Summer Vacation
Summer Vacation
Ryan was the first and then me. Mitch got nailed in April, which was weird because he was an accountant and it happened right before tax day. Sister in law's dad got dinged way back in November, but it didn't come out till March. Just the other day I found out that Angela was out and that Ian was going to be terminated at the end of the school year. We used to be in banking and software. We were teachers and litigators. But in the year 2009, we are just people stripped of the most fundamental bit of schema that defines us in this society. When someone asks, “What are you?”, you answer with the name of your job.
It's like you would expect. You start out kind of getting off on the whole thing. Daytime TV. Workouts. You clean more than usual. You'll sit and drink your coffee instead of getting a cup to go. After a few weeks you start to have “bad days”. Days where you don't see another human being. Days when you don't leave the house. After two months you can't really remember what working life was like. Even on bad days, the thought of going back to a 10 hour a day job is enough to induce a little panic attack. This is mostly due to the fact that you do things more thoroughly when you're unemployed. Why, with a job you wouldn't have time for anything at all.
There are good days too. You try to manufacturer situations that make the good days more likely. It's important to seek out human contact, even if you don't like people. You try not to find yourself hung over or malnourished. These things will kill the chances for a good day.
Inevitably, the many hours of so-called free time leads to introspection. Where is my life going? How am I going to bounce back? Why am I such a fucking loser? Why do I want to be next?
When someone asks a year from now, “What are you?”, what am I going to say?
June gloom has moved to Southern California and put up curtains. Somewhere above the gray summer is raging. We feel the heat made balmy by the moisture in the air. As the lazy days drag on into this wretched year, the sun makes ever more frequent appearances. Barbecues. Swimming. Sandals. Beer.
We're kids again with nowhere to be and time to kill. These months of ironically recaptured freedom are all we ever wished for all those days riding a desk and watching the clock. We're trying to enjoy this, but sometimes it feels so wrong. Sometimes we succeed. Some nights when it's 71 degrees and we're cooled by a thin glow of summer sweat we get it done. There our relative youth, our resolve to rebuild, our anger and our guile. There's the government suspiciously conceding and giving us back some of our money so we can pay the rent. There's family and friends and the effort to just be kind of zen about it all. Most of all there's the summer. There's the shitty event movies, bonfires, char blackened breasts of chicken and burgers. Circumstance has put us in an embarrassing but nevertheless novel position. We're going to enjoy this summer and we refuse to feel guilty about it. We're going to get tan and thin and strong, and when we get back to the real world, when we define what we “are” again, we'll be a little younger and a little wiser.