larger view

    Oh Summer, how I love and loathe thee. Your hot days filled with sticky shirts, sweaty backs, and blistering skin. The scorching heat that I long for during winter is ironically disdained during your lengthy days. Your breath feels like a hair dryer overtaken with sadistic glee. Night offers shade yet little rest. Tossing and turning as my air conditioner wheezes in the night sucking in dollars and blowing out cold refreshing air.

    Yet, I cannot help but also be attracted to you. The sun parched land somehow drains energy in a dance of enervation, yet that lack of vitality has a certain pleasure that is hard to convey. Your lengthy days bring lethargy that is as a great stone forcing me to my knees. And there, close to the ground, I enjoy a lemonade and am grateful. For in your punishment are the multitudes of pleasures that can only be experienced concurrent with misery. Jumping into freezing water, playing with a garden hose, trying to make ice-pops out of every imaginable liquid, sitting in the backyard stripped to as little as legally allowable. Only by your presence can these things be relished.

   What a great travesty are Summer Mondays. A wonderful weekend filled with family, relaxation, and metamorphosis into a sloth is abruptly ended by the piercing screech of the alarm clock. Up I wake to bludgeon the offending clarion. Then the waters of Bath I unleash to wake my unforgiving body. Off to work my wife makes her way. And I, I stand missing that oh so great and loved part of myself that is her. Mondays, you wretched beasts, if ever I find a weapon capable of slaying those such as you... well then, I guess I'd have to loathe Tuesdays.