I'm not a creature of the heat: one of the unexpected trials of my near-decade's residence in the South in the '90s was missing fall (real fall) and winter. The eight months of summer were bad enough on their own, but I also found out that my emotional rhythms were tied to the progress of seasons; I felt always obscurely wrong-footed living with the two (wet-hot and wet-cool) Louisiana gave me. It's easy to complain about the Chicago winter—everybody does—but I feel there's a certain solidarity in the complaining. In the north, winter is somehow entirely objective: it's too massive an event for you to be able to take it personally—it's just something that happens, and it happens to everybody equally. Once in Louisiana, I recall, we had a December day that never made it out of the twenties (LSU actually cancelled classes because of the threat of frost), and I stepped out of doors into the meat-locker version of Baton Rouge and thought, why is the air doing this to me? I was mad at everybody all day.

[Fall, by the way, has a taste of its own. To me the most delicious day of the year is that day in late summer, towards evening, where something in the tang of the cooling air and the sound of the leaves prophesies the year's turning. No, it's not fall yet: but fall is there, just over the northern horizon, moving stealthily on.]

Right now my mom and my sisters are on a week's vacation in Pensacola. Every July and August, after I turned 10, we'd head to the Gulf Coast to catch the rays and the off-season rates: and I'd stay in the air-conditioning with whatever reading material I could scrounge while the family walked up and down the hot, sticky beach collecting buckets full of utterly common seashells that somebody always thought we'd "do something" with, in the crafts way: and never did. This year, I begged off, pleading work—there's a lot of it to get through this month—but as much as I want to be with my family now, close to the first anniversary of my dad's death, Florida in the second week of August would have been a tough sell even if I could have got away cleanly from Chicago.

August saps me. A suite of 90-degree days, head down shuttling between artificially cooled caves, leaves me lethargic and weltschmerzy. This is the month of deja vu: everything seems like it's being done or said as just one more in an endless series of repetitions. Bush vacation? Check. Torture stories? Tell me a new one. Outrageous political appointments? Electoral manipulations? Wars, and rumors of war? Done it all already, haven't we?

At the moment, I don't have enough in me for passionate blogging, or for feeling like I can make any very worthwhile intervention in any of the current topics. And I don't really like to blog for purely phatic purposes (though this entry comes close)—I like to imagine when I post that I'm doing something useful, at least in some theoretical sense. I'm pretty sure I'll get the mojo back—but for the time being, updates here will be sporadic. Let me plug, collectively, the great blogs listed over on the left—they all come out of my Bloglines subscriptions, so you know they make up my own daily or near daily-reading. Most of the time, somebody there has already said whatever I might have thought to say, anyway.

posted by michael  2:35:03 PM  
tell me about it []  trackback []