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In my waking dreams, I avoid Summer. Summer doesn’t exist – it goes SpringFallWinter, repeating.

How do I always end up back here, this place I don’t like? Always halfway between let it be and cut it all off, always half out the door one foot in one foot out. Are there really people that live differently? I know there are. They stay put, sentient, in the same house they grew up in, their children now run around indifferently in the backyard, unaware of the mountains of half melted army soldiers their father buried there so many years ago. He used to kick at the cat, a secret he keeps hidden still, since so many articles written about serial killers indicate early onset animal abuse, but he reasons that he never made contact, and that the troubling, dark thoughts about stuffing everyone into a very large pillow case and tossing them into the river are just remnants of a bad dream.

Fucking Summer, man. It’s gone now, except for one day this week, right in the middle, where it’s supposed to be 93. My sister will be here with her baby and husband. My brother will meet him for the first time, probably hold him at arms length and ask “who’s is it?” He lifted me up at Rammstein so I could see the fire cannon above the heads of the very tall white people standing in my way. It reminded me that we were once very good friends who made mud pies on a frisbee, even adding in those helicopter seeds for good measure, or ones that ran to the carwash to get a pop, and sometimes even snuck out through the woods to run to TasteeFreeze for giant Pixiestix and Ring Pops.

“Today I fucked up by walking behind an attractive woman and her dog.” These are the news titles I want to read. Wouldn’t it be fun if everything varied between backlit and sepia-toned, depending on the mood? I wanted to dye my hair so black it was blue but the hairdresser said no, so we settled on purple. I think there was a time when I loved Summer, but I think that was back when I didn’t dislike California so much.