Down with August
While I harbor no particularly negative feelings toward Wings, Jefferson Airplane, or Jerry Garcia, I so agree with the thesis of this polemic against the month of August: It consistently sucks. Decimate it! Diminish it! Down with August!*
It sure is swell to collect some external validation for my intense, long-standing, and mostly irrational personal prejudice against the month.
August is for me the anxiety and indigestion that ushered in a new school year and its attendant social insecurities. Later I graduated to paralyzing fears of academic and professional failure.
August is about Type A dysfunction, exacerbated by oppressively hot, restless nights.
I’ll never be ready for August. August means premature endings. People leave in August and never return. Marriages dissolve beyond repair in August. August is when my little sister drove that damn hand-me-down car all the way up to the Great Library in the Sky.
And there in the middle of this miserable month is the most uncomfortable day of the year. For as many birthdays as I can remember, I’ve choked on feelings of inadequacy and despair, or mild embarrassment in the best of times. Martha Stewart’s calendar indeed offers little consolation to someone prone to bathetic metaphorical thinking:
“If it rains, organize basement.”
*Hat tip to the Librarians’ Internet Index for unearthing the 2001 Slate column.
August 18th, 2008 at 3:37 pm
August is the month of Mini-KT et moi lounging in the lawn chair while the Daddy & Jims rode grueling bike hours. We the Sag-Wagon drivers were quite good at just that. Saggin’ and waggin’.
August is the month of holing up in the AC to avoid the roast of Indy humid heat. Mini-KT et Maman did that too.
August is the month of going to the lake to eat cold spaghetti, puke it at midnight, and drive 150 miles in a VW in the 1976 gas crisis in a gaudy pink and turquoise nightie and Grandpa’s gold terry bathrobe singing “Take it to the Limit” for comfort in the storm on the way to the hospital.
August is the month that Kate and I worked our way through her passage into this world, she my first and frankly unimpeachably successful original model.
Passages are the theme of August. I will not trade what amazing treasure August has brought me for all the grief it has left in its wake.
Vive Augustus!