Summer took its own sweet time arriving this year, with a cool, rainy spring that extended halfway through June. Then came the Work Apocalypse that’s kept me cooped up at the office during the daylight hours for the last six weeks or so, the peak of the hot weather in these parts. And I haven’t had a lot of fun on the weekends lately, either, due to a string of misadventures and the general sense of exhaustion that comes from working too damn much. As I result, I feel like I’ve missed out on the whole season.

Oh, the high temperatures are still topping 90, but if you’re paying attention at all, there’s no question we’ve passed a turning point. The “monsoon” rains that usually hit around the first of August have come and gone, and in their wake, the days have lost their furnace-like intensity, like a fire that’s been banked for the night. The mornings are getting cooler, and there’s a mellow quality to the air that always reminds me of the smell of pencil shavings, and leather jackets, and pretty co-eds in plaid wool skirts.

Normally, back-to-school time is my favorite part of the year. The cooler weather suits me better than the scorching dog-days, and it makes for lovely top-down driving conditions. And I like the golden-hour sunlight that starts to predominate as the earth tilts toward autumn. But this year, the approach of fall just makes me sad. It’s coming too soon. I resent having the summer stolen from me by circumstances beyond my control. And I keep thinking of something I once heard an aging movie star — I think it may have been Cary Grant, or maybe it was Michael Caine — say to Johnny Carson about savoring every summer, because he didn’t think he had many left. Not that I expect to kick the bucket anytime soon, but we humans do only get a finite number of summers, don’t we? It’s some kind of tragedy to have to piss one away in a haze of indistinguishable and unfulfilling days spent in the belly of a relentless corporate machine.

But then, I guess we’re not supposed to think that way if we’re lucky enough to have a job in this economy. God, I’m getting tired of those three words, “in this economy.” Seems to me that they’re turning into a convenient excuse for a lot of BS we wouldn’t otherwise be willing to put up with…

I’ve taken a lot of crap over the years for choosing to express my masculine identity via an obvious — and in these parts, at least, uncommon and frequently mistrusted — visual signifier, i.e., a beard. As I’ve discussed before, I’ve experienced a fair amount of rejection because of it. But more often I’ve been met with simple puzzlement. Many of my fellow Utahns can’t conceive of why a person would want to have fuzz on their face, and saying that I just want to be myself rarely satisfies their curiosity. Well, now I have something else I can say the next time some well-meaning conformist asks the inevitable:

And if that’s not enough for you, there are nine more reasons where that one came from. Thanks to my fellow beardite Andrew Sullivan for pointing me there.

Aren’t we a pair, raggedy girl?

The other day, my dad, watching me make a sandwich while my kitty-boys twined themselves around my legs and tried to coax me into dropping some lunchmeat into their greedy, adorable little paws, made the following quip:

“Anyone who thinks they’re ready to be a parent ought to try living with three cats first.”

You know, every once in a while, Dad displays a startling level of insight.

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(Incidentally, have I mentioned I have three cats now? I didn’t set out to become a crazy cat guy or anything, but the way this situation developed… Basically, this new female cat showed up in our barn a couple years ago. She was obviously young and, although a bit stand-offish, much friendlier than the usual transient barn cats we get around the Bennion Compound. Our working hypothesis is that she had been somebody’s pet, rather than a feral animal, and some jackass didn’t want her anymore and dumped her, and then she somehow found her way to us. Well, there are a lot of other cats in the neighborhood and it didn’t take long before the poor thing was knocked up and very, very confused and unhappy. As I said, she appeared to be young, and possibly didn’t understand what’d happened to her. In the past, when the feral cats who hang around have had kittens, my parents and I haven’t found them until they were already mobile and quite wild. In this case, mother and children were accessible, and irresistible in the wake of Shadow’s death not long before. Three of the kittens ended up imprinting on me. Evinrude, Hannibal, and Jack — a.k.a. my kitty-boys — are now indoor-outdoor cats who pretty much have the run of the Compound, while their mother mostly stays out in the barn and wants as little to do with her brood as possible. And somehow, just like that, I’m a crazy cat guy.

I won’t mention Mom and Dad’s two cats, who bring the grand total around the Compound to six. Shadow would no doubt be appalled if he knew his territory had been overrun with the other kind. And yes, animal activist types, they’ve all been fixed.)

Scanning around the TV dial this morning while eating my Post Cherry Almond Crunch — I highly recommend that stuff, by the way; it’s available in jumbo boxes from Costco — I had quite a range of viewing options. I could have watched Good Morning, America blathering about Chelsea Clinton’s wedding; The Today Show blathering about Chelsea Clinton’s wedding dress; The Early Show on CBS blathering about some missing kid whose stepmom is the prime suspect in his disappearance; or Pork Chop Hill, an old war movie starring Gregory Peck and featuring Norman Fell — a.k.a. Mr. Roper from Three’s Company — in a supporting role.

Guess which one I ended up watching?

When I was seven years old, my parents and I embarked on that great American ordeal — um, that is tradition — that figures so prominently in the lore of many families, the California Road Trip. Naturally, given my age at the time, I was utterly preoccupied by the mystical siren-song of Disneyland, but we also hit a lot of other attractions along the way, some well-known, some not so much, and a few that were masterpieces of good old-fashioned roadside kitsch. In the latter category, I’m thinking of the Roy Rogers and Dale Evans Museum, located on the legendary Mother Road, Route 66, in Victorville, CA. Not that I knew what Route 66 was back in those days. I didn’t know what kitsch was either, and I certainly didn’t know who Roy Rogers and Dale Evans were. But my parents did — Roy and Dale were as much a part of my mom and dad’s childhoods as Captain Kirk and Spock were to mine — and they were as giddy as kids themselves when we pulled our 1970 T-Bird into an empty parking lot in what seemed to me like the hottest, most desolate place in the world. (This was years before I visited Phoenix!)

The museum didn’t look like much from the outside, merely a plain, warehouse-style building with a tremendous statue of a prancing horse out front. I would soon learn that the statue was of Roy’s famous pal Trigger, and its pose mirrored the one exhibit I still clearly remember from our visit to that place: the taxidermied remains of the real Trigger, standing on display like a life-size action figure on a collector’s shelf. There were other mounted animals there as well — Roy’s dog Bullet, and Dale’s horse Buttermilk — but it was Trigger that commanded all the attention in the room, even from an ignorant kid like myself.

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My friend Karen posted this cartoon the other day. I was amused.

It’s probably just as well we no longer live in the culture depicted here, though. The way things have been going at the office the past couple of weeks, my ashtray would be overflowing, my bottom desk-drawer full of empties, and my vision blurry from drink. It’s blurry now, but that would be from working until 10:30 last night and coming back in first thing this morning. Alas.

Yeah, I can relate to this at the moment…

UPDATE: Hm. My sidebar appears to chop off the right side of the comic strip. Sorry about that; I figured it would float over the sidebar like video clips often do. If you just click on the cartoon, you’ll be taken to the Official Dilbert Site, where you can read it in all its glory.

Yes, I am still at the office at 8:23 PM. For the third time this week. With more yet to come. Grrrrr.

Anyhow, the big air-conditioning unit that’s mounted above my cubicle just shut down for the night. While the silence is a blessed change from the constant white noise, there’s also something deeply sad about it. The suddenly unmoving air seems to somehow absorb the sensation of life and activity that usually permeates the old cube farm, and it starts to feel like we’re nearing the inevitable end. Like when the Titanic‘s lights went out just before everything really went to hell.

Or maybe it’s just sad that I’m here late enough to witness the energy-saving protocols going into effect. As I said earlier, grrrr.

So, I just took a phone call from someone who identified himself as a freshman in the College of Humanities at my alma mater, the University of Utah. I knew instantly that it was a plea for money; I’ve fended off quite a few of them over the years, and I can recognize the signs before the caller even finishes identifying themselves. Yes, I’m one of those bad alumni who don’t give back. I rarely have any spare cubits to give, and, depending on what kind of mood I’m in at the moment they call, I tend to have a somewhat jaundiced opinion of my college education, and of the expectation that I ought to provide the place with any more funding than I already gave during my five years as a student there.

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