By Jefferson Weaver
I hate August.
Not my dear friend of the same name; indeed, I don’t hate any person. Their actions, their attitudes, their hairstyles, political views – maybe. But not the person.
It’s the month of August which I hate, with an abiding, deep-set passion that would make the most violent Jihadi back away, laying down his suicide vest and avoiding eye contact.
August accomplishes nothing, in my opinion. It is a hot, muggy, pesthole of a month, akin to a sewer of garlic-infused zombies. Indeed, I am reasonably certain the month of August inspired the Walking Dead craze to begin with, since it leaves most people shambling, panting, and barely capable of coherent utterances, much less complex sentences.
Zombies I think I can live with, but I abhor August.
August is the time when the most sensible fish have gone deep and nocturnal; that’s okay, since the sun’s molten bronze heat saps the strength of anyone who ventures outside, much less the extra steps to the torrid reflecting pool of a fishing hole. I like fishing at night – but August was also called the Month of All Hungry Mosquitoes, by some Native American tribe or another. Well, maybe not, but it would have been understandable. The nights are so full of skeeters that one needs a couple rounds of high-brass Number Six to make it to the truck, and even then, you’ll still have to squeeze between the bugs. Indeed, in some places, the skeeters are so thick I’ve switched to buckshot. Not that this dratted month would cause me to exaggerate, of course.
August, why do I loathe thee? Let me count the ways.
I simply cannot make it from the house, into the truck, and to the office without my shirt becoming saturated with sweat. It’s almost too hot to drink coffee. It’s too hot to eat, which is a major issue, since I have the metabolism of a shrew and the palate of a gourmand. In other words, I’m hot, sweating, possibly smelly, hungry and deprived of caffeine. There are those who think my bride should have a license to keep dangerous animals for the month of August, just so I don’t have to be out roaming the streets like a stray dinosaur with sociopathic tendencies. Such critics might be right.
August, you disgust me.
I write for a living, but August often drives the creative muse to the airport and sends it to someplace temperate, like the North Pole. Ergo, my phrases often become lofty, lugubrious, unnecessarily loquacious, anachronistic, archaic (if not downright arcane), idiomatic, idiotic, irritating and irrelevant. Not to mention that August always aggravates me into alliteration that is agitating, awkward, angry, anarchistic, apoplectic, antisocial, apocryphal, and actually downright antithetical at times.
August, you could make the pre-conversion Grinch cringe. Indeed, you are less cuddly than a seasick crocodile. Dr. Seuss never wrote a book about you simply because he wanted to educate, enlighten and entertain children – not send them screaming to their rooms to revert to thumbsucking—and that’s just the teenagers.
August is not a month. It is 31 days of torment, of regret, reprehension, redundancy, revulsion, and raw armpits. There’s that alliteration again.
August is too hot to ride a horse, too hot to ride a bicycle, too hot to walk, and too hot to swim. If months were insects, April would be a cricket welcoming spring; May would be a brightly-colored butterfly; June, a happy green grasshopper; July, a graceful Luna moth enjoying the night sky – and August a malevolent mahogany wasp, resistant to most pesticides, one which doesn’t die with the first sting, but instead keeps inflicting misery out of sheer perversity, even after being crushed and squashed under a strong shoe sole.
August is indeed a plague-carrying pest that feeds on the souls and psyches of mankind. It doesn’t even feed efficiently, but just tears off the tastiest chunks of a shattered heart and wastes the rest of the sweat-seasoned carcass.
Although a very few classical writers have described the Kingdom of Satan, better known as the depths of Hell, as a frigid, icy nightmare, I’m reasonably sure that, even without the Revelation of St. John, authors describe the Bad Place as a torment and torture by fire and heat because said writers endured the month of August.
August in any place other than, say the extreme tip of Tierra del Fuego, Southern Australia, the peaks of Everest, McKinley or Kilimanjaro, or possibly one of the poles, has to be a foretaste of eternal damnation. Maybe that’s why, before the advent of air conditioning, so many revivals used to take place during August.
By August, politics, baseball and some out-of-school children are becoming bombastic, boring, bratty and in some cases, brain-dead. After the first week, August is like the proverbial three-day-old fish – but that fish, either piscatorial or metaphorical, won’t even last one day during August.
But soon, although never soon enough, September will strike down the imp of August like an avenging angel.
The corn will reach its full golden splendor, and fields will tremble with the might of the harvesters rolling down the sentineled rows. Those selfsame fields will then echo with the sound of shots, fellowship and occasionally, a shout of victory as the religion that is dove season opens to all the faithful. September is a time for remembering old dogs and good friends, and frantically pedaling a bicycle to the hardware store for another box of shells and a soft drink speckled with ice.
Some of the grapes will begin to ripen, the black-purple replacing the struggling blue of the rabbit eyes and the sweet-tart charm of blackberries. Many apples and some pears have already begun to ripen, but the best won’t reach their peak until September soothes the smarting soreness of August. September is when I can get a good inventory on the next persimmon grove I shall raid, even though I won’t gather a single blushing quince-cousin until after at least one frost in November – assuming the deer, possums, coons, foxes and birds will share.
September is when the shoals of blues and jacks fight the rollicking surf ahead of a storm born off Africa with the express purpose of flirting with the Carolina coastline. I can do without the damage and adventures of a hurricane, but everyone knows the best fall fish run north of a tempest. September is a time for getting a little last minute training in on a new puppy, or helping an older dog regain some of the craftsman’s attitude lost over the summer.
The surviving baseball teams play like they mean it, and the Friday night lights of the only kind of football I enjoy draw the faithful to country stadiums like moths to a flame.
September is a kind mother, smelling of biscuits, who comforts a sniffling child recently bullied and insulted by August.
Indeed, September almost makes August little more than a bad memory, one to be forgotten as September rolls over into October, which gently transfers ownership to November, to be followed by the sometimes schizophrenic but always beloved December, and the challenge of January – only to be followed by the other month I hate, that wretched minion known as February.
But for now, I’ll enjoy the last of the best part of summer, and hunker down amidst air conditioning, cold drinks and a bad attitude for a few weeks.
After all, that’s what one does, when one hates August.
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