Cup of Unsweetened Summer

5:09 PM, Wednesday, 91 South, sluggish and jerking towards the 291 exit in the narrow hope of lessened traffic and the virtues of illusionary speed limit freedom. Bittersweet summer, my summer, taunting; attempting to force guilty air conditioning and thoughts of going nowhere and how the use of air conditioning results in spending a zillion dollars on gas; the same gas that churns a profit for the upper classmen of Exxon and Sunoco who are sitting in air conditioned office spas convincing our ignorant little president that there is a supply and demand problem that can only be rectified by more dead soldiers and deforestation. And higher prices.

The windows stay down in diminutive and dismal defiance.

Saddling beside me, just as stalled, is a metallic silver Corolla, with an oversized spoiler serving virtually no purpose other than to mimic an epic shark fin on an exaggerated, overzealous guppy. Its stereo, costing the teenage owner more than he spends on child support in a year, discharges voluminous doses of Usher. Despite his windows being up, the bass growls along my spine; of course, it has to be this loud, he wants every driver on 91 South to hear it, for it is his way of saying “I am the Chosen One to enlighten you with my insubstantial self-assertion into your life.” Usher. My God, this boy has no soul.

I think all souls have dissipated into the asphalt.

I don’t mind the heat, nor the sweat balling up under my shirt; I am out of work, on my way home, my stink is my own, no one to impress with un-frazzled hair and pressed pajamas; let it all go to hell as the shoes will soon be off and seduced by the stillness. But I can hear them, these Nowhere People, forever bitching about the heat; the same way they bitched about the winter, or the rain-split spring, or the decay of Autumn and the onslaught of New England heating bills; or anything-anywhere-anytime; regardless of time zone, universe, or Survivor outcome. Forever ensnared in the details of the media misery parade, they mimic the sound bites at work, at garden parties, and within earshot of anyone that doesn’t want to hear; feigning intelligence like a desperate chameleon clinging to fit the scenery of ineffectual acceptance.

Acceptance is sometimes too easy a way out.

Then again, maybe this as well, this indiscriminate summer, has balled underneath everyone’s shirts; the nagging deceit suffered by millions of Americans, scrimping and skewering a pittance of two-weeks vacation a year, edgy with pressured and chiseled itineraries and escapist dreams that crumble as fast as they are constructed; back to work, back to jammed copiers and leadership by omission, to a land of the misbegotten and bedeviled. I am, in this moment, the living metaphor for the workforce; mired, overheated, disheveled. All chameleons, forced to change our colors. To fit, to match; our wages, our noble obligations, weakened by the lure of retirement at a time when our legs, livers, and love gives out. Europeans taking off the month of August are amused by us. We merely fight back with a God complex, and the matching war-blood red, religious right white, and the 9-to-5 blues.

And we hold onto a few vacation days just in case day care falls through.

5:21 PM, minutes from false hope, the relief of making forward progress; at least to a home where the curtains can be drawn to a tight close, and a few open hours to cling to before the sudden dusk and wrinkled sheets descend. Wednesday is running out, running away; tomorrow assures a reproduction, a novice rerun with low ratings and an unknown cast; cast-off, castaways; the summer sun strains and promises under the disguise of dawn. There’s coffee with slight, bitter smiles, and the faint possibility of an offhanded drive to the ocean. If it were only the weekend, if only everyday were the weekend, filled with the sweetened summer, filled with the deceptions we have learned to blindly grasp, sold to us. We have to buy, we were raised under shaded, listless maples and lazy-lawn afternoons; the aftertaste of freedoms vanquished, and we are left to fend for shards of contentment and squandered inspirational memories with every passing, unfulfilling payday.

At least there’s always coffee.