I’m not at my best in the summer. I have always been useless in July. I have suspected that it’s reverse SAD, the endless light, going outside in the heat and ending up exhausted. It may just be bad sleep, however. (A novel insight of this year is that various difficulties may be stemming from one culprit: the fact that my body is not actually set up to sleep well.) This feeling of July-hate has lingered throughout the years, but August isn’t much better: sleepy and silent, the sort of month where you feel crappy if you’re not traveling somewhere else, as everyone else in the world is pretty much traveling. It’s hard. These days we can be voyeurs on everybody’s summer trips, taking in the bucolic sights while ignoring the humidity and spiderwebs that are likely making a home in their vacation places.
However, I do have one secret joy that is making my summer semi-incredible: central air, the right temperature, for the first time in my whole life. I visited my father this summer in the drafty 100+ year old New England house that I grew up in and it’s always been powered by fans when it gets hot but with the sweating and the turgid air I could barely sleep. And I grew up on the east coast, but to be honest, it feels as if this part of the U.S. is getting hotter, in stickier ways, every year. I haven’t had much to say in this space: I have about five half-written drafts sitting in the CMS. Why, you may ask? Partially due to a familiar feeling of summertime sadness.
The funny — but not funny ha-ha by any means — side effect of being on an SSRI is that it’s harder to cry. In regards to crying, I’ve been able to feel tears literally behind my eyes at sad movies, sad news, this sick, sad world, and yet nothing comes out. It’s as if a wall has been put up. And I almost cried when I heard that David Berman, the poet and musician behind Silver Jews, died. I felt my body wanting, physically, to cry. That news actually got a little bit further, a little bit behind the wall of the SSRI.
I know why his death has hit me more than I expected. I have spent hours in a car with his voice, driving from one place to another, sitting with his stories like he’s an old friend. I’ve spent more time with him than people I love in New York. There’s been plenty of good writing online about why he was a rare talent, facile with words and jokes and able to find some beautiful stuff in life (that’s why we have poetry, sometimes) even though he found existence painful. The details are hard to hear: the debt he was in, the reluctance to do music, the tenuousness of his sobriety, his stupid evil father looming over his life (and ours as well: he’s quite the successful gun lobbyist). If you haven’t listened to American Water, please do. It’s a beautiful album.
Recent Articles That I Wrote:
BuzzFeed: I love Kirsten Dunst!
Vanity Fair: I hate Netflix!
Today In My Tabs:
Esquire: Hal Needham, the crazy stuntman who inspired Brad Pitt’s character in the new Tarantino (His biography, Stuntman! is the best.)
The Morning News: Alexander Chee on working with Annie Dillard
Bunny Michael’s Instagram: a balm for the modern world