The Dogged Days of August

This month just stinks, man. The period of time from about July 10th to Labor Day is a beating whether you’re in Texas or California, but especially Texas. Each day feels like a grueling race I can only ever hope to finish by flopping across the finish line onto 83-degree pavement at midnight. It just never cools down here, unless a thunderstorm happens to sweep through just quickly enough to wake me up and flood the streets. There’s just no respite until the first cool breeze, whenever it arrives in fall.

***

One of the benefits of not doing a paid Substack or something like that is, it turns out, the freedom not to write if Life Things demand my attention elsewhere. And while I don’t love the idea of not writing something on at least a weekly basis here, I also take comfort in the knowledge that I have no accounts in arrears.

My summer thus far has been marked by sweetness and tough times getting tougher. But amid the molten slag of still-unmet Obligations, the great gift of hardship is that it forces routines upon you. I’ve been waking up early with my mind filled with stress, but I’ve channeled that into a run before work most days. I’ve successfully kept junk food out of the house rather than using it to numb anxiety, as has been my inclination in the past. I’ve been going to bed at a good time because I’m exhausted after work, often while listening to an audiobook.

Generally, I much prefer to read books than listen to them, unless they be short stories (the Arsène Lupin series particularly lends itself to the audio format, as French is much nicer to listen to than to pronounce, quite badly, on the page). But Spotify recommended the Andy Serkis reading of The Fellowship of the Ring, so I figured I’d give it a shot. Except, here’s the thing I discovered right before Frodo got to Bree: Spotify limits even Premium members to 15 Audiobook hours per month. They do not offer any tier of membership that allows unlimited audiobook listening. It’s baffling, but I’m sure it’s all a messy effort to do the same thing so many other subscription services do: hook you with a series (binge-watching was surely a neologism coined in the foul depths of board rooms), then force you to pony up just to scratch the itch you’ve developed.

Thankfully, there is a better way. A thoroughly American way, as it happens: the library. Most big library systems (including Irving, where I live) use a service like Hoopla that allows residents to freely stream audiobooks and tons of other media, all without charge. It’s eminently sensible, and it gives you a sense of superiority to boot. Seriously, check a book out from the library sometime. You’ll walk out with a book you didn’t have to pay for, and you’ll feel like a good citizen and a great bargain-hunter. For me, in fact, that same library is also my local polling place, so I get to taste the last vestiges of civic order in multiple ways. Libraries are cool and great and free, which makes them especially vital to people in lower income brackets (or without income at all), not to mention children and elderly adults. I’m sure someone will find a way to monetize them before long. Nothing gold can stay.

Anyway, that’s been my summer: a tiny bit of travel to see family, then work disasters and nights that never cool down. But at least I get to continue walking to Mordor. If I have to live there, then so do the hobbits.

This morning, I listened to “The Mirror of Galadriel.” That’s the chapter where Frodo and Sam see visions in Lothlórien of their beloved homeland being ruined. Sam is almost consumed with rage and heartbreak, deliriously demanding to go back home in order to punch Ted Sandyman in the face. My brief visit to California last month evoked a similar sort of feeling, that desire to go back to where I grew up and defend the idyllic parts of the seashore and the eucalyptus groves with everything I had. It’s not a rational response, but rather a nostalgic one, that fearful instinct to curl up in your childhood bed and feel safe and certain that the world is good and that every day can be just as good as the one before it.

By the way, nostalgia derives from the Greek nóstos for “homecoming,” which itself derives from the Proto Indo-European root nos/nes or something in that vein. We don’t actually know PIE words except by inference and deduction, which is the coolest possible way to learn a language. But in other words, the same prefix that in Spanish now means “us” has also, for the great bulk of human language, meant “home.” This desire to care for that which cared for you in prior years, to return to what was rather than face what’s ahead, may be among the most essentially human experiences there is.

But August looms, as will every day after it. There’s nothing wrong with trying to pass on the sweetness of yesteryear to others, but you have to look forward, too. Jim Nill has taught this lesson many times over, if I can insert a quick hockey aside, as do all good GMs. Anyone who remembers the final Dallas seasons of Darryl Sydor or Jamie Langenbrunner knows that, nice and poetic though those returns may have been, they weren’t the same. More often than not, you’re better off continuing to look ahead, and maybe to your left and to your right occasionally.

We’re stuck in this month, so we might as well face it, and face forward. These days may lack hockey and be overstuffed with Weather, but the least we can do is learn the lesson of Click, and resist the temptation to fast forward. There is good even in the bent and broken days of hail and heat. As Mithrandir says, “I have not much hope that [August] can be cured before he dies, but there is a chance of it.” And a chance is all any of us have these days, isn’t it?