The Old Double Whammy

It is Father's Day.  I got nothin' there either way.  So. . . it is the summer solstice--the first day of summer.  I've got something there, just like everybody else.  Equal light and dark.  Like this photograph. Summer brings heat and frustration here in the swampy south.  It is the mold and mildew season, the time of rotting vegetation.  Nothing blooms.  Things just grow and get a dark, dark green. The world closes in.  It is suffocating.  All you can do is drink and take afternoon naps and hope somehow you are able to sleep comfortably through the night.  If you have money and leisure time, of course, you do not stay here.  Only a madman or madwoman would do that.  And that is what we get here in the sunny south--madness.

I threw ten yards of mulch yesterday in my long, curving driveway with a pitchfork and a wheelbarrow and a rake.  It was late and the weather in the nineties.  I don't know if it was old age or heat stroke, but I am not the man I was.  At least I didn't feel I was, though I threw just as much mulch in a day as I ever had.  Now I'm Cross-Fit.  My forearms are like Popeye's.  My back is either much better or much worse.  It is sore either from muscle development or spinal grinding and nerve damage.  But when it was done, a shower and lunch felt wonderful.

Oh--I also sprayed a Monsanto product to kill all the weeds before I mulched.  I am that way, I guess.

I took an Emergen-C packet last night that has melatonin to help you sleep.  It was brought over by a friend and I was out of the ones I usually take, so. . . I feel like shit this morning.  Woke with a cold, too.  Slept too long too late.  I don't know.  Everything seems to be going wrong.  Adobe products are all fucked up on my computer.  Bridge won't open anything.  I've worked for hours and hours trying to get something to work right.  I've done virus checks and disc doctors and still can't get things to work.  Both mine and the tenants a.c. units went out this week and I had to spend over $500 on them. Other things, too.  The summer misery has begun, I guess.  It is long and wicked where I live.

The antidote?  Oh, I always want to buy something.  Many things.  A Vespa and a digital Leica camera, perhaps.  Those two things are staples of life, really, practical things.  Necessities almost.  See me on a Vespa with a Leica M around my neck.  Fuck me, wouldn't I be something?

I think I'll go weep now.  Perhaps I've started my period.  Perhaps its andropause.  Whatever it is, it needs seeing to.  Hell. . . maybe it is just Father's Day Lamentations.

But it is most likely simply the First Day of Summer.  It will pass.  Give it time.  A whole lotta time.