By Myles Ludwig
As we drift inexorably and aimlessly into the dog days of summer and the annual oppression of August begins to weigh upon us, I have to admit I’m glad not to wake up to the sound of the thundering hooves of the apocalypse again.
It’s time for a rest.
Outrage is behind us; we can barely work up a smirk about Weiner and Spitzer, a hot political pastrami sandwich left under the infrared warming lights too long. They’ve dried out and the mustard has curdled. In Rio, the unstoppable Cariocas are multitasking with a samba beat: shaking their collective booties, catching rays and rocking with the pope. I’m wondering about the future of those used popemobiles. Can one be bought and used as a beach buggy or a golf cart, or are they scrunched into a metal chunk the size of a priority mail package and dipped in bronze as icons of modern religion — faith on wheels, as it were?
The smell of barbecued vegan burgers and French fried kale perfumes the air and a sort-of-new Woody Allen movie opens, his latest cinematic Cliff Notes on the classics. This one’s a Madoff-inspired riff on A Streetcar Named Desire. One Tennessee Williams, one War and Peace, one Crime and Punishment is not enough for the meister jokester of do-overs. Mick Jagger has turned 70 and he is definitely beginning to flap with a pronounced creak. Team Adam gets another tat, its own bottled smell (a little like gefilte fish), and Keith Richards has finally grown into his face.
The rest of us alta rockers are beginning to fade into the distance. We’re tuning up our hearing aids, polishing our bifocals, checking out walkers, searching for solace in the philosophy of Epicurus and thinking seriously about which island is which out there in the Aegean where people live longer than the rest of us because they have nothing else to do, and which one, minus Wi-Fi, might suit us best.
We’ve spent the week cooing over a prince formally known as a fetus and indulged our suppressed desire to be ruled by royalty other than Mr. and Mrs. Carter. Egypt is still writhing, another hurricane is bearing down on Hawaii (a bit over 10 years since the last one caromed of Kauai, leaving the island decimated and off-limits for tourists for a year) while we are glad the Duchess of Cambridge looks good in polka dots and Prince William can snap a car seat into the back of his Range Rover like any commoner and drive off to Kensington Palace.
We’re starting to collect memorable anecdotes of our youth in our public storage rooms. We’re going to hand them down to our grandchildren as experiential nuggets whether they want them or not: “Well, my little whippersnapper, I remember the old days when war was cold, nobody had a GPS to tell them where they were, Facebook meant a mug shot, we were pretty careful about we liked or didn’t like… when Nixon finally resigned and marijuana was illegal. I remember when the Lone Ranger was real, when we played Spin the Bottle and Candy Land instead of Candy Crush Saga. I remember Gabby Hayes.”
These are the melancholy days when crusty editorial writers pull out their lyrical notes and rhapsodize about summer sunsets, last pleasures, when pizza was really pizza and write news stories about transportation accidents, invoke hot peppers, sad songs and horror movies, and the triumph of mind over body, and rail about insects in yogurt. These are the days, my friends, when Europeans and psychotherapists go on vacation leaving Dominique Strauss-Kahn with an empty pimp cup and New York with a month’s supply of Ambien and a padlock on the Home Shopping Network channel.
I remember these days as a kid. They were a bit fraught. We knew they’d end much too soon, before we’d get our first kiss and before we’d be returning to the drudgery of academics. It must be especially so here in Florida where schools are, well, failing.
So far, the best sign of summer I’ve seen is Shaq’s irresistible face on tall thin cans of cream soda in two different flavors. He’s reached sodastardom.
I’ll have another Shaq, please.
Myles Ludwig is a media savant living in Lake Worth.