Summer ends only once officially, a few weeks from now. But by my reckoning The Summer Here straggles to an end, bit by bit: the last sweltering night I spend laying in bed and hearing people monkey around in the pool of the student complex next door (I know my neighbors and their friends play a game called "chairball" during the day, but decline to speculate on the pool games they play at 3:45 in the morning, or to go find out); the sudden accretion of Cuyahoga County-plated SUVs, fresh young faces and jort-sporting parent types around town, inversely proportionate to the amount of street parking available, which signals that university move-in day has arrived; the last bedraggled and broken-down, Suncoast-smacking hurricane to wearily dump its remnants upon us, like so much surplus crops upon a Third World market (we've had only one of these, a little piece of Ernesto wandering over right in time for the football season opener Saturday night.)

Soon it will be autumn, my favorite time of the year. It already feels like it. Goodbye to those lazy, hazy, lazy, crazy, lazy, lazy days of summer. I overdo the "lazy" a little. I haven't really been a sloth, in the sense of sprawling across the futon and staring glassy-eyed at trash television, the shifts of my swollen bulk setting off little puffs of Dorito dust, crinkling burrito wrappers and tumbling fallen soldiers. No, no, happily no. As I wrote the other day, I've done a few decent things with it. But if I haven't yet stopped feeling a little under-accomplished at the end of each night, then it is no surprise that the last notes of this summer pile upon each other to sound a whole chord that is...irresolute. Dissonant.

One problem (among many) of growing up thinking that You'll Be A Writer (and this is fundamental to me, the skeleton key to understanding the strange mixed mind that results - full of bravado, unease, discriminate self-exhibition, love of humanity and the impulse to control it - but how pretentious that sounds if you aren't afflicted, or even if you are) is the mystification of that life, which must lead down a path to that nagging discontent. I used to casually imagine, assure myself of ending up in some (no doubt magical) work-place largely out of time and beyond responsibility; I mean, to live that idealized writing life of quiet regularity, no distractions (i.e. the distraction of living in society, having the concerns of social beings - this didn't really figure in those soft-focus visions), a life of waking early each day to greet the muse, whereby we would copulate vigorously (some image of the creative process!). In other words I worshipped the image of a life that few people, if any, actually live, and one that I'm probably not suited for, at least as currently constituted.

But then those have actually been my living conditions for the past two months. Nowhere to be, much less money to do anything with; I've seen the inside of a bar or two, but that's been old for a while. This summer we have seen that however industrious, I am not really regular (strike one), that I have the attention span of a toddler matched with the aspirations of Faust (fouled off), and that I've got these very, very real concerns - old work to make up, work that's coming, a "career" that's rushing up surely enough, and most of all, Kiki being happy and well. Waking before eleven was a struggle all summer, and so the days flew by (the working people of the world collectively mourn for me). This summer, I spent a lot of time (maybe too much) pacing in and around this place as if it were a boat, thinking about my thinking as it was the sea I was drifting over; I thought about those points out on my horizon, wrote, read, floated a little closer to them, but by eye alone there's no way to gauge just where I've gone, just what work of substance I've done. If any.

I figure I have, but what? That's one thing that's been bugging me, and I think of charting it...finding some bearings.

So here and there I'll try recapping some of the summer stuff I alluded to a few days ago.

June 16-17, 2006: A long 36 hour period, as any that takes you from Connecticut to Newark to Manchester to Hanover would be. Conversations with my mother on the drive down: the funny-were-they-not-so-sad dysfunctions of my extended family; my brothers' jobs and goals (I am not so in touch). Crossing the GWB within view of the NJ apartment I lived in five years ago, she offers an insight so piercing and honest and utterly right about me then (and in the year after, when I left that job, that shocked place, drifted home and more or less shut myself up in the ancestral pile); "you weren't happy then." It's one thing to know it yourself, another to realize your parents knew it too, yet another to have her finally say it so simply. With the implicit "but you are a little more, now," unspoken. And to agree. As I did.

Manchester with four hours to kill. Good taste suppresses any sentimentality over being back in England for the first time in years. Or else circadian arrhythmia does that; no wet-eyed glances at seeing the airport Boots or The Sun again, and certainly no backsliding to M. K. '98, that tortured and searching transatlantic. Once upon a time maybe, but not now; you see it is all the same place, and the pop stars have different names but do all the same things. I just want to keep moving. Momentum, and a succession of moving escalators get me across the airport.

Where I must wait. Baggage belt breakdowns produce stymied Mancunian vacationers and football fans, and that ain't my scene, baby. A proper English vegetarian breakfast; fried veggie sausages, fried little mushrooms, fried "tomatoes", all soaking in deep yellow yolk, brought by an Eastern European girl with that straw-colored hair. Watch the airplanes. I set my laptop up in the stinking smoking section, lanky young janitors puffing and speaking Polish nearby; clamber behind the fruit machines to plug in it and find out about Kiki, only to discover that wi-fi don't come for free here. Should have figured on that. The first time I contend with this pan-European menace, but not the last.

Then, Hanover on Saturday afternoon. Equally unsentimental over this, and it's been even longer since I've been in Germany, where I feel curiously at home. I stayed on a quiet street behind the central train station, in a small hotel run by an exuberantly friendly German. My own Deutsch is six or seven years out of practice at this point, but pride obliges me not just to try and bumble it, but to fake understanding whatever he tells me about the World Cup festivities downtown. I'll find them come hell or high water, later. I can barely mutter "ja" at this point for all my inflight study, but I'm so tapped out I'd be subconversational in English too.

The Bigsoccer YouTube video thread is a little 15 page (and counting) gift to anyone who loves music, especially great old rarities. My most recent contribution to it connects here; after the Ghanaians beat the Czechs I gave in to a mercy nap. Between the channel-clicking and the conking, some cosmic governor of appropriate Germanic weirdness decreed that this should be on my television.



Jet lag + nappy daze + glam roller disco + just how irresistible was Olivia Newton-John (and if you know anything about her in this movie, you'll get the extra delicious irony for me) + I haven't seen this since I was a kid + I can't believe they actually ever made stuff like this in the first place and to think I was alive then, too = truly awesome.

Gene Kelly freaks the shit out of me in that split-screen, though.




And here is where I went to watch the US shoot themselves in both feet against Italy; a patch of dirty grass transformed, Xanadu-like, into a corporatopia of uninspiring German pizza and inspired German beer, cover bands, lingering jubilant Ghanians and utterly defeated-looking Czechs, Germans masquerading as Ghanians, Germans masquerading more successfully as Italians, and the adjoining clatches of blue and red shirts. My wearing the '98 US jersey was about all the jinx we would need. Night fell fully after the match and we tried to forget that our World Cup was pretty over. The house music came on, as it always must in Germany, and there was drunken limboing. Inside I was still cursing the idiocy of Pope and Mastroeni. Everyone I met there was from Minnesota. I don't think they cursed. But they shouted, oh but they shouted, as we were shooed out of the place. I lost them all somewhere on the streets afterwards, before any sort of trouble ensued - the sort of trouble you might find these days, bellowing about the U!S!A! around the Hauptbahnhof after midnight, and I skipped half-getrunkenly the rest of the way back.