September is all sharp yellow pencils and starting over again. I tend to dislike both of those things. August, on the other hand, is an enormous three day weekend—an ode to nights we stayed out way too late and made terrible decisions. Even so, I’ve been noticing the clock running out, prompting us to tighten the purse strings and break it off with that fabulous summer fling, preparing to accept ourselves for the way we look without a tan. It’ll be another year before we drop the entire contents of our 401k at Beer Lands and smuggle joints into Outside Lands by way of our pantaloons. Goodbye sweet debauchery, we had fun this season, didn’t we?“Goodbye sweet debauchery, we had fun this season, didn’t we?”
Being an adult kind of feels like we’re always waiting for summer to begin. We work through it, grind through it, try to live a little bit wilder in attempts to regain that youthful, emancipated feeling once more. I don’t think we ever find it the way we did when we were kids, but it’s sure fun to try. And try we surely, surely do. We milk the weekends for beloved coastal road trips and BART into the East Bay for summer concerts at Greek Theatre. We wake up before work for sunrise runs, flock to the Presidio Lawn for yoga on Sunday mornings. San Francisco summers have never been about a specific temperature, a red hot degree. Half the time we’re drinking on patios in weather far colder than winter, but it’s the warmth in our souls that brings us that sense of joy. That nostalgic reminder of long days and sandbars and tan lines and cold ice cream melting on hot asphalt. Bottle it up, baby. These are the things worth living for!
At Camp Bob Cut, we’ve been mourning the passing of our favorite season (or at least I have, quite vocally). Summer came like a fabulous set of waves and was gone before I really got my footing. Now, I’m left asking when the time for respite again arrives. Where is the breathing space between seasons? The thoughtful time between parties? The grounded conversations between flights of fancy? I have no answers to these questions. Let me know if you do.
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