The Long Slide into Numbing Darkness Begins

Sigh. The summer solstice has passed and now the only thing ahead of us is the long slide into numbing darkness.

We were so full of hope last week. The days were getting longer and more and more sunlight flooded this beautiful world. Now that’s all gone. This morning it was a little harder to wake up than it was last week, with the chirps of the birds coming just a little later. Tonight the sun sets at a disappointing 8:33 p.m., giving us a scant 15 hours of daylight.

We’re still having our pool painted and are waiting to fill and open it. But why bother? We’re just going to have less and less time in it before the exhausted sun sinks to the ground. I might as well just start buying Halloween candy now. Soon I’ll put up the Christmas tree and just wait for the snows to start swirling and mercifully bury me in my misery.

It will not be too long before we will smell leaves burning and feel a chill wind destroy the flowers we so carefully planted. It will not be too long before we will walk to and from the office in stubborn darkness.

God, what’s the point?

A list of fast food places I've never eaten at or haven't eaten at in so long that I may as well never have eaten there at all

Taco Bell

Arby’s

Chipotle

KFC

Popeye’s

In-and-Out

Skyline Chili

Checkers

Church’s

White Castle

Carl’s

Hardee’s

Jack in the Box

Sonic

Blimpie’s

Jersey Mike’s

… You know what? You try to come up with content every week! You try to write something fresh after 16 years of doing this! Because let me tell you, mister, it ain’t easy. I work a full week of editing others’ articles and coming up with an editorial calendar for a new publication, and then I’m just expected to, what, tapdance for your amusement? To dance for nickels down at the dock? I’m tired and it’s hard sometimes. I try to entertain people with slices of life, childcare stories, parodic plays, TV recaps, political screeds and all sort of curiosities. And sometimes that well just comes up dry. Sometimes it’s another week and you stare at the calendar and have nothing to say. And that’s when the void opens up. Can’t you hear it howling? I can. It’s that giant emptiness into which slips all your inspiration. You rejoice because you finally have that one idea and it crumbles under the weight of inspection and down it goes, into that void from which nothing can possibly escape except the laughter that mocks you. So you try this sometime.

Empty Pool

An empty pool is just an empty pool, not a gaping metaphor out back, not a nagging reminder of promises rotten on the vine, the life you could’ve led but didn’t.

It means only a solid week of dinnertime thunderstorms and baleful squares of red over local counties that keep painters far and away and futile, not the subtext that nothing can ever happen fast enough for you, that you will never be ready, not matter what you do.

It does not have to mean, despite your Poor Little Rich Boy lamentations, that you will spend a summer fuming and broiling on concrete surfaces with no relief after mowing the lawn. It is only that summer, true Summer, will have to wait a few weeks, while man and nature get it together, a delay you will never remember.

I love a parade

Millions of straight people around the nation, and perhaps the globe, will gather in Boston at the end of the summer to celebrate a first annual Straight Pride Parade. This will entail festivities such as …

Such as … what? There are a ton of snarky answers I could give about what kind of floats the heterosexual bacchanal would include (I’m resisting the temptation to be snarky and give this stupid event any sort of sheen of fun) but I’m really wondering what this event would feature. Beyond trolling, which the organizers confirmed by hiring Milo Yiannowhatever (uninterested in Googling to check spelling) as the grand marshal, what is the point of all this?

One of the organizers says the point is straight people attaining equal rights. Equal to whom? If they’re talking equal to gay people, one of the major legal disparities is that LGBT people and others in many states can be fired for their orientation alone. Straight people cannot. So if these parade ringmasters really want to be equal to gay people in this respect, they’d actually have to take a step down.

There are many examples that one could easily cite to show why LGBT people still face discrimination and disadvantages that others do not but I will give two quick examples to illustrate who really is in a sense on the low end of this seesaw. First, last weekend at the gay pride parade in Detroit, a bunch of neo-Nazis wearing swastikas protested, called people the F-word, pissed on flags, the whole deal. Second, last year at pride in Philadelphia, some yahoos were protesting, saying “Gays should not have children” as we walked by with our son, two days after he moved in (we ignored them and continued to enjoy our day).

Neither of those two things would happen at this straight pride day. The most marchers would get is snark or cattiness from the peanut gallery. When the bottom-feeders of society protest pride like they did in Detroit, they only justify the need for LGBT people to march and celebrate and be visible.

The whole point of pride is because LGBT people were made to be ashamed for so long, and there hasn’t been an equivalent for straight people. This whole dumb parade idea is like asking, “If there’s a BET, how come there’s not a WET? How is that fair? Huh?” followed by a smirk from someone with middle-school level wisdom who assumes he’s made a rock-solid point about a “double standard” but really has much to learn.

So many people—LGBT, African-American, Irish, Puerto Rican, Italian, Polish and more—have their own institutions because they were shut out of the institutions of the dominant groups. They march and celebrate because they once had no visibility and no equality, and they want to share their culture with the world. Parades and other events are to celebrate how far we’ve come, to recognize the shoulders of giants we’re standing on, and to acknowledge how far we have to go.

Late Adopter

So I hear Apple will be killing iTunes and splitting the app into separate apps for music, books, etc. This alarms me less than I thought it would. As I understand it, all my music will translate over and I once I’m set up on the new system (I assume with some help from Steve), everything will be smooth. Maybe my experience will be better as iTunes is very slow to load (I don’t know if it’s my laptop or the app; probably it’s both). I have very simple needs as far as music and as long as my playlists are intact, all the data is correct and all the art is intact, I’m fine. I’m attached to my play counts but I’m not going to nitpick too much if they start over at 0.

I’m a late adopter as far as technology. I didn’t get an iPod until 2007, right as the iPhone was debuting. I still only use my iPod for music. I figure it holds 160 GB and still works fine so I’ll keep using it until it goes. It’s a simple device that does what I need it to do: play music. So I just never bothered to put any music on my phone, but if I have to, the option is there.

I never got into streaming music and I don’t think I will. I already have a large collection of music, most of which I paid for over decades (some in the form of CDs with the Wall lifetime guarantee sticker on the jewel case) so I’m not going to pay per month to access what I already have. Like, why am I paying to hear Purple Rain again when I’ve already worn through several copies? I’m sure the streaming services don’t have everything I have, like all the Madonna remixes I have (and I have all of them) and all the live Tori and Prince B-sides and stuff. With streaming, I’d get access to new albums that I might not buy but I think I’d also be losing stuff. I’m kind of ignorant of this stuff and I’m sure there’s a simple way for me to integrate the music I have but for now, the system works and I don’t want to change it. It doesn’t seem worth it. Technology will be still there if I ever want to evolve.

We seem to be moving beyond this idea that people own their own music, that it’s just out there to grab, but I still like having my stuff. It doesn’t take up any physical space, so what’s the harm? I’ve spent a long time building up my collection and don’t want to give it up, and don’t want to be at the mercy of a streaming service that decides it doesn’t want to carry certain artists or music anymore. (I saw an advantage to my system when Prince died. His music wasn’t on any streaming services at the time so there was a big rush for people to find it. I already had everything ready to go and just had to hit “play” on my old-fashioned iPod.) I have backup hard copies if things go south and I need to rebuild. This works for me.

I have this tendency to skip over technology upgrades and only upgrade when I need to. My phone is an iPhone 6 because it works fine and satisfies my simple needs (although the battery charges don’t last as long so I may be upgrading, but probably not to the fanciest phone). I have regular headphones with wires. Some people care about that stuff and that’s fine, but I just don’t have any interest. I read once that one secret to financial stability is only upgrading or replacing something when you need to. It’s not a standard I live up to all the time but it does make sense.

S l o w

Drivers are passing you because you are too slow. I’m just letting you know this because you look a little confused. “Why is everyone zipping around me on the right? What a world!” I’ll tell you why: because it’s the height of the morning rush hour and you’re doing 56 in a 55. You are too slow and this is why everyone is passing you. You might think you are going pretty fast because you are exceeding the speed limit by 1 mph. But please start driving like people do on highways in the real world. Your car is in the Eisenhower Administration and it needs to start getting into the disco years. I’m sure you can do it. My car has 211,000 miles on it and the engine sounds like a smoker’s cough and it can still get up into the 70s. You’re just too slow. You may be wondering why people are passing you with angry looks on their faces. Look, we’re not angry people. We just want to get to work on time and you are in the wrong lane. At least move over. You simply are not driving fast enough. I don’t know why this is. Maybe you are mentally preparing to turn left in 10 miles and have to trot along in the left lane and slow down miles before your turn rather than staying in the right and moving into the left lane closer to the turn because, “Oh, I get nervous switching lanes on the highway!” Maybe you’re just out of it, a theory that gains credence because you’ve been driving for several miles with your left turn signal on, making a sound and a light right in front of your face. Maybe you’re just inconsiderate, not noticing the traffic stacking up behind you because you’re an island unto yourself and only need to care about when you’ll get where you’re going. I don’t know why you’re this slow and I don’t care. Just, please, either speed up or move over and let the world get by you.