August 31, 2011
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“We are the hollow men
We are the stuffed men
Leaning together
Headpiece filled with straw…”
T.S.Eliot
1 Strange days.
2 I swear.
3 As active a person as I am, there’s something about late August that defies explanation.
4 I’ve tried, year in and year out, to figure it out, but it seems always to drain all of us.
5 I guess it’s the clove of seasons, as one lyrical short story put it. It’s that eerie time between summer and Halloween when everything becomes hot and hazy. It’s a sort of unreal time of the year.
6 For people dealing with Hurricane Irene, I’m sure it is hazardous and heartbreaking.
7 To those of us out here on the West Coast, it just seems to surround us. There is something odd and dusty about this time of the year.
8 For those of us back in school, it’s a weird time. We teachers are still getting acquainted with students; students are fresh and eager, but clearly older and facing really odd things.
9 Life gathers around us in an annoyingly hot and smoggy way. Baseball season seems over if your team is no longer in it, and so we fans become the walking wounded. We click on the radio for around twelve seconds to keep some sort of touch with our teams, but they all seem out of touch, and lost.
10 The moist, verdant lawns of summer look like dry, bristly patches of their former selves. Flowers that stood gorgeous and lush during the summer have grown long brown necks and seem to resemble straw dogs.
11 People try heroically to squeeze in summertime activities like traveling to lakes, or hitting the beach, but all around there are realities letting us know that we are just fooling ourselves.
12 It’s the end of summer, which actually ends later this month. It is now dusty, dry, hot, and strange. It actually ended weeks ago.
13 Labor Day is well named. Everything we do right now seems to own up to the title.
14 Relaxing seems contrived and forced. Computers go down routinely, offering little in the way of hope. We hop on them anyway, looking for something to pull us in to help us ride this natural dust storm.
15 Teevee offers things like Chaz Bono and half-baked, over-hyped shows about celebrities. We glance over slack-jawed at how stupid everything has become.
16 The ground is dry and cracked, and so are our lips.
17 Stores still have summer leftovers lying on tables. But we all know that summer has come and gone. We all know that we have almost two months of same. Halloween eventually becomes the spirited portal that sets things into some semblance of zoning in and finally accepting that we have become just a tad bit older, and that we are rambling recklessly down some sort of strange road to a sort of settling-in for the coming winter months.
18 Meanwhile, no matter how cool we try to make ourselves sound, we realize that we are made of straw. We notice now that we are yet another year older. We get annoyed watching younger people do the same stupid things that we used to do, and we admit it’s stupid, but that we also carry a bit of envy of their naivete’.
19 The season is dry, barren, and endless.
20 Small nameless bugs and knats land on our computer screens, and we occasionally smear one just because it wandered into our personal space, which becomes a computer screen, a lousy teevee show, or a couch that looks so much more inviting than a treadmill.
21 When alarms go off in the morning, we pull the sheets up over our heads and wish we were in some sort of alternate universe that would simply swallow us down and disappear.
22 And yet we know it is ephemeral; we know it is an annual ritual that will run its course. We know we will eventually have a sense of normalcy, of dinners, of workouts, of pots and pans, and of everything righting itself.
23 But right now, we are drained and stretched as far as we can drain and stretch.
24 Forgive it, ladies and gents. Live it once again; ’twas ever thus.
25 A strange little bug just ran across my computer screen, scaring me for a thousanth of a second. I just wondered how many more have been doing that for the past three weeks.
26 I think it’s time to pull the sheets back over my head. There’s still time.
27 See you tomorrow. Don’t think too much about this. It’s a cheap poem in disguise. Everything will return to normal tomorrow. Or the next day.
28 Promise.
29 Peace.
~H~
