for future archivists), that’s all just a silly, if not highly well-informed prediction on how this whole pump’ spice will play out. But even if things don’t get that dire (though they most certainly will), where does it all end? Pumpkin spice lube? Pumpkin spice Pringles? Pumpkin spice room sprays? Pumpkin spice treats for your dog who cares more about eating cat shit than it cares about eating pumpkin spice? Guess what? They already have those things!