Summer misery

My last two Friday newsletters have referenced the late summer misery of September. (See: “The cruelest month.”)

From “The Birds are in misery”:

It is so miserable in Texas right now that I’ve taken to reciting Werner Herzog’smonologue from Les Blank’s Burden of Dreams: “The trees here are in misery and the birds are in misery. I don’t think they sing. They just screech in pain…. It’s an unfinished country. It’s still prehistorical. The only thing that is lacking is the dinosaurs here. It’s like a curse weighing on an entire landscape. And whoever goes too deep into this has his share of that curse. So we are cursed with what we are doing here. It’s a land that God, if he exists, has created in anger…. Taking a close look at what’s around us, there is some kind of harmony, but it is the harmony of overwhelming and collective murder. And we in comparison to the articulate vileness and baseness and obscenity… we in comparison to that enormous articulation, we only sound and look like badly pronounced and half-finished sentences…” (Summer here will end one day… in November, probably.)

I need to take this note to myself from September 2020 and auto-email it to myself every June:

Summer is a season for doing as little as possible. If I get any more of them, I plan to get through them by swimming and reading and generally practicing as much extreme idleness as I can get away with.

From my letter, “Summer is cooking my heart”:

One thing I know for sure that my notebooks have taught me is that life is not linear. Life is more like a spiral. We travel around the sun and we live in meteorological, spiritual, and creative seasons. “Live in each season as it passes,” Thoreau wrote in his own notebook in late summer of 1853, “and resign yourself to the influences of each.” (I would add: the more you deny the season you’re in, the more you suffer.) When I visit myself in the pages of my notebooks — flipping through an old summer diary, for example — I see that my patterns are well-established and that I’ve been here before and I’ll be here again. (If I’m lucky, that is.) Keep going!

On that note: It’s the first day of fall and Halloween is 39 days away…