Sunday, August 12, 2007

A Break In The Weather

The man in the next booth eating his hamburger was bald, his arms crawling with tattoos, and he had one of those little silver horseshoe piercings hanging out of his nose.

It was the black t-shirt, however, that completed the look. In large white letters, it read:

BERMUDA TRIANGLE SEX INSTRUCTOR

Then, in smaller letters underneath:

After we have sex, you get lost

It’s been that kind of summer.

Sometimes it seems like it will never end and the relentless and oppressive temperatures will last forever.

I tell the therapist that I was never good at long-term thinking. Whenever I say something negative about myself, she counters by trying to find the positive side of it. Sometimes I take her point, but other times it seems a little far-fetched to me. I think she could probably find the silver lining in falling down a flight of stairs.

Don’t you hate people like that? I mean, aren’t I allowed to be awful?

She says I can change. A fat lot she knows.

“There’s that can’t word again,” I can hear her say.

Stick around, kid. There’s a lot more where that came from.

Summer often feels like this endless commercial, beating you about the head and shoulders with advertisements for movies and concerts like some giant blaring loudspeaker as the sun tries to melt you into butter.

The advertising isn’t geared towards me anymore, though. It’s not interested in my money anymore. They’re after the kids down the street, which is fine by me. Let them get their pockets picked like I did.

The commercials that want you to buy a car are actually aimed at me, which is why they all have these old punk bands playing on them. That’s a little disorienting. It’s a wonder one of them hasn’t come out with an SUV called “Anarchy” yet.

I don’t know what I thought I was going to do for money, I tell the therapist.

I suppose don’t is a close relative of can’t.

And now I don’t have anything to sell, I tell her. I’m on the outside of everything.

I’m beating my head against the wall and punching at shadows.

And?

Well, all right, I suppose there are some things I could do differently, but I…

Yes?

Summer really beat our brains out this week, not just here but the whole country, frying like an egg on the sidewalk. Then Friday came around (blessed are ye among days) and you could almost hear people gasping as they left work to find that the heat had been replaced by a cool breeze.

We’ve got the windows open and the air conditioner’s off for the first time in weeks.

It’s coming to an end. Summer’s over, again.

The sober and mature films will be coming out that nothing blows up in and the kids will be going back to school and saving their money.

I always felt like the year started in the fall, not in January, my therapist says.

And there is that sense of an ending vacation, I suppose.

Then there was the young woman with the t-shirt we saw at the restaurant this weekend. It showed a fork and a spoon smiling and holding hands and it read:

SPOONING LEADS TO FORKING

You've got to admit it's an improvement.

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