Category Archives: General

When a summer day is full, sleep comes quickly and easily.

If it fills your mind with the present moment – the sun, the heat, the flowers, the books, the pool, the garden, the grilled dinner, the first cherry tomatoes just starting to ripen and the thrill of popping one into your mouth directly off the vine – then the day has proven worthwhile.

I’ve had the luck and luxury of having some pretty full days of late – not with any grand adventures or big events, but the simple summer living that the season affords. It’s the best way of dealing with overthinking and overanalyzing – which Virgos such as myself are prone to do to our great detriment. Finding solace in being mindful and present instead of living in my head has proven a boon to my mental health. Summer makes that easier.

After working out and meditating and just making it through a recent day, I slipped into the pool, not bothering with a swimsuit, just pulling off my shorts and wading in with this old pair of underwear that wouldn’t mind getting a bit bleached. Swimming from the shallow end to the deep, I breathe in the scents of evening.

The spicy sweetness of phlox hangs in the air near the deep end. Nearby, the smell of damp earth fresh from being watered reminds me of some almost-fetid greenhouse dripping with its own condensation – plants sometimes have a way of sweating too, transpiration to our perspiration.

Even this late in the day, the sky is a sickly hazy yellowish gray color – still lit from the sun’s rays slicing through the smoke in the air from the Canadian fires – seemingly an annual summer event in a world that burns itself out a bit more with each passing day. I dive underwater to get away from it all, because I cannot afford to think about this world like that too much – humans being so problematic, and so disappointing.

I did what we’re never supposed to do: I looked right up at the sun because it was obscured by the hazy smoke drifting down from the Canadian wildfires. It looked eerily like the moon when clouds pass mysteriously in front of it, only this was the mighty sun, probably damaging my retinas in my foolish act of defiance.

It’s been a week of recklessness, as Mercury continues in its messy retrograde motion and a new moon prowls the sky invisibly. Astrologically, this is said to be a shit show, especially for a Virgo, and I’m definitely in the difficult feels about practically everything. (Forewarned is fair warned: stop fucking with me.)

Things are also said to bring great relief when this retrograde ends around July 23rd. That’s always been a good date for me, so I’ll be laying low and doing my best to keep quiet until then. (This would not be a good time to bet on that happening however, so apologies in advance for all that I’m about to say or do. Again, stop fucking with me.)

Sunny Mondays in summer hit differently. Their intrinsically depressing nature is blunted by the power of the season, a reminder that nature is what will always matter in the end. Mondays are a human construct. Summer is invincible. Here is our weekly blog recap…

Woodstock kicked the last week off in whimsical fashion.

Weather whiplash is a requisite part of summer these days.

Maple and bamboo light in the attic at night.

Triggering summer scents carried by the breeze.

Rainy abstract, taking out the night.

A summer holiday with the twins marks the passing of precious time.

Scarlet bee draw brings all the bees to the yard.

New spectacles, old jockstrap.

A feast for the hummingbirds in a brilliantly-colored salvia.

Embodying golden splendor in mesh netting.

Solid gold summer realizations come when they want to come.

Out pooling for the day: Do Not Disturb.

A golden summer night makes the journey home.

Soleil summer hallucinations backed by a driving beat and a hazy heat.

Golden 80’s glory days for those of us getting old.

Dazzlers of the Day included Mark Harkenrider, Meg Stalter, Evan Mulrooney, and Erling Haaland.

This is where I’ll be spending the day.

Come back later.

Peruse these summer songs.

Take a day.

Touch the grass.

Or smoke it.

Whatever floats your boat.

The intense heat of last week threatened to melt away all the golden trappings of this Solid Gold Summer like some gold-foil-wrapped chocolate bunny from the perilous Easter period – but summer has a way of proving itself invincible, refusing to yield even to its own incendiary machinations. 

The music is magic as the Solid Gold dancers take to the stage of my hazy childhood memories – sequins sparkling in the roving spotlights, slicing through all the dramatic smoke effects as their limbs flail in impossible feats of human movement.

Glimmers of glory shimmer in the starry wide-eyed wonder of a little boy watching all the flashy magic playing out on the television. What might it feel like to spin in the middle of all those shards of glittering light – to be a disco ball with every light beam trained on you? Where all you have to do is spin and reflect the light back onto the world – the conduit, the vessel, the portal – resplendent in gold and mirrors and taking it all in only to give it right back in some incongruent generosity of spirit of which no one would ever quite believe you were capable. It’s not something we have come to expect of our golden icons. 

When I think back to the boy I used to be, the kid who watched those Solid Gold dancers with rapture and transfixion, studying the way their sequined light pierced the stage night, I remember the ferocity he sought to capture, and how he vowed one day to be just as bewitching as the spectacle parading before him. 

My dreams of gold read differently now, and I am starting to see things from a changed point of view. My vessel is solid gold; the rest of the world and its people may be gilded, facades and shells of empty, misguided brokenness, but I somehow remain whole, I remain true. I remain solid through and through. The tacit admission is that I’m just a little tarnished – an ironic flip of all that is expected from my sparkling superficiality, from all that has admittedly come before – with the graver implication being that I was tarnished by own hand and head. Overthinking and overanalyzing are the bane to many a Virgo, and I am far from an exception to this overwrought conundrum. 

Yet it is precisely at such times when I remind myself that I still have the power to enthrall and enchant, as I’m reminded by friends and strangers alike, in ways overt and covert because nobody willingly gives me any flowers despite how much they know I love them. Or maybe it’s because they know how much I love them, and love has never been easy to come by for me. 

The rest of the world gets the show then, and for anyone who is still reading, that goes for you too. The ones I seek to reach are infuriatingly unaware of these spoils. My golden splendor spins with purpose only for itself, for the sake of spinning. It’s something to do, something to fill the mind when more disruptive thoughts might derail an entire summer.

“I know I am but summer to your heart, and not the full four seasons of the year.” – Edna St. Vincent Millay

Summer fleeting, summer flying by, summer waiting for no man… I feel the swift rush of time in summer more than any other seasons, likely because we want it to last. Its golden splendor seeps into daily summer living, the way heat eventually comes to land in the earth and stay there until September, but once the nights turn it’s difficult to make the warmth last. For now, I let it soak into the skin, into whatever waning darkness remains in my hair like that of some silver-headed wolf. 

Gold hints of Egyptian pharaohs swirl us deeper into the past, even though it was the same sun, the same earth, the same stretch of desert still baking in the heat. Sands cycling through time, indeed marking time like the trickle of an hourglass, and so go the days of our lives. Fitting, as summer meant I could reconnect to my soap operas – the entire NBC daytime line-up from ‘Days of Our Lives’ to ‘Santa Barbara’. I don’t even know how many of those shows still run, or whether it’s all streaming now or some other service I’ve ignored and allowed to leave me behind. Summer is no time to learn a new thing. 

Instead, I gleefully get lost in all the golden light, embracing summer for the momentary joy at hand. Forget the other seasons if we can have this one golden summer. 

Hummingbirds love these deep-throated salvia blooms – because who doesn’t enjoy a deep-throat experience? I’ve planted several in pots on the patio so that we can watch them flit from bloom to bloom, darting with pinpoint precision and split-second motions. It’s one of the most enchanting displays of the summer. Enticing the hummingbirds is always a worthwhile endeavor. They usually favor colorful and interesting blooms, so everybody wins.

A sign that mid-life malaise has kicked in: I missed the due date for my eye appointment by a year. Usually I am right on top of that benefit, as I’m only allotted a check-up and new pair of glasses or contacts every two years, and my eyesight is deteriorating faster than that schedule. This time I let things go for an extra year beyond that – mostly out of laziness and such an onerous experience last visit (clearly I didn’t take my own advice and find a new company). This year the wait time wasn’t any better, I’m just more resigned to accepting that it’s always going to take an hour and a half for a five minute appointment. That little shift made all the complaining go away. There are badder fish to fry.

As for the new specs, I like their less bulky frames – it’s keeping with a simplicity I’m trying to bring into my life. Same thing with the underwear selection, because that’s what most people came here for – no judgment, all respect.

Mary Haynes may have doted on a fictitious perfume called ‘Summer Rain’, and I myself may have a bottle of the Hermes beauty ‘Un Jardin Apres la Mousson’ recalling the garden after a summer deluge, but I’m still trying to find ways of appreciating a rainy summer day, and I’m not quite succeeding.

Instead, I take a rainy night and turn it into an abstract study in contemplation, painting it somewhere in my mind and streaking it with blurry lines that obfuscate as much as reveal. Strange and wonderful the way rain brings the streetlights to electric, reflecting light; this is why they wet the pavement when they shoot movies. Once you notice that you’ll see it in every outside movie street scene.

With the possible sweet exception of the linden tree blooms, no other summer flower reminds me of childhood, and in such unassuming and visually quiet fashion, as a simple hedge of privet. It immediately rekindles summer memories of Provincetown, of family vacations, of nights walking in hot and humid air, which always carries floral fragrance more potently than any other time of the year.

Like the linden tree, privet doesn’t shout its presence with bold and colorful flowers – it speaks solely through its sweet and somewhat subtle fragrance. When appearing en masse during their blooming season, it manages to fill the surrounding air with a lovely perfume, and most don’t know where it’s coming from since the show is far short of grand ostentation. It speaks to me more sweetly because of this.

Welcome to the Northeast, where a stretch of upper-90-degree days can suddenly turn to rainy mush in the mid-70’s and no one knows how to dress or act or behave anymore. Add in an unhealthy dash of Mercury in retrograde motion and you have the making of a minefield of moods just waiting to be set off by the slightest foraging mouse. Mice be forewarned.

I look back to this past Sunday, when my niece and I took a drive out to Manchester, Vermont for some maple cream ice cream (which is more than worth a drive if you’ve ever had it). The scenes along the way were idyllic; the company sublime. It lives in my head on the rainy mornings.

I’ve said this before and it bears repeating: I think my favorite Peanuts character is Woodstock. 

Most people peg me as a Lucy, a few wiser folks see me as Snoopy, but I’m probably closer to Woodstock. I mean, the thing wears feathers. Hello. This is a kindred spirit.

Like Snoopy, he just wants to have some fun and live his life without bothering anyone else.

That’s a good philosophy.

American patriotism has been killed by the MAGA movement, and it’s quite the shame. The less said about that, the better – so on with this weekly blog recap – the very first one of July in a very golden summer… 

Read your lips, shut my mouth.

Canna do.

Insta’s undue influence.

Happy return of the yellow flowers.

Crop top pelvic peek.

Slowing down the summer head.

Walking on eggshells.

A moment of summer melancholy.

Pool light.

It’s purple and veiny and you’re gonna love it.

Madonna’s ‘Confessions II’ is her best album in two decades.

She’s a grand old flag.

The Friday golden hour.

Requisite freedom Speedo and jockstrap post.

F.A.F.O. – Taste of Italy, Latham, NY

Our Dazzler of the Day was Jason Watson.

A flower that lasts but a day.

A summer Speedo moment of contemplation.

Sunday sunset poolside.

What a wildly hot stretch of weather we’ve had this week, and despite my reputation for complaint, I haven’t made any because it’s summer and time to embrace it all. (When you have a pool and AC, you don’t really have a right to complain anyway.) It’s felt good, the way early summer always does when the sun deigns to shine. Some summers don’t grant us that, so when it’s here I show appreciation. Even at the tail end of the day, the heat has persisted, sometimes actually increasing into the night. Such strange turns have resulted in momentous storms popping up out of nowhere, landing a nightly deluge upon a grateful garden, and keeping all but the most dramatic of plants from wilting (looking at you, hellacious hydrangeas). 

People can wilt in such heat too, physically and emotionally, and when summer turns like a knife it doesn’t care how it cuts – and sometimes cuts made without care are the most dangerous of all. At the end of a day, when the sun goes down but the temperatures refuse to follow, there is still no relief to be found in the air. Only beneath the water can you plumb the depths to locate a spot of coolness, and even then you can’t stay there for long.

Why do people – usually the worst people – decide to try to fix all their work issues on Friday at 3 PM and expect everyone else to solve such self-induced dilemmas before 4 PM? 

Just stop. 

Just don’t.

Just fuck off.

If your choices led you to such a place, examine your choices and stop expecting the rest of us to clean up your mess. 

{This has been a Public Service Announcement from the desk of Fed the Fuck Up.}