Tag: summer

Dog 1, me zero

~ Chris ~ Leave a comment

A clank — the neighbor dispensing with wine bottles in the recycling bin. A thick rain falls and wind blusters the trees, making the dog’s ears perk up and eyes go wide. He bristles at the sound of heavy winds, and often pleads to get on my lap if it’s all too much out there. Rustling leaves — Cubby’s nemesis.

Now a jet plane roars above and the local commuter train blows a curt toot, last call for the suit and briefcase brigade. The rain gutters rattle with liquid bloat. For a couple of days, the water extinguishes the August heat. I couldn’t be happier. 

Summer’s almost gone, finished marring, charring the days with high 80s and 90s, sometimes more. Who likes this rot? Most people do, but, as my opinion abides, most people are maniacs. Melanoma. Enjoy.

I detest sweat as well, and shorts are the devil’s attire. But whoosh, the gusts flurry again and now the dog is on my lap, plop, an impossible tableau: dog jostling the laptop computer, making this task either funny or furious. Since it’s the dog, I’ll take the former. 

So now, typing one-handed, I’ll wrap this reverie of sight and sound, a mini-experiment in writing live, as the world unfurls, realizing once again that the damn dog always wins.  

Wet hot American summer

~ Chris ~ Leave a comment

And suddenly, a violent cloudburst. It has doused the hot rays of a 90-degree day, literally out of the blue, and hammers rooftops and streets with angry, percussive cascades. It is gray. It is thunderous. It is beautiful.

Windows are being slashed and gutters rush. Steam-genies dance off the sidewalks. The dog is whining and restless, unsettled by the climatic lurch. I calm him and he looks at me with the anxious eyes of Toto when he’s about to be snatched from Dorothy. 

And then, like that, the rain stops and a vengeful fireball shines again and all the fun burns away. Another summer bummer, a Zeusian tease that will come again, probably when I’m walking across town in shorts and a t-shirt, umbrella tucked in my sock drawer.

Already the ice cream truck tools and tootles by and the dog yelps and grumbles. Either he’s being ornery or he really wants a Fudgesicle. The rain has passed, gone. Children chase the ice cream man, splashing puddles along the way.

Happy August

~ Chris ~ Leave a comment

The summer heat wave, all solar blaze and dragon’s breath, sizzles on without a whisper that it will break soon. It was 95 degrees at noon today, and still I braved a quick walk that was as pleasant as licking dynamite. I was sopped afterwards, but AC and a brawny desk fan evaporated the wet in 45 minutes or so. Summer. Yum! 

The whole time walking all I could think was: August 1st — yes. Summer’s last lap. Though September is unduly warm, it rarely hits the 90s and I get giddy waiting for it. In fall, the air smells different, earthy. Breezes are brisk, just like the cliché. The sun softens, goes fuzzy like a peach. I get to wear jeans. I take a trip (Berlin in October). Of course, there’s Halloween. So great for kids, so embarrassing for participating grown-ups. Everyone’s infantilized. And there’s Thanksgiving … yeah, well. 

When I walk, it’s an obstacle course of flora. I duck below the low-hanging branches of curbside trees and hopscotch around front yards flush with foliage curling over the sidewalk. It’s all so lush, the greenery, that I hate to say I can’t wait for it to shrivel and die in the cold. It is pretty and life-affirming, but sporting a jacket beats it anytime. The heat is my kryptonite; the chill my vitalizing spinach. (Mixed metaphors — Superman and Popeye. Apologies.) 

Ironically, workers are installing a fancy heater in the dining room today, which, if it wasn’t such a happy prelude to the cold, would be insanely counterintuitive. 

I wonder when the heater will be needed? When will we drop to 50, 40 degrees? When will we stop sweating? When will it be dark by 6 p.m.? When will all those plants die?

Tomorrow, please.

Don’t sweat it. Yeah, right.

~ Chris ~ 2 Comments

Not even summer and already I’m sweating like swine. It seemed nice out, about 80 degrees, a soothing breeze, sky marbled with clouds. And then I began my walk and promptly sensed something was off. The atmosphere was thick, dense. Then it was gooey, like clam chowder.

I love clam chowder, but this was just gross. I was getting damp. My hair curled into a Medusa ‘fro. Liquid beads lined my upper lip. For a moment, I felt like an Olympian.

It’s not the heat, it’s the humidity, goes the old saw, which I wish I never saw. I should have known swamp conditions were rife with a New Orleans exuberance: The day’s forecast showed a lightning bolt shooting out of dark clouds with a temperature of 84. Soup du jour.

I was mid-walk. No turning back, just forge ahead. An ample puddle formed in the small of my back. My brow bubbled with warm dew. My pits were the pits. The nightmare of swamp butt was becoming a wincing reality. 

By the time I got home, I was nearly sodden. And the sweat kept coming. I toweled off, though I wasn’t shower wet, just sticky and irrationally moist. About ten minutes later the body faucets petered out. I stood in front of the fan to finish the job. I’ll probably catch pneumonia.

That’s the trouble with sun, heat, humidity, sweat and all that other summery crap. It’s a prolonged hazard, from sunstroke and sunburn, to day boozing and clammy underwear.

But really — am I right? — it comes down to sweat. That’s the worst of it all, the bane of the season. Of course it’s a necessary evil, our own physiological AC, even if it feels like the opposite. The process of sweating is to help keep the body cool when the perspiration evaporates from the skin. Dogs, cats and birds pant. Humans, so beautifully evolved, perspire in buckets. We get antiperspirants and, if we’re John McEnroe, rocking headbands. 

Sweat isn’t all summer’s fault. Occasionally I’ll wake up in a panicky sweat, courtesy of nightmares about a particular recent felon. When I’m drumming I often break a healthy sweat the way meatheads at the gym do, by sheer physical exertion. That’s the good kind. Then there’s nervous sweat, aka flop sweat, like the time in high school when I gave an oral report about Mozart and a dribble of the wet stuff ran from my forehead down my nose, onto my 3×5 cards. You can tell I’m traumatized because I remember it 100 years later. 

By the way, my opening line was a lie. Swine, like dogs, do not actually sweat; they don’t have sweat glands. Lucky pigs.

Late summer litany

~ Chris ~ 3 Comments

1.Late summer rain, lusty breezes, 70 degrees — paradise. Fall is knocking and I’m tripping over myself to answer the door. Of course more heat is brewing — it will hit 86 on Saturday — but the wind and wet is a heartening preview of the best season of all. Autumn is when I travel. It’s when I look for clothes — jackets, long sleeve shirts, shoes maybe. I recently bought a new watch and new glasses, both of them a shimmering blue, though any color coordination was strictly fortuitous. I’m not that fashionable. I consider the items fall purchases, as the watch is largely a travel accessory and the glasses signify renewal and optimism, things, perhaps counterintuitively, I associate with fall. (Plus, my prior glasses needed a new prescription and I never did like those old frumpy frames.) So summer’s in retreat. Cooler climes and shorter days are coming. And I’m getting all celebratory.  

2.The Little Rascals they’re not. But these kids have vim and spunk and initiative, an entrepreneurial spirit that fuels their gumption to holler at passing strangers who are easily a foot taller than them: “Lemonade! Get your lemonade right here!” These neighborhood urchins, some seven girls and boys, are tracing a wholesome tradition from way back — I’m thinking Tom Sawyer days. Times have changed: Their tangy beverage is displayed in bougie glass dispensers, from Ikea or West Elm. And they demand $2 per cup (in my day we charged a quarter!). It’s the last lap of summer, and here I come strolling under shade trees lining the hood’s main artery, a sitting duck. I’m buffeted by the blandishments of piping young voices touting their wares. But I am stuck. I’m carrying no cash, and evidently they don’t take Visa. All I can do is tell them this and walk on. It’s embarrassing, a little. But it beats what happened to me when I was hawking lemonade as a seven-year-old. “Lemonade!” I yelled at a passing car. The driver turned my way and flipped me off. Those were the days.

A stock photo, but look at that wad of cash!

3. Sometimes — no, almost always — a good, hard pop song is just the thing. I’ve been rediscovering two of the best power pop bands of the ‘90s, Jellyfish and The Posies, who prove a genius for the grooving, hair-tossing, sing-alongy pop hook. Plucking styles from a sequins rainbow of catchy, often ethereal influences — Bowie, The Beatles, The Beach Boys, Queen, ELO, Supertramp, Cheap Trick, with a pinch of psychedelia and a pound of Phil Spector — Jellyfish and The Posies layered sweet melodies atop bombastic rhythms and throbbing drums: sugar-coated hand grenades. Their greatest albums, Jellyfish’s “Spilt Milk” and The Posies’ “Frosting on the Beater,” rock as hard as they pop. Lush melodies and harmonies reign. And, especially in the case of Jellyfish, their sound and look is consciously sui generis; Day-Glo and dapper, the group seems right out of Sid & Marty Krofft. Even now, the bands crackle with a big bubblegum snap. Hear them here and here. (What happened to them? Grunge happened.)

Jellyfish, working hard at being psycho-delic.

4.My trip to Budapest and Kraków is precisely two months away. I know, it seems like I’ve been gabbing about it for an eternity. That’s because I have. Vacations are like that: you plan them, book them, then hurry up and wait. For months. Two months left. Grueling, but at least summer (*#$&!) is almost over. I’m still fussing with some fine points of the trip, like booking an overnight sleeper train from Budapest to Kraków (they told me to wait till the end of the month). And netting a spot at a coveted restaurant in Budapest (they told me to wait till mid-September). See, I’m ahead of myself. I booked hotels and dinners and tours four months in advance. Question: Should I really pop 30 bucks for a 45-minute tour of the Hungarian Parliament, which is beautiful and jewel-encrusted? I’m chewing over that one. But I’m pretty sure I know the answer.

Nope.

Autumn ecstasy, briefly

~ Chris ~ Leave a comment

Summer is officially dead. Yes!

Yesterday, the first day of fall, landed with a beautiful bang — low 70s, intermittent cloudbursts, followed by the gauzy autumnal light that streaks so nicely through the clouds and on breeze-blown trees. I almost wept. Today’s forecast: sunshine and 63 degrees. The soundtrack: rustling leaves. Be still my beating heart.  

I banish sweat and sun, beach parties, barbecues and Birkenstocks. People moan about seasonal depression right about now. I get that in the spring; setting the clock forward is a ritual of exquisite distress. It was George Harrison who sang that euphoric earworm of misguided seasonal optimism, “Here Comes the Sun.” Damn him. 

Harrison, in my book, is inviolable. Then there are the real musical scofflaws, whose seemingly every tune is a cloying summer anthem, trilling about sand, surf, girls, cars and other frolicsome “fun.” That’s why the Beach Boys are the worst band ever.

Fall is when I shop for clothing, like a trio of chilly-ready shirts and a Bond-worthy waxed jacked from Barbour (on sale, natch). They’re perfect for my annual fall journey, this one to Spain happening the day before that quintessential fall-iday, Halloween. Face it: Halloween beats Easter, July 4th and Labor Day in any back alley brawl. 

I fall for fall. I embrace shorter days, cool weather, scattered leaves and natty scarves, while spurning the obnoxiousness of football and cutesy orgies of pumpkin-flavored confections. I read today there are people who suffer “autumnal existential dread.” The article said: “The melancholy we feel is a form of grief, mourning the lost sunlight, the ease of summertime, and the greenery that abounds in the warm weather.” Boo-hoo.

I pity you not. In fact I kick up my heels and do a leprechaun jig to the staccato rhythm of my own gleeful chuckles. Fall is here. And guess what? Winter, that frosty front of misery for most, is right around the corner. Bring it on. I’ve got the jacket for it. 

Paradise.

Summer’s roar and pour

~ Chris ~ Leave a comment

The sounds of summer: little girls shrieking in the park; the ice cream truck’s old-timey jingle-jangle; the living room fan’s sighing thrum; the glassy clank of the ice dispenser; the dog’s whistling nostrils as he naps to cool off.

Meanwhile, the sky is about to explode. 

Cool Whip clouds froth and darken, snuffing the sun with enveloping shadow. Then: thunder snaps and growls like splitting wood, and plump raindrops slap hard surfaces. 

It’s 90 degrees and, like that, it’s pouring and roaring. The sounds of summer. 

Only an hour ago I was walking in woolly humidity — the kind of goop that makes the small of your back immediately pool with sweat — under partly cloudy skies, typical summer climes on the East Coast. Which means, wear smart shoes and pack an umbrella.

No one cares that it kissed 100 degrees yesterday. Cloudbursts and thunderstorms are coming — have arrived — and while climate change is partly to blame, this is rather normal atmospheric behavior here and now.

I am so happy. Rain douses the heat, and temperatures can drop 20 degrees in less than an hour. Summer, foiled again! Lightning, so dazzling a sight, rakes bleak skies, and thunder makes Wagnerian drama.  

But they’re fickle, these wet, boisterous storms, with fitful, stop-start rhythms. Fooled into thinking one has passed, I jump at the chance to walk the dog.  

It’s hot as hell. The sun blazes — until it doesn’t. Shade suddenly blankets everything. Rumbles and cracks, those sounds of summer, augur trouble.

We get soaked. 

Summertime boos

~ Chris ~ 4 Comments

Summer’s here. Now scram.

People who know me, or who’ve read this blog, know that I am the whiniest, grumbliest, bitchiest anti-summer complainer in the contiguous United States. I’ve never met someone who dislikes summer as much as I do. It’s a lonely place to be, alienating, distressing and really annoying. 

So I was cheered to see in today’s paper a story about summer seasonal affective disorder, described as a “less common and much less understood counterpart to seasonal affective disorder, or SAD, a recurring pattern of depression that comes on in fall and winter.” (Those are the people who get all boo-hooey when the mercury hits a lovely 55.)

At last, some scientific scaffolding supporting my rare condition of hating the hot months with, well, fiery passion. I do not get SAD in the winter or fall. I get glad. I get ecstatic. I chortle to myself like a madman.

But come spring and summer, right about April, I plummet into a tar pit of depression, exacerbated by all that makes heat fans positively joyous: revealing clothing, sunshine, sweat, long days, crowds, barbecues, picnics and anything else outdoors, including street festivals, beach frolics and concerts in the park. 

What vexes me so? Let’s ask a simpatico writer at Cosmopolitan: “I hate the pretty trees in the park that blow pollen directly into my sinuses. I hate the flies, mosquitoes, the wasps, and the ants. I like my coffee hot, my temperatures cold, and my limbs swaddled in at least two layers of fabric.” 

I wonder if she’s single.

Spurning summer is like dissing Disneyland or burning the flag — it’s socially unacceptable, frowned upon and deeply confounding to the rabble. It’s downright un-American. The social pressure to feel summery when the sun is shining, to beam about how “nice” it is when it’s a Dante-esque 88 degrees, is obscene and fascist.  

“To reveal that you hate society’s favorite season is to reveal yourself as an enemy of humanity,” Cosmopolitan says. “I’m seen as the bummer who hates fun.”

So am I. And I’m tired of it. It recalls those super “fun” people who try to drag you out on the dance floor when you truly, definitively do not want to dance. What I wouldn’t do for a large polo mallet.

“If you don’t want to go to a beach or hike to a swimming hole or drink a spritz on some roof, you give the impression of sourness, as if you’re an ogre who just doesn’t know how to relax, man,” writes the New York Times. “If you don’t want to watch a movie in a park, you feel like such a grouch, an Eeyore who should be out there summering.”

I’m getting better at telling Ray-Banned fans of sand, Frisbees, perspiration, flies and overcooked carcinogens to buzz off. Only in recent years have I caved to wearing shorts on hot days, but I’ve stopped doing summer activities I don’t want to do, be it ambling through Central Park, watching parades or swimming in any body of water. 

I can do without swamp ass, snow cones, sunburn, kayaks, heat-induced comas, hordes, and, as Vogue so deliciously points out, “some dude wearing flip-flops, airing his gnarly toenails.”

Henry James — a hell of a writer. Yet he wrote this: “Summer afternoon — summer afternoon; to me those have always been the two most beautiful words in the English language.” Henry James — also psychotic.

Pity me, for recall that I am afflicted with “summer seasonal affective disorder,” the scientific excuse for all my bellyaching. No, don’t pity me. Because there is, despite what the old song says, a cure for the summertime blues. I chill, literally: A/C set at 68, fans blowing, icy gin and tonic in hand, visions of skiing and wrestling yetis.

“If you’re reading this and you’re a fellow summer hater, let us make our stand now,” says a defiant Independent scribe, who gets the last word.

“Let’s shout it from the shadiest rooftops. Let’s whisper it from behind our curtains, with our air-conditioning units on. This summer, let’s stay in, and feel no shame.” 

The pleasures and perils of reading outside

~ Chris ~ 1 Comment

Reading outdoors is an ambiguous business. I’m an outdoor-reading veteran, a pastime that unites something I adore — reading — with something I barely tolerate — the outdoors. 

Yet occasionally a switch of scenery is required and I’ll dust off a patio chair at a spiffy sidewalk cafe and do the old curl-up with a crisp new paperback. Way back when, I’d try to read old-school newspapers while lounging on the beach, furiously fighting the wispy pages to stay put in the seaside gales. Without fail, a page corner would poke me in the eye and a full page would slap my cheeks. Repeatedly.

That’s how reading outdoors can be ambiguous. I was reminded of this today, a partly cloudy, 64-degree afternoon, when I fancied a book and a breeze would be a peachy idea. I grabbed my reading and hit the backyard deck thinking what a clever boy I am. 

After recently tearing through two new novels — “Whereabouts” by Jhumpa Lahiri and “Second Place” by Rachel Cusk, both ethereal, psychologically astute gems — I’m onto the Ralph Ellison classic “Invisible Man,” which even in its early pages is searing. Propulsive, savage, uncompromising — perfect for a glimmering spring day.

I lasted about 25 minutes out there. The clouds kept stubbornly shifting, sealing off the sky for jacket-ready cool, then opening to a sunscreen-ready radiance. Hopscotching moods, it was atmospheric ADD. 

I sniffled as puffs of wind released flurries of pollen over me, and my bookmark fluttered into the fresh, fragrant mulch. The chilly breezes, swaying shrubs and twisting trees, sent me back inside with grumbling memories of beach vs. newspaper. 

Mother Nature was playing with me, smudging the border between winter and spring, which had its calendrical kick-off March 20. (Summer — insufferable with its perplexing pleasures — arrives June 21, an annual day of mourning.) How else do you explain today’s crazy, veering temperatures? Nature knows how to confound. Watch how she drives meteorologists bat shit.

And she knows how to boomerang me back inside, onto the cushy Eames chair, body gently reclined, feet up, “Invisible Man” in hand, and not a mote of dusty golden pollen to spur the sneeze and wheeze.

This tiff with the elements isn’t over, and its history is rich. Just last week I was reading the Rachel Cusk novel on the deck in fine balmy air, the only irritant a black hairy bumblebee the size of a condor that decided it wanted my friendship. It buzzed and bothered; I swung and swatted. The encounter was a truce.  

I coulda been killed out there. What next while I’m reading amidst flora and fauna, burly bumblebees and erratic skies? Rabid chipmunks? A biblical hail storm? The next-door neighbor trying small talk over the fence? (I’ll take rabid woodland animals over that.)

Summer’s thermal terrors are fast coming and I will spend most of the hot months indoors, hands on the latest talked-up book or dog-eared classic. Inside it’s dark and dank, the only breeze wafting from A/C vents, the only deluge the torrent of words I’m reading, the only vicious creature a scruffy terrier mix named Cubby, who can be effectively disarmed with a hearty belly rub or a good Jack Reacher thriller. Much like me.

Easter not so easy

~ Chris ~ 3 Comments

We rummage about the day, seeking a good book, ambient pleasures, deep meaning (why is that dog squatting so?), and a fine, frothy whiskey sour. The last first, please.

The days are long, the books are long — like the 600-page Mike Nichols biography I just polished, with joy — and the drinks are long, or, more precisely, tall. Either way, pour. Now. 

Temperatures are amping to the mid-60s, heralding spring’s ominous simmer and summer’s damp, gaseous inferno, both of which, I need not tell you, I abhor. (I only partly exaggerate when I say my favorite utterance is brrr. My second favorite: “I’ll get that.”) 

For some, who I will surely offend, today is all about the embarrassing folly of Easter (Jesus, the great escape artist — a Holy Houdini!), celebrating that boulder-rolling feat of celestial sorcery so magnificent it befits a children’s picture book, ages 2 to 5. And, somehow, the whole zany thing — the tomb, the missing body, the resurrection, the Holy Spirit (insert spit-take here) — boils down to Cadbury’s ooze, Peeps’ chews, synthetic grass and ham. 

What would Jesus do? Probably puke, like most of us.

So hallelujah. Now onto cursing: It’s a sunshiny Sunday, blue and bold and obnoxious, just what everybody delights in, because isn’t life one grand fairyland, dusted in gold, roofed with rainbows and burbling with birdies? 

Actually, it is pretty nice out, for now. I just dread when the sun-worshippers get greedy, Mother Nature listens, and everything gets hot and ruined. (Dear October: Step on it.) Look, get your unflattering beach garb, go to the tropics and leave the rest of us alone. 

Travel. Now? Right. I should be in Paris. But while I’m freshly vaccinated for Covid, France is redoubling its pandemic shutdown. The place is a festering contagion and no one’s going in or out. I bought a flight to Paris in March 2020 for an October trip, and we know how that ended. We sit. We wait. We read 600-page artist biographies. 

Or we read (and re-read) short story collections, like Joy Willliams’ delectably edgy “The Visiting Privilege,” Tobias Wolff’s comfort-foody “Our Story Begins” and the tough, granular realism of Richard Ford’s “Sorry for Your Trouble.”

Art saves. Sort of. I have a birthday coming up and no book of short stories will blunt the bite. Yes, I’m at the point when birthdays make you scrunch up your nose. I’ve been doing this for years; the last time I actively celebrated my birthday was age 13. I believe in getting older as much as I believe in Christ’s Penn and Teller routine in the desert. 

Started as a random riff, this is turning out to be my annual jeremiad about changing seasons, warming and wilting. This week I add a year, perhaps finally becoming an anachronistic artifact, shriveling like a vampire in slashing shafts of sunlight.

I need a flotation device in this sea of self-pity. More to the point, that whiskey sour is sounding pretty terribly perfect right about … now.