Summer Is

Summer is not my season. Like the snowboard company’s name, I wish it never happened.

Summer is rude. Five a.m. engines rumbling as the early birds in their unnecessarily loud trucks and motorcycles storm off to work. Squealing tires and slamming doors continue well past 10pm.

Summer is loud. Windows down, air currents roaring, large tires and groaning brakes. The dump truck that has to shake the dumpster 20 freaking times. The air conditioner whirring to push too much air past the rough surface of insulation before forcing it to make a 90 degree turn. The leaf blowers buzzing like angry wasps loud as an airplane.

Summer is a wind tunnel. Every fan is on full blast. I can’t hear myself think with them all whooshing. My girl wants one blowing across the bed, and I can’t bury my face enough to sleep comfortably. My skin is dry, my lips crack, and my throat feels like I swallowed an ancient burial ground.

Summer is a sweaty herd of people. Traffic jammed going into and out of town. The traffic going to the beach is jammed all the way back to the city, some 60 miles. Finding a parking spot anywhere is as much a struggle as leaving it. Youth behind the wheel hooning around as swaths of pedestrians stroll casually across the street. The elderly that insist on sitting in the far left lane and going 15mph under the speed limit. Sitting at a stoplight for 3, make it 4, cycles before getting close enough to actually get through the intersection.

Summer is festivals. I remember festivals, vaguely, though it’s saddening to have to remember them. The last several years I’ve either been slave to an employer that doesn’t care about my mental health enough to allow a day off or I haven’t had money to do anything. Sometimes, it’s both reasons simultaneously, even though capitalism would have us believe those two conditions are mutually exclusive.

Summer is expensive. The price of fuel goes up, the price of goods goes up, the price of going anywhere or doing anything is far more than the same activity done any other time of year.

Summer is lewd. Girls run around wearing about 2 square inches of fabric, and anxiety overwhelms me as I fight the urge to look. Sometimes, I’m relieved to catch their eyes scanning me, followed by a sheepish smile. See? It’s natural to look, right? But sometimes, my girl is close by, and my anxiety doubles if I’ve even glanced.

Summer is like living on another planet. You can’t breathe the air unless it has been conditioned. You can’t touch things that the sun is touching. You need to carry water with you like a scuba tank, lest you drown in the hot air. Every commute is like a journey through space, uncomfortably biding your time until arriving at the next habitable destination.

Summer is selfish. I complete another lap around the sun, but a small box of metal doped gunpowder is more significant than that. So much more that contention arises over just which ones to plan the day around. It’s rarely ever my day, and I rarely ever get the honor of deciding what to do with it. It’s the perfect irony to be told what to do on the day that your entire country is flagrantly touting the freedom from being told what to do.

Summer is pretentious. How could someone not like summer? They don’t just ask, they exclaim in shock. Like I’m a defector, a traitor of the human species. As if disliking summer is the most audacious thing a person could imagine. I must be mentally ill. Summer is the only time of year that my loved ones will tell me I need to seek professional help.

Summer is unbelievably not unlikable. Yes, I lost my best friend during the summer. I don’t blame the season for that. But, I do find it appalling and offensive that someone who should know me well points to such a thing as the source of my mood, being in complete disbelief that I could hate summer for being rude, loud, windy, traffic jammed, lewd, selfish, pretentious, expensive, full of festivals I can’t attend, and generally feeling inhospitable.