I always feel like I get less done during the summer because it's always so hot and humid. Like, heat is not such a big deal—I can deal with heat. But the humidity. The lack of any kind of useful wind. The only wind we get here during the summer is either in the middle of the night and nothing during the day; or only during the day and nothing at night. We had snow here once this year. I don't want to wrangle myself into another political rant, so I won't talk about climate change right now; but, suffice to say, I've really never liked the summer. Oh, I liked being away from school just fine; but I could never understand why we needed to have summer break... during the summer. I guess it was for the best, considering they didn't start retrofitting the old-ass schools around here with air conditioning until long after I was gone (the funding somehow always ended up getting redirected to sports, big surprise).
But, like, it's the cicadas, you know? I knew that once the cicadas all came back, I was on borrowed time. School was only a few weeks away at that point. Maybe I liked the weird daytime events at the park for no other reason than there were food vendors there, but the cicadas meant that all that was about to go away. Maybe I liked how the city would always set off $14.000 worth of fireworks because I discovered how to avoid getting bitten by insects by wearing knee-high socks and long-sleeved white teeshirts, but that was already a fading memory by the time the cicadas came around. Maybe I liked playing Mario Kart with my stabilised bike and big-wheel with J in the church carpark after 21:00, but the cicadas meant I had to start preparing for my usual military-like schedule again. A schedule handed down from antiquity because "if it ain't broke, don't fix it"; concocted by men and women in business casuals sitting around a conference table in a building across from the mall. Maybe I liked the mall more than school, but what kid didn't back in the late '90s? When they say, "See you next fall," they don't mean the real fall, with the chilly afternoons and the crunchy leaves; they mean the fall of childhood back into the groove of the corporate feudal state. So many years spent, dutifully checking off things from the list in the Back-to-School section at ShopKo, picking out things like pencils, notebooks, folders, and backpacks, promising myself that this was the year I was going to do better. This was the year I was going to be able to cut out all distractions, suppress all desire to be doing something else, embody the spirit of Pythagoras himself to do better in school; despite the dyscalculia, the autism, and the teachers who were more interested in passing kids through standardised testing to actually help anyone who wasn't already excelling. This was the year that my teachers wouldn't have to write words like "inattentive", "defiant", and "underachieving" into reports that got sent home in the post. This was the year I wasn't going to have to commit a federal crime, intercepting those letters in the mail as they arrived, only to have the whole thing blow up in my face during parent-teacher conferences.
It all stopped eventually, though. Just, one day, it was over. The nightmare ended, I'd been reprieved. 12 years straight of chronic underachievement, constantly having my Nintendo 64 and GameCube confiscated because I was grounded for getting another F in math class despite the A's elsewhere, impossibly short deadlines that only got shorter after NCLB, and constantly feeling as though I was walking up the gallows every 3 months at conferences, it all finally came to an unceremonious end in July 2009. And I've never learned how to live without it. That feeling of constant stress transmuted to despair over what I haven't been able to do, longing for a time that I hated, and a very specific emptiness that I don't know how to fill. I feel like a long walk on the rail trail would help... but, the humidity. I hate the summer.
--27 July 2024--