The Lint of August

Posted on August 26, 2004 in Depression Memory Weather

I participated in an open mike poetry reading tonight and my performance, like much of my August, was sucky. Though I had good material, I declaimed it poorly. I felt like so much chopped up gray. When I drove home, I pushed the air conditioner to its highest notch so that the stickiness stepping in from the coast would freeze and fall to the floorboards instead of adhering to my skin.

I’ve never liked August. Not for the Feast of the Assumption. Not for my dad’s birthday which fell on the same day. Not for the lion of the zodiac. Not for the clear night skies. August is the empty streets of Zagreb remembering in asphalt the parboiling of ferns in an ancient tropical heat. It is San Bernardino vomiting from the smog and the threat of September when things get hotter and dryer. It is the first fires. And it is the time when no one comes to anything worth doing together.

August is a wad of lint.