Why I Hate Summer

There are a lot of things to love about summer. If you are in school, you get three months (or thereabouts) off. There's the Fourth of July, you get to indulge in two fine American traditions; that is, eating unhealthily and blowing things up with little or no reflection upon the reason why. It's the time for vacations, where you can feign a cultured air because you've been to the beach at Rio De Janiero or gotten drunk at Cancun, or been one of millions of tourists who have a picture of the Great Pyramid. There's baseball, which isn't the most peripatetic of sports, but is a great excuse to get outside, drink too much beer and yell at umpires like you know what you're talking about.

All of this stuff is great, but it doesn't really offset the price you pay in terms of the heat.

Here in the Great Midwest, the heat isn't just hot. It's moist. Moist as in "walking through water" moist. Moist as in "if I step outside of the air conditioner, I need gills" moist. Moist as in "heavy duty deodorant" moist. Well, you get the picture, and it's not a particularly pretty one.

Some people don't seem to mind the humidity as much as I do, and my hats off to them. Well, I don't wear a hat but if I did I would take it off. I guess I'm just one of those wimpy individuals who needs to breathe in order to function efficiently, who needs to have a cool, dry pillow and sheets in order to sleep well, and whose appetite depends on the barometer reading being about 30.

I honestly don't know what people did before AC. The mantra is "well, you didn't miss what you didn't have" or "people were just used to the heat then". Maybe. But didn't people also DIE a lot younger back then, too? Hmm, I wonder if there might be a connection between the two? I have two vivid memories of life in high heat before air conditioner (or at least before we had one when I was young). In one of them I'm around eleven or twelve and was playing whiffleball with some friends in his backyard. The heat was...well, it had to be around 100 degrees and the humidity was high as well. I was in the outfield (I think it was a three on three game) and our team requested a break so we could have a drink and rest a bit. One guy from the opposing team snarked "Oh, the heat kills 'em!" in a very disgusted voice. Well, yeah, it does; sometimes.

The heat is also an archfoe of the, shall we say, "tonally challenged" individual. I've always had very light skin and exposing it to the summer sun results in burning rather than tanning. And before you suggest it, no, I'm not about to irradiate my epidermis in one of those "light coffins" where you pay someone with a junior college degree in hair care to give you cancer. I don't really even mind having light skin, except that it's just another reason for people to tell me I should "get out more", implying, I suppose, that getting out has to mean making your skin have the look and consistency of leather.

The summer is also not a great time if you like life to quiet down just after supper. Nope, those hot months see the sun hanging around WAY past it's winter bedtime. The kids keep right on playing ball, the dogs keep right on barking at cats, the cars whiz by, the neighbors have get togethers that last darned near till the ten o' clock news. Now I don't mean to seem a humbug, but I like winter where the days and nights are clearly segregated and there' s a nice "settling in" period before you hit the hay. Like the warmer weather, the longer hours of light only serve to make us "great indoorsman" seem even more misanthropic than we already do.

Summer also brings with it the great yearly cavalcade of insects; ants, bees, mosquitos, wasps, grasshoppers, crickets, june bugs (possibly a Midwest reference). I don't imagine I have to explain why I don't like insects. I don't have a raving fear or hatred of them, but they are bothersome. In general, given the choice between a frigid climate that keeps tiny crawling things that want to eat my food and lay eggs in my pet's poop quiet, and a warm one that revives them, I think the choice is obvious.

Then there's the lovely business of sweat. Sure, you sweat in all kinds of weather, but summer tends to drive the point home a bit too often and with too much fervor. I don't think sweating is manly, cool, or tough or anything positive, let alone "sexy" (which I sometimes hear, to my utter revulsion). It's just slimy, smelly fluid leaking out of me (and everyone else) that must be combatted forcefully and daily; sometimes in the summer, hourly. In the winter at least you can continue to put on more and more layers of clothing until you are comfortable. In the summer, you can go stark naked and still be hot. And still sweat.

For us summer shut-ins, you'd think at least the boob tube would provide some sort of solace, but alas, the situation there is just as bad. While the rise of cable television has blunted the summer rerun blues somewhat, June through September is still largely a dumping ground for stuff we've either seen before or won't want to see again in the future. Reruns of popular television series coupled with loser pilots and "burnoffs" of shows that are doomed to cancellation predominate.

So summer's pretty much a losing proposition all around for me. It's hot, loud, smelly and more than a little socially isolating. It's strange how none of this stuff seemed to bother me when I was ten years old, though. I didn't sweat that much as a kid, tans were cool not life threatening, and I was playing outside so much I didn't have time to notice the reruns. The Cubs were always on too, so there was new entertainment to be found even after I retired indoors. Kids were everywhere, something was always being celebrated; Memorial Day, the 4th of July, my birthday (in July), my folks' anniversary (same as my birthday), my dad's birthday in August. Sure it was hot in the day but it cooled off nicely at night when my folks and I would sit outside in lawn chairs and listen to the Cubs on WGN radio and talk to the neighbors who usually stopped by. My dad and I played a lot of catch and later he let me help him mow yards. I remember stealing sips of my mom's beloved iced tea and staying up and watching "The Tonight Show" and "Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman" with her. I remember going to Kentucky Fried Chicken (not yet "KFC") every Sunday and making a trip or two to the local go kart/pinball emporium every summer.

Funny how the heat didn't seem to matter so much back then.