Read a conceit on social media that intrigued me. It asked readers to remember the last time they got together with all or most of the youthful friends who created their closest, steadiest, most dependable adolescent playmates.
For me, it’s a good presumption these curtains came down at the ends of summers. Just before Labor Day Weekend. Continue reading Sweet Green Hours
August is the Mojave Desert’s most challenging month.
While unavoidably sweltering, it’s generally less torrid than July. August actually starts letting residents kind of imagine autumnal respite in ways July absolutely forbids.
Until the last several summers, July counted as the “monsoon month.” Indeed, rain in quantifiable measures wetted if not outright soaked this region. Away from Las Vegas in the desert proper one might’ve believed he or she heard the parched dirt greedily gulp whatever rain had fallen. Continue reading Useless Clouds
Give or take a few years, a wave of contemporaries will join me sloshing into retirement. Some are younger and have ever-shorter distances to go. Others, having been there for a while, welcomed me at the finish line. A few leaned into the same tape as I did.
I think we share this mutual view: we don’t believe we’ve made it; we’re grateful to have “finished” the race. As I must’ve written elsewhere, now I know why my parents were so happy when work stopped scheduling their lives. Continue reading Arc of the Ball
August is the reason the French refer to September as “reentry.”
Like some Old World countries, the Belle Republique takes a month off after the bombast and celebrations of July. Americans should do that here in the New World but wouldn’t this just be the thing to interrupt our motorcycle rallies and guns shows? Besides, we must grudge the notion of vacation. Isn’t it a national trait? Instead of seeing time off as deserved, ah, earned, business and our hamsters on wheels go-getting natures insist we disdain time away from the millstone.
That’s just wrong. Continue reading Long. Languid. Like August.
The 2023 silly season turned sinister PDQ, didn’t it? Continue reading This Silly Season
Despite the mounting profusion of ads for Halloween, the bloom of summer remains fragrant. Besides, this was written in September. At least two weeks yet before Michael Myers, Freddie Krueger, and Jason Voorhees start invading screens for marathon gore sessions. Continue reading Solstice Serenades
In our fractured age, do children still discover pleasure in chasing elusive fireflies and capturing them for display in jars? Continue reading Sirius Hours
In the Mojave Desert, residents are on the cusp of our least wonderful time of year. Indeed, if Andy Williams had to sing about this season those lyrics would get stuck in his throat.
Summer. Already in mid-May Las Vegans can expect triple digit temperatures. As the month elides into June it becomes hotter with July and August turning everyday into a constant blow torch of torrid.
Throughout summer, I thank American breweries for 30 packs! Continue reading Let Us Broil
Autumn stretches a lighter hand across the Mojave than she does upon the Northeast.
Although the desert days shorten and the shadows lengthen as well deepen earlier, the chill which accompanies these shifts lack the same heralding of great changes which will occur in New York.
Except in the dispatch that follows. Continue reading Gone Shadows
Looks like the 2021 Silly Season will be vicious. Usually, these months don’t leave much behind in the way of planet-realigning events. Uh, other than the outbreak of the Great War and Martin Luther King’s appearance at the Lincoln Memorial.
Safe to assume this August will deposit avoidable death on us as it further scars American society. Continue reading A Grim Silly Season