Orange Wine and Oreos, Summer as a Decline
Things I am grateful for this week.
It’s been busy here in the SGOW biome. Many events. New clothes. Sweat everywhere. It is all, relatively, good. I told my assigned partner, during a corporate icebreaker, that my proudest achievement this year was taking more time to rest. Going on a trip. Asking to leave. The prioritization of rest.
Instead of being a buzzkill, he warmly affirmed the sentiment, before telling me about some cool systems he was working on in Austin, Texas, the specifics of which are hazy in memory. Rest is good. Writing is good too, but I am trying to have it complement the rest, which right now is top priority. I rather not eclipse it.
THE MUST-TRY COMBINATION OF THE YEAR
I’ll just say it right here, at the top: orange wine and oreos together are very good. A couple friends and I picnic’d at Ernest E Debs park. A chilled, skin-contact wine, one I paid $30 for at the Erewhon in Culver City, was a match made in heaven with the half-stale Oreos my friend bought from work. There is an expectation that comes with expensive things, that you must pair that thing with something equally overwrought and overpriced. Maybe a fine goat’s milk cheese. Fermented purple cornichons. Muscat grapes imported from Japan.
Go for it, if you have those things. I didn’t. Yesterday, I peeled back the blue plastic film from a half-eaten tray of normal Oreos, and I took two out. I sipped the wine, which was tart and tasted of stonefruit, then I promptly popped an Oreo in my mouth. I took another sip, and there was harmony.
A QUOTE FROM ELIZABETH BISHOP DELIVERED BY MATTHEW SAGE
M. Sage performed at the Audubon center, as part of an ongoing outdoor performance series organized by Living Earth LA. Before he began his set, he shared with the small crowd this quote from poet Elizabeth Bishop:
“There’s nothing more embarrassing than being a poet”.
Elaborating on this, he shared his perspective on embarrassment — how it is the feeling one feels when they brush up against conformity — and that our chimeras, our creative instincts are inherently embarrassing. Embarrassment is a sign that we are well on our way towards the personal, the interesting. It is a pirouette from shame and into curiosity.
I have a friend who told me that whenever they are faced with situations they might feel embarrassment, or even shame from, they go right ahead and live inside of it. They go into the intensity of their being, because it is an embrace of what they are. And their constitution, built on compassion and a fierce respect for themselves, is strong enough to withstand any cringe that might be a byproduct of their decision. She said this to me in the same park as the concert, but it was a different day.
SUMMER AS A DECLINE
Days are blurry. More and more, I often find myself lost between months, between seasons, misremembering holidays and birthdays in the process.
I have begun considering the seasons with greater intensity1 — trying to be more aware of equinoxes, solstices, etc in efforts to place myself within a year. In preparation for a good friend’s wedding, I was looking up the first day of summer, under the impression that their wedding might coincide with the solstice. When I discovered that it was indeed happening on the solstice, I was stoked. The seasonal synchronicity gave the event more symbolic weight.
Summertime is a beautiful time. I am a big fan of the season. Summer is sunshine, cicadas, and warm buildings. Summer elicits freedom. Summer recalls childhood and its bedding.
One of the first poems I wrote was called “Sunset Activities”. In one draft, I lamented how locales closer to the top of the world experience sunsets longer than I did in California. There is simply more daylight, and in the world of this poem, daylight acted as a currency with which you had to spend wisely, as it was limited. Naturally, the longest day of the year is special, because per capita, it has more daylight than all the other days in the year. Once the longest day of the year has passed, we are then hurtling towards the shortest day of the year. It splits time and space in twain: time we spend traveling away from the sun versus the time we spend orbiting towards it.
When I was outlining this next part of the blog, I just wrote “BOOO” in my notes app. If you look up what day the summer solstice begins, you will find that it coincides with the longest day of the year. My naïvete believed that I had more time than I did. The longest day, I thought, would land somewhere towards the middle to the end of summer. Placing that day at the beginning of summer, you subject summer to a downwards slope. Peak summertime is literally the first day of summer, and from then on, it begins to end.
Every sunset this summer will be shorter than the day’s prior. The “endlessness” summer elicits is just that — a conjuration, an illusion. I am faced with a dilemma of meaning. Is summer a death spiral? A cursed shell on the beach? The storm clouds looming in the distance, eating up the yellow sky? I can easily resign myself to this altered reality. I think, though, on the possibility that we already knew this. Since figuring this out, I have wasted the days I was most looking forward to, worrying about this new perspective.
Now knowing this, what if I gave into the delusion of joy? What if I discarded the notion of delusion and just saw joy in the decline? There is no endlessness, but there are ninety three days I can spend however I wish to. I can go on and travel to the beach, trim the tops of strawberries, don flip flops and shorts, and listen to Mac Demarco’s earlier work. Summer is a short song, but it is still worth singing, despite.
And other forms of time-tracking, like moon cycles and astrological systems.