Summer of Our Discontent
Boating is a popular summer endeavor. [Eugène Delacroix, detail of "The Barque of Dante" (1822)]
I think I realized I was hopelessly fucked when I couldn’t master the high-fives that the summer kids seemed preternaturally accustomed to. Even pretty simple high-fives stumped me. I guess I wasn’t used to touching people. And talking! Man, I was bad at that. Slang was like an evangelist bleating out nonsense syllables, half High Aramaic and half dog bark. I was allergic to ice cream, threw a football like a girl, had no friends, and feared sunlight. All these disparate threads would come to a head every year for about a hundred days of wasted time in a brutal stretch known as the summer.
This group of months was spoken of with reverence. But I was never good at liking things.
As a kid I insisted, like the half grown asshole I was, that I preferred winter, that dead trees and lashing rain were more my style. Winter was made for me. Spring and fall didn’t seem worth considering. Nuance didn’t suit me—this was a Manichean War of the Seasons, and I was a winter man. I liked the cold in my joints, liked night arriving a few hours after lunch, and I liked stacking my favorite blankets on top of each other and getting under them. There was no baseball in winter.
Winter is a crucible, summer a slaughterhouse.
When I was young, there was one good thing about summer and that was I didn’t have to sit in a classroom all day and pretend to give a shit about learning cursive. But as I got older and fatter, waiting all year for a few empty months grew less and less enticing. Summer would arrive and the freedom from teachers became a new kind of prison, the prison of a newly minted ghost on the subway, a fresh loneliness, the loneliness of the weirdo. We had bizarre allergies to grass or pizza, we didn’t own skateboards or watch the right cartoons.
So it became that summer wasn’t for us. It was for salamanders, fruit flies, and musical theater ruffians. It was for cheerleading covens, festival groupies, and missionaries.
And for the better: I firmly believe that the type of gloomy introspection necessary to become an actual person is incongruous with summer. Existential dread may be imaginable in summer, but it hardly seems appropriate.
And once again summer has me in its grasping sunshine hands, pummeling my inspiration away one loutish day at a time. With its human shields, its gibbet craftsmen, its umbrella cocktail commissars and earnest champions of the blue pill. Summer is where it is at, they say. But I am here to tell you that they are wrong.
Summer is the perfect storm that generates Woodstock ’99. Summer is the thrum of mosquito wings zooming off with your blood. Summer is bees on your hamburger and ants in your beer. Summer is the new Clive Cussler novel. Summer is Michael Bay giggling and hoisting bags emblazoned with dollar signs. Summer is for the oligarchs. It’s when our wealthy caste of miserable cable news pundits squirm at the distance to the next election cycle. It is a time for the worst hangovers and clichéd epiphanies, of soul mates revealing their true colors and sweat on your eyelids. Summer is failed expectations in a frat-party firestorm.
War is a summer sport. That’s when blood boils, when old resentments resurface with a vengeance, when blood feuds resume, the best time to steal your neighbors’ cattle. No more ice on the ground? Sharpen your scimitars, there’s pillaging to do.
Monday, August 19, 2013