Summertime Blues

Normally Flashback Friday is a happy occasion, but today, I read the unfortunate news that Oscar-winning actor “Macho Man” Randy Savage died at the age of 58.

So before we get going with things, I’d like to mention it for a brief moment.  Many will remember the Macho Man from his once-ubiquitous “beef” (and mechanically-separated chicken parts) jerky ads in which he beseeched viewers to “Snap into a Slim Jim,” if they “need a little excitement (OOOH YEAH!),” and though this isn’t a wrestling website, and I am not a wrestling fan, I’d feel remiss to not mention his passing.  And besides, he had a definite sartorial sense that I would call “Glam Metal Qaddafi.”

Macho Man started off wrestling in the early 80’s, before the industry became the corporate whatever-it-is today.  Watching it as a kid, the wrestlers were basically hyper-realized cartoon characters whose moral identities as good and evil were at once both easily recognizable, and often subject to change at a moment’s notice.

I never really got into wrestling too much as a kid, my Dad would never buy the pay-per-views and back then, the opponents were unfairly matched. Often, I’d witness a really strong wrestler beating up a nobody for ten minutes.  As a staunch admirer of underdogs, this never really sat well with me.  But, despite all this, I will always associate wrestling with my youth.

I watched the movie Wet Hot American Summer last night, and it occurred to me that summer is right around the corner.  When I was still in school, once finals were over, these would be the lazy last days of the year, when even the teachers were looking forward to that long vacation and would conduct class with a kind of vacant, pleasant malaise with perpetually wistful expressions that today would be attributed to Xanax.

Back then, of course, these absent gazes were clearly just the outward expression of someone dreaming about all the zany places that they would drink General Foods International Coffee Decaf Suisse Mocha Instant Coffee over the summer.

One of the truly surreal things about being an adult is meeting teachers at bars (teachers know how to DRINK, yo).

When I was in high school, it was completely unfathomable to me that teachers could be real people with real lives, but it’s a crazy-mixed up world we live in now, and in a bizarre twist of fate, teachers aren’t just stern Old Testament rod-and-staff Edna Krabappel-automatons anymore.

Nope, some asshole done made them living, breathing, actual human beings, so now, summer is theirs too.  I’m still not 100% on board, but whatever.

You teachers out there, you still get what we took for granted as kids; that three month period each year of unfathomable greatness.  As a working adult, I can’t even imagine having a whole three months off, like I was a kid and could just wake up on like a fucking Wed-nesday or some shit and not have to do a goddamned thing if I didn’t want to.

The Sun at nine in the morning just bathing my corner of the Earth in radiant goodness and millions of whatever-the-hell kind of bugs warbling that ever-present drone, broken up by a CHICKCHICKCHICKCHICK every once in a while letting you know that these were the days of true splendor.

These were the days of life itself that had burst forth from the nothingness of winter all spring into a ninety degree day with nothing to do but catch the ice cream truck and eat Doritos when the only flavor was Nacho Cheese and throw a tennis ball into the pool so your Golden Retriever could epitomize a paragon of six million years of human evolution by diving with gleeful canine abandon into a man-made underground swimming pool to paddle around frantically while lapping up and then reflexively gag-coughing on chlorinated water.

We don’t get to be young forever, and even if I had the whole summer off now, I could never experience it with the child-like sense of wonderment that I once did.  Sure, there are great things about the summer now; the weekend days at the beach, nights at the club, and mornings in a lover’s bed, there’s a lot of fun, and we have access to a lot that we did not as children.  But as children in the summer, we had easy access to the one thing adults spend their entire lives trying to attain: joy.  This summer, you will wake up early on some morning and you will walk outside and you will smell summer and you will know a pleasant longing that you cannot place, a primal memory almost remembered.  It is joy.  Long live summer.