Summertime, and the living is hotter than an RV-full of angry network pundits in a drought-induced forest fire. Article after article compares America to Rome, and not in a good way. As we celebrate the 40th anniversary of the Summer of Love, where’s the love?
Not in Paris Hilton’s cell. Not in a 100-mile line to snag an iPhone. Not on either side of the Congressional aisle or between the elephants and donkeys who want to write on White House stationery. The vice president doesn’t even consider himself part of the executive branch anymore. And nobody’s sure if he’s supposed to be.
This summer the CIA opened its half-century Pandora’s box of “family jewels” – and with it, a stench of old-school patriotic hubris that could knock a buzzard off a manure wagon.
I’d love to contribute to my 401(k), but I opted to buy gas for my chunk of Detroit steel instead. Our highways are so dimpled, a bear stumbled onto an interstate last week here in Richmond and broke his ankle in a pothole. I saw this on TV. Michael Moore immediately flew him to Cuba to be treated – for free.
The real estate market is tanking. Wall Street is turning fearful. Jobs are plentiful, however, especially if you like the kind that starts with $6 an hour and ends with, “Drive to the next window, please.”
If it’s July, that means we’re still neck-deep in two wars without a rope. This summer, Baby Boomers are beginning their slow sojourn to sucking Social Security dry while fueling the only real estate boom in sight: Retirement homes.
Are we to the Hawaiian Shaved Ice snow cone shack yet? How many people are in line at that Cold Stone Creamery?
As the thermometer rises, Susan Decker has her work cut out trying to make Yahoo into Google. Wikipedia is beating CNN to the news punch with free contributors. Terrorists are still claiming God hates airports. And last week, Captain America – after 66 years working the superhero beat – got a cartoon burial at Arlington National Cemetery when an assassin’s bullet felled the Marvel icon. It’s even a tough summer on fake heroes.
Baseball bats are not immune from the paradigm shift. Forget the ubiquitous aluminum sticks that cost up to $380 a swing and sting like grabbing a power line when you tork a screamer down third. Wooden bats are coming back, and the buck-fifty ($150), high tech (six-piece hickory construction) 360º Woody is leading the way. To celebrate the return of wood, let’s raise our steroid syringes and toast the occasion by banking a few dingers off some drunk’s head in the cheap seats.
As I prepare to pay for three kids in college next month, I recall our family’s amazing trip to Maui last year as we watched July 4th fireworks on the beach overlooking the Pacific. This year, we’ll be enjoying bottle rockets and rat chasers next to a soybean field in Alabama while a group of Bubbas croon, “I’m proud to be an Amurican, whur at least I know um freeeee.” If you have visited Maui and Alabama, I don’t have to explain the difference between those two experiences.
Just when I thought this summer couldn’t suck any harder, along come nightly predictions of apocalypse on Coast to Coast AM, the highest-rated after-dark radio show in America. Evangelicals, readers of Mayan calendars, environmentalists, amateur scholars and a bus full of people eating high-fiber grains have all reserved a seat on the Big Finale Tour of 2012, the year the Mayans said the world, as we know it, would end. Guess they’re getting a five-year head start.
These groups point to everything from honeybees disappearing and Yellowstone’s volcanic bulge to climate changes and Biblical doom. Increasing UFO activity, migratory birds falling from the sky, glaciers melting, earthquakes, nuclear winter, super hurricanes, magnetic pole shifts, Tom Cruise and Scientology – I am scared to go to Wal-Mart to buy an energy-efficient light bulb because – hell-fire-and-damnation-on-a-seseme-seed-bun – the glow from that meteor landing in my kitchen will get the job done.
This summer is the reason I love fall.
