Summer Summer Summer

It’s pretty quiet around here. Not literally. Figuratively. The air conditioning is struggling to keep up with a hot sun and temps in the upper 80’s. The sun seems to be at a high noon position from 9am to 3pm. It’s still early in May... so this will continue on for a while. Summer is unofficially here for the next four and a half months.

I liked summer growing up. School was out and baseball was played. In later years, school was out and basketball was played. Later still, school was out and rock and roll music was played. From 2000-2005, summer meant the stress of keeping grass that is cut down to an eighth of an inch high alive and green. All environmental conditions are trying to convince these tiny little grass plants to give up, turn brown and fade away. It’s not always easy, there’s conflict. Man vs Nature. Man vs Mother Nature. Man vs Nature so that another man can putt his golf ball on a lush and true surface. Expectations, reasonable and unreasonable. It can get to the point where it’s Man vs Man and Nature is just a point of argument. Stressed out plants. Stressed out people. Stressed out resources. Some people thrive on it. Some people thrive on it for a while. Some people really, really care. Others really don’t. Some people understand. Some people won’t.

Pretty universal. Pretty universal in our western developed world. Go to the third world (or poor niches of our world) and survival is the greatest priority. I don’t see too many Afghan folks concerned about on the job stress or an upcoming performance review. That’s all us. We have it so easy we can bury ourselves under our own trivialities and contrived contrivances. Not that they’re not real, these trivialities (some probably are), they are real… real pitiful (Man up! and Woman up!). I write this for my own reality check as much as anything… we are lucky to be born here. We have it so very easy. They don’t have to create conflict, it finds them. Armed conflict, even. I dare say it haunts them in their dreams at night as it haunts them during the day. I’m haunted by things far less daunting. Like that dream where I have one class left in college that I need to graduate, but I haven’t gone to class all semester or read any of the books and I can’t remember my locker combination and all the toilets are overflowing in the bathrooms and I can’t get to sleep because I can’t find my bed in the dorm. That one’s brutal. People in the third world would love to have that dream. I hope they get to one day. Then we could all move on to more important matters, like Miss California.