Artificial Flavors (Rites of Summer)

It’s early August, and it doesn’t show, but I am striving mightily to convince my inner child that We are Having Fun; that the Rites of Summer shall be observed, as in summers past. We will still stare up at a starry sky, if we can get away from the city lights on a cloudless night and find some ground to stand on where we won’t be chased away. We will read yellowed pages in sun-dappled shadows on a lazy afternoon. We will swim, even if we have to pay admission. There will be long walks and cookouts, carnivals and conventions, and kid, maybe someday we’ll even go to Gen-Con or San Diego Comic-Con, even though I know it’s a lot of money and travel to stand in a huge crowd and get told in person what movies you’ll be watching next year, and the answers to the questions that everyone always asks the celebrity. (Why did you write that, how does it feel, how do you get to Carnegie Hall) …or we’ll scroll down our phone, reading other people’s opinions because those cost nothing, because seeing someone say what you would have said is almost as good as being heard. Go to work and go to sleep and mourn the season before it’s even gone, and with it all those summers that never really existed except in hindsight.