Just a little crazy
Topic: Raving
I was looking at some pictures that Mike Doughty posted from an outdoor gig he played in Boston recently, which reminded me that I missed Artscape in Baltimore this weekend, and I suddenly felt the strangeness of living through winter* in July. Even more strangely, I felt a deep craving for an East Coast summer.

I want to walk out my door and into a wall of hot, heavy air that sticks to my skin. I want to wonder why it is that humidity weighs down my clothes, yet impels my hair to wander far and wide from whatever style I've attempted to train it into. I want to need no excuse for lying around all day, because everybody recognizes that its just too hot to move. I want it to be summer, and I want it to be the summer I know, not the summer here that I briefly experienced when I first arrived, all dry heat and intense glare.

I remember the many little miseries of city summers. I lived through a bad one the summer after college, in a sub-let studio apartment with no air conditioner. I remember lying absolutely still in my bed night with the fan blowing directly across me, hoping I'd fall asleep before I felt the need to turn my pillow over again in a fruitless quest to find a cool spot. I remember wanting it just to be cool enough that I wouldn't start sweating as soon as I turned off the water in the shower. I remember that, when the wind did blow, it only brought in the smell of tar from the roof. And yet the summer that I love is the summer that feels like a sauna and smells like things that haven't been properly dry for days, and right now, as crazy as it sounds, I'm envying all of you who are having that summer.



*This must be qualified with the disclaimer that the season referred to as "winter" in Melbourne would barely pass muster as late fall in most places I've lived.