Take that, Summer Work Ethic

I'm composing at my Portsmouthwerk in a lounge chair beside a tall window, the interrogator's lamp protecting my weakening eyes before the onslaught of yet another glowing screen, another blank page, another attempt to organize all of the fragments and sketches.

There's a breeze from that window, and the sounds of cars and humans, and I remember a similar lighting, a similar breeze, from some summer in my childhood. It was a time when the bathtubs had cats' feet, and pails were full of blueberries, and in our utter boredom Visa and I looked up the species of all the robins breeding in Grandpa's rows of corn and raspberries. Such breezes are as an amnesiac for the sun and heat (what sun and heat?) that had (might have once) been the scourge of the day.

That was when the Old Man still stood, and there were no drunk people shouting at each other that they'd be late, that they were going the wrong way, but there was still that feeling that even as we were finding ways to occupy our lives, even if we found something that made us forget that as-of-yet-unknown buzzword for this day and age, ennui, we could never escape the ticking of the clock, the march towards some inexorable yet equally incalculable end.

I choose, rather than inertia, rather than a Hegelian synthesis, to sidestep fate. Beer o'clock down at the pub it is, then.