Enemies strengthen you. Allies weaken.

It is pretty much summer. Summer is at worst failed expectations in a firestorm and at best sloshball days and cool nights. Railroad tracks with Jason Molina as crooning whiskey preacher. I've been trying to get a few people to make compilations of summertime music. Throw it my way. An acceptable summer mix could also basically just be 90s indie rock. Almost all of that stuff sounds like baseball bats cracking, pebbles crunching, and some kid realizing some profound shit in an altered state. It's a fun time to be alive, even if the main appeal of summer (a real tangible break from any aspect of your life you hate - school!) has been rendered moot with continued existence. Still, it continues to evoke strange feelings out of me, despite just being something that happens every year around this time. If winter is all about being down and out, summer is the BRINGER OF GREATER THINGS. And yet that thinking is kind of dumb, and puts a lot of pressure on a summer to stand and deliver.

Summer is that snake that just keeps eating its tail. That hungry snake! I think his name is Herbert! Check out these words of MINE, from a couple of years ago, roughly this same exact time: 25 years old, very poor, experiencing a crush you should get out of your system when you are in high school, keeping it low down, dirty, and useless since 2002. Historiography, married women, an anti-coming of age film, swine flu, death on the installment plan. Love, love, love.

The "love, love, love" is an ode to a Mountain Goats song. I wasn't insane. Everything else is pretty boilerplate Alex. I'm of the opinion boilerplate Alex is pretty cool at this exact moment, so I ain't trippin, bruh bruh. I guess my main point, if I had one, is that for whatever silly reasons, summer is an extremely special time, and shit always seems to HAPPEN with a frequency. I will be forty five years old and I'll still consider summer bildungsroman times. Going to parks to get my basketball ON(!), porch and stoop times, nights that just don't end, hatching deviously benign schemes and getting teary eyed listening to Drake or Cinerama, I channel my hero George W. Bush and say BRING IT ON, BRUH BRUH. I get the sense more and more every year that this kind of thing has to stop. But I'm going to pretty much deny that until the moment I die. Not a principled stand, but a stand.

I have a gross summer goal and a lot of free time. Get at me, younglings. I miss you.