August, and I say this with no affection, you are a month of hot garbage.
There is no good in you, August. You serve no purpose.
You are the wrong temperature not only in one place but in every place.
To go outdoors in you, August, is to walk into a stranger's mouth. It is to sit in a vile cloud of heat and moisture that wicks away energy from every limb like a wizard's curse. To go outdoors in you, August, is to be wrapped in a thick hot sponge and beset by mosquitoes. It is to have your whole body lightly braised in a fine oil like a slightly rotisseried chicken, to wrap yourself in a piece of wet paper towel and climb into a microwave. It is to stand inside a fart.
But to go indoors in you, August, is to walk into a store's cold refrigerator of beer, or a florist's icy chamber of rare plants. To go indoors in you is to step into the freezing arctic and be blasted by a thousand icy winds, to witness penguins shivering in your office and huddled for warmth. Indoors is an icy cave where it is always winter and never Christmas and there is no Turkish delight and Santa is four months away. Did you bring ice cream with you from outdoors? Too bad; you do not want it now, and it is frozen to your hand with a layer of ice an inch thick, and you will need to chisel it off.
Indoors in August is the surface of a moon of Jupiter, but not one that supports life. Indoors you must step over several dead tauntauns and the flags of many failed polar expeditions and the stiff form of the little match girl to get into the elevator. But you are still damp with sweat, which now freezes to your body, like a cursed ice pop. To stay indoors in August is to need several sweaters at least, but you have just come from the warm cave of the tropics and there was no thought of sweaters then. August indoors should sell sweatshirts, like any place that is freezing cold that you do not realize will be freezing cold -- San Francisco in summer, indoors literally anywhere in August.
Want to go back outdoors? Oh, but now it is raining. There are also mosquitoes.
August heard we liked summer, so it gave us extra summer, but it did not get useful feedback about what of summer was good. August demands that you go lurching out on the weekend convulsed with the regrets of July and June, trying to seek fun, but now it is unpleasant everywhere.
August is too wet in places and too dry in other places, and also there are primaries in it, which is confusing. The news is just as bad as ever, but sometimes the anchors are on vacation, and it does not seem to make a difference. The television does nothing but tell you to go back to school, and this is cruel to students who must go back to school and cruel to everyone else who must be reminded of the ineluctable march of time toward the grave and how much fashions have changed since their youth.
When a movie comes out in August, it is a movie about a large shark whose entire endeavor is to insult you for fun, or it is a Good Movie that you cannot gather a group to see on a Friday night because you will all have Thoughts about it afterward.
There is too much of you, August. We did not need 31 days of this, but you have 31 days anyway, to spite us. You smell funny. You are the second helping of summer we ordered because the first helping was so delicious but we did not realize we would be full by the time you arrived.
You contain no holidays, August. You confuse the holiday aisles of CVS, and they try to sell Halloween candy but furthermore back-to-school supplies but furthermore a small plastic shovel for making sand architectures at the beach. There are no fireworks in you. The sports are all over, or they are too far along.
You are too late in the year for us to make any changes and have them stick. Everything is too close to over for anything to be different, and the thing that comes after you is fall, where they shove pumpkin spice into us until we cry out to the gods for mercy, and the whole world is full of gourds.
Vile month, despicable month, everything about you is garbage, and I spite you.
Alexandra Petri | The Washington Post
Alexandra Petri is a Washington Post columnist offering a lighter take on the news and opinions of the day. She is the author of “A Field Guide to Awkward Silences.” Follow Alexandra Petri on Twitter, @petridishes.
