Here in America, Labor Day weekend is upon us – an occasion meant to honor the wage slaves and the clock punchers, but more practically is a signpost declaring the end of summer frolics and the beginning of the slow, frigid descent into fall and winter.

Unless, like me, you live in Los Angeles, a place where seasons are subtle, rain and snow are practically alien concepts and it doesn’t start to dip below 70F until after Halloween. How does one mark the passage of time in a city where it seems like it stands still? Pumpkin spice, of course.

On a recent road trip down the coast, I stopped in a Starbucks in San Diego to see if they were serving their most popular seasonal beverage, the pumpkin spice latte. No luck – not until Tuesday. I could have some rubbish fizzy tea or an industrial-grade sandwich that tastes like it was warmed up with the Death Star laser, but no pumpkin spice.

As such, my mind says it’s not fall yet. It’s still the fiery purgatory that exists between boiling hot summer and slightly less hot autumn. The introduction of pumpkin-flavored items – and then peppermint and eggnog in time for Christmas – is all I have to trigger the senses to note that it is a different time of year. Football helps too, but you can’t drink the LA Rams, and fortunately, no one has tried.

But the dirty secret of this whole blasted ritual is that pumpkin spice drinks are disgusting. You might as well melt a bag of confectioner’s sugar and drink that with a Twizzlers straw. The main reason to drink coffee is to consume enough caffeine to survive another 24 hours of personal and professional malaise. It’s unclear that PSLs even have any coffee in them.

Every coffee shop has to serve seasonal drinks, though. People love them, either because of the novelty of a weird flavor (like the monsters who eagerly consume biscuits and gravy-flavored potato chips as though that’s not the most heinous idea humanity has devised since the mail-order bride) or the scarcity. I am guilty of driving past a McDonald’s once a year and exclaiming to no one in particular, “Oh, the McRib is back.”

Who cares? I don’t even eat at McDonald’s – not because I’m too good for fast food, but just because I don’t like it. But if you tell me some processed shit sandwich smothered in brown sugar sauce is back “for a limited time only,” well, I just have to have at least one. You know, because it’s special.



That brings me back to the passage of time: the rarity of things – the emotions they evoke when we can enjoy them – are sometimes all we have to experience pleasure at the flipping of the calendar.

Birthdays are the cocking of an invisible gun called mortality that’s about to go off at any moment. Holidays like Christmas and Thanksgiving are fun for some, but they’re generally a passive-aggressive mind-crime committed by your lunatic family. What else is there, if not coffee?

It might not taste good. It might be woefully terrible for your health. But at least it doesn’t make you feel bad about gaining weight or pester you about when you’re having kids. It tells you that time has passed, but without including the fact that now you’re bald or you have a mortgage that you might never pay off. It’s just a drink. It serves a purpose, and a not inconsequential one – it reminds you that you’re alive. Still. Inexplicably. You made it. It’s pumpkin spice season.