Goodbye Dear Summer

Dear Summer,

As you pack your bags and gather up all your personal belongings into that great seasonal Hefty bag in search of better times and nicer weather, remember this, my beautiful mistress of suntan lotion soaked frivolity:

You'll be back, bitch.

Just like always, you'll come crawling back, and just like a lonely socially inept man in love with a prostitute, I shall forgive you for all your past sins and treachery for just one shot at three more months of carefree buffoonery and sweatsoaked debauchery with you. Like a good woman and an even worse friend, you've taught me things about myself no other season has had the gall to.

And for that, Summer...

...for that, I am still in love with you.

You've shown me the joy of wandering through a state park, sunburnt fields littered with plastic relics of the modern consumer age, the smell of the highway's exhaust saturating the crisp hot humid air, only to stumble across a large group of filthy hippies kicking around a rice filled hemp sack, welcoming my wit and cash with open arms and unshaven armpits.

From there, sweating in my black NIN t-shirt, a foolish and carefree dreadlocked gypsy would offer me an uncut ten-strip of LSD soaked construction paper, or a delicious little sugar cube double dipped with that fiendish mind replacer Aldous Huxley so brazenly explored reality with. A budding youth barely old enough to buy cigarettes, I handed the patchouli-soaked heathen two twenty American dollars and bounded away. Away from the hippy stench. Away from your unbearable afternoon heat. Away from the carefully constructed veneer of wilderness located alongside a stretch of busy highway. Away.

You whispered in my ear that it WAS ok to chemically poison my brain and deepfry my synapses, just so long as I was willing to face the consequences of forever walking around on this Earth with the knowledge that things aren't always what they seem to be. Especially not this reality, this waking life. Jaw clenched tight and that copper taste of chemical infused saliva, pupils gaping open like some poor Californian teenageer after her first try at double anal, spine vibrating with Kundalini like a massive tiger-striped Balinese serpent-beast, you took my hand and held on tightly right before you kicked me in the ass and shoved me into the abyss. You taught me that it was ok to be insane, if just for 8 hours, depending on the dosage ingested. It's ok to see right through people as if suddenly I had stumbled upon the only pair of actual working X-ray goggles, not made of cheap paper and googly eyed lenses, but constructed out of the splintered remains of the doors of perception, long kicked in and broken down by mad savage psychonauts.

No matter what the reasoning by any action was, you showed me the truth, Summer. You showed me that the slick and glistening skin of a beautiful woman laying out on a car hood, cigarette in her lips, acid in her mind, and my name on her tongue is truly a wondrous thing indeed.

You showed me the many faces hidden behind my own friends' ego, and never stopped or pulled any punches when I could look no further, for I had seen the demon, the Fear, inside of them. And you left me wanting more. More, before the cold winds and the dying leaves swept in. No other season could attest to that, Summer. For you are the great glowing lioness breastfeeding us all upon the throne of carnal delights. You are the lover we mere mortals break our backs for, while forcing ourselves to deal with the other seasons, in an effort to afford ourselves your burning embrace.

And now, now you're leaving us. You're leaving me.

So in conclusion, I want to thank you, Summer. I want to thank you for introducing me at the age of 16 to the wonderment of hallucinogenic pharmacopeia, and showing me that it's perfectly acceptable to lose one's mind for half a day, just so long as I had you by my side, carefree and lazy in our conquests. Because without you, Summer, I would not be the man I am today.

Waiting for that whore of a season, Winter, to come and go. - Timothy Leary