Peak Summer 2024

July 15^th is peak summer; top dead center.  And this year it’s living up to the hype.  Lots of heat, lots of humidity, a pretty good amount of sunshine.  As opposed to 2023, I am satisfied with the ration of summer being provided.  I am watching countless hours of old movies and wandering the fields looking for pictures of bugs and listening to political talking heads panicking or laughing at the latest exploits of the Joe Biden Flying Circus and Freak Show Emporium.  I’ve had to stop watching anything that has James Carville on it.  The Ragin’ Cajun is so distraught that I’m afraid I’ll bust a gut laughing at his apoplexy.  I’ll be shocked if he survives.

Now I will pay for all this joy.  The karmic wheel never stops turning and eventually it will pay me back with pain.  But what the hell.  Let’s let this thing play out.  Sometime in September Trump and Biden are supposed to have their second debate.  I’m sure by then the Dems and the Media will have adjusted their depression meds and decided to stop their Biden freakout and concentrate on destroying Trump by any means necessary.  And ANY is the operative word there.  I won’t be surprised by anything but I may be dismayed anyway.  After all these are desperate and delusional people who control resources that have almost no limits.  Four years ago, they shut down the whole world’s economy for a year and a half just to get Donald Trump.  What might they consider out of bounds?

But I digress.  I read that Shelley Duvall died yesterday.  In honor of her passing I plan to watch “The Shining” this week.  There is a certain contrarian logic in watching that most wintry of horror movies at this most sultry time of the rolling year.  Watching Jack Torrance succumb to the poison that the Overlook Hotel has served up to him is a cautionary tale for every frustrated fiction writer that ever lived.  All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.

And just to give equal time to a less disturbed ghost story I think I’ll watch the George C Scott version of “A Christmas Carol.”  I think Christmas in the middle of July is something that should not be left to only the Hallmark Channel.

Yesterday I got a burst of energy and took out my pruning saw, bow saw and extra heavy-duty pruning shears and went primitive on some small trees that have gotten out of control in one area of the property.  And while I was at it, I searched out some Virginia Creeper vines that had gotten completely out of hand in the woods.  Some of these vines were three inches in diameter.  The trees they were climbing on were almost overwhelmed by the parasite that had wrapped around and choked them.  Looking out at those trees I now see broad swaths of dead leaves up in the canopy where these vines have been cut off at the roots.

Camera Girl mocked me for all this effort for little tangible result.  But self-satisfaction is its own reward.  Vines, especially poison ivy aggravate me.  In August I have a plan to wreak havoc on a patch that’s growing by the road.  I’m going to soak them down with vinegar and cover them with plastic or paper to let them stew in that low pH brew.  I don’t want to use herbicides because of ground water contamination.  But acetic acid passes muster as an organic substitute.  In my book the highest good that bio-engineering could be put to would be building a virus that would drive poison ivy to extinction.  The man who did that would rise to the level of a saint in my opinion as having removed one of the great scourges in this world.

Well anyway, time to get back to peak summer.  At play in the fields of the Lord.