Hot Winter
Don’t bite off more than you can chew. Don’t let your eyes be bigger than your stomach. Don’t let your mouth write a check that your ass can’t cash. I’ve been warned my entire life. I never listen.
So I guess I see now that a long-form-essay-only blog would be unsustainable, considering I don’t possess long-form-essay-only energy or inspiration on a consistent, year-round basis. Add to this, a life-long orientation toward episodic depressiveness that slows down production at the ol’ noggin factory (ironically, this will be addressed in my next longer essay, already in progress). So the longer pieces that I love to write will still appear here when they happen, but in between, I still want to make contact and holler at you and hear back from you because I’m alive and you’re alive and we are all trying to make sense of this being alive business in this particular cray-cray time in human history.
So I’m functioning a little better than in recent months, having just returned from two rejuvenating, nature-centered vacays, just in time to write this and generate the energy to get wildly pissed off about something. It is this: I have a visceral, sphincter-tightening response to any visual or auditory mention of the words BACK TO SCHOOL. Though I have not been mandated to attend any school for decades, the dread and sorrow are nonetheless permanently neurologically encoded in such a way that I will drop things in stores when the overhead announcer directs me to check out the BTS savings in their so-and-so department, and I will audibly wail.
When the buzzkill internet advertising blitzkrieg starts, showing teens in new outfits under dyed denim jackets and overstuffed backpacks, I recoil with demonstrative indignance from this blasphemous, aseasonal joy-murder. You have to feel it to heal it, so I am writing this here to exorcise this particular type of bee in my proverbial bonnet. I DID NOT SURVIVE THREE OTHER MEDIOCRE SEASONS FOR YOU TO DECIDE THAT MY SUMMER WAS OVER SO THAT YOU COULD SELL LUNCHBOXES, MARSHALL’S! It’s over when I say it’s over, you monsters. Clearance, my ass…You better put them men’s swim trunks back up to regular price!
Summer is my favorite. If I could live in one of those commercials where everybody is wearing fresh, colorful summer outfits and dancing down the sidewalk to a latin-tinged hip-hop jam while dodging cute, braided double dutch girls and smiling at the seated old-timers while knocking back an ice-cold (insert soda brand here), I would. Though, if I’m really honest….. I would only commit to a maximum of 45 days of it, then I would pick up the seasonal climate remote and change it to the hoodie-weather channel in which the boomboxes are now playing acoustic Bossa Nova synced up to falling leaves and everyone is sipping (insert hot beverage brand here) and taking in autumnal sunsets.
I used to go hard all summer. I used to skateboard or bike around all day in 90+ degree heat on my days off, just being out in it. Now, my mood spikes in June with a short burst of liberated elation and then after that, it’s too hot for anything, and I end up staying inside for the rest of the season with the same indoor-living blues as January- it’s just a hot form of Winter.
So I am inside writing between conducting therapy sessions and binging Criterion Channel movies and avoiding the double whammy of heat & humidity and presidential election campaign news and AI mindfrickery and Australian Breakdancer memes and new aches and pains and sensations in my body that are either completely normal signs of aging or are evidence of imminent death. I hope you are having a wonderful day.