With June and July fading from the rear-view mirror, August and September are all we have left of summer, so at this crux let’s have a look-back at our summer playlist 2026 – it’s a musical smorgasbord of the most messy and eclectic kind, which is just the sort of playlist I like best (and why the algorithms of Spotify don’t work well with me – my taste is too varied and too unpredictable). As I was listing these out, it suddenly struck me how much has happened in this single summer, and we’re not even halfway through it. Part of me shudders, part of me is relieved it’s over, and part of me is still in shock. Click through these musical moments to remember… if you dare.
Death Cab for Cutie has inadvertently insisted on inserting its music into our Solid Gold Summer – perhaps slightly at odds with disco or Egypt, but message-wise on perfect, heartrending point, bringing this summer into a rainy, somber focus, stripping the golden gilding off all that seemed to shimmer in the spring, and revealing the hum-drum, mundane make-up of its only-too-basic structure. I’m all for superficial shine when it comes to appearance, but for matters of the heart the idea of gilding is heartbreaking. You can’t capture or coat the heart. You can’t pretend passion. The heart will tug no matter how golden the day turns, no matter how brilliantly the sky shines. And here is a transitory song for the moment at hand, closing out the month of July.
And I wonder where you are tonight If the one you’re with was a compromise As we’re walking lines in parallel That will never meet and it’s just as well
A rainy night in summer makes for the ideal backdrop to listen to this song. It speaks to things more succinctly, if mysteriously, than my clumsy prose could ever capture or convey, music winding its way around words and strangling them in such exquisite agony. When it sounds so good, and looks so pretty, you step into the trap willingly, sliding the noose pleasantly around your neck, teasing asphyxiation, daring it to do its damage.
Sometimes I’m overcome By every choice I couldn’t outrun The junctions all disappear You can’t double back to your summer years
And I wonder where you are tonight If the one you’re with was a compromise As we’re walking lines in parallel That will never meet and it’s just as well
I didn’t mean for things to get so dark so soon this summer, but sometimes life takes us where we may not want to go, but absolutely need to be. It’s no longer worth it to fight the currents of the universe, and I’m much happier to let things play out without upending the apple cart entirely. A few apples are sure to be lost, but perhaps they’re just the bad apples – no love lost there.
This is a difficult time of the year for me. Memories of Dad’s last days mingle with summer now – a sad alignment for the supposedly-sunny season, but one that still manages to bring a certain degree of comfort to the hot days. I remember the days of goodbyes, the time with him for those last few weeks, the rare and revelatory moments of clarity and consciousness when the Dad I remembered would only-too-briefly surface and be present for a few seconds. Tomorrow will mark the third anniversary of his leaving. As I finish this post, it’s pouring rain outside, and I do not mind it.
And I wonder where you are tonight And if the one you’re with was a compromise As we’re walking lines in parallel That will never meet and it’s just as well It’s just as well…
Nothing gold can stay, or so some say, and the idea of permanence no longer seems to be part of the current world’s situation. Nothing seems stable, nothing feels permanent, nothing can be relied upon for more than a brief moment – and perhaps this is the lesson I’ve needed to learn. To be honest, I thought I’d learned it during and after COVID. My idea of anything being set in stone was destroyed way back then, and it’s never fully, or even partly, recovered. It’s hard to count on things when the whole world shifted beneath our feet and threw us to the ground; we got back up, those of us who survived, but I’ve never trusted my feet, or the ground, since.
Digging for gold in my neighborhood Where all the old buildings stood And they keep digging it down and down So that their cars can live underground The swinging of a wrecking ball Through these lath and plaster walls Is letting all the shadows free The ones I wish still followed me
I remember a winter’s night We kissed beneath the street lamp light Outside our bar near the record store That have been condos for a year and more Now that our haunts have taken flight And been replaced with construction sites Oh, how I feel like a stranger here Searching for something that’s disappeared
This song leans into the golden moment as transitory, mourning the passing of time, and the evolution of neighborhoods and physical locations. As buildings are torn down and roads revamped, so too do people crumble and rebuild themselves, often right before our eyes – people being the mercurial and impossible-to-fully-understand wild cards that are more fickle and capricious than any evolving environment. If you can’t count on the stability of the land beneath us, how could we ever count on a creature as variable and moody as a human being?
Digging for gold in my neighborhood For what they say is the greater good But all I see is a long goodbye A requiem for a skyline It seems I never stopped losing you As every dive becomes something new And all our ghosts get swept away It didn’t use to be this way
Somehow, I still manage to love them – in the general sense of humanity. Despite popular belief, I’ve maintained a generosity of spirit that is hidden behind my own somewhat self-obsessed guises, and it has always felt right to love rather than waste or ruin my time doing anything else. If it means screaming into a void, and loving those who might never love me back or even be aware that I exist, I’ll continue undaunted. The hope of a gold rush payout is ever on my horizon; it sparkles in the distance, glinting like flecks of precious metal in the cold rush of a stream. Calling to me, time after time, asking that I don’t give up, threatening hope and heartbreak – and I know I will always answer. It’s how I was made, and no matter how much the world or the people around me may change, I’m not ever going to stop.
A musical twist on our recent Egyptian excursion for our Solid Gold summer, this song is neither very Arabian in sound or disco in beat, and it comes courtesy of The Lumineers. It also suddenly has deeper meaning, while dovetailing with the Nile and the sparking gold themes this summer has wrought. Summer always seems to turn more serious than we ever want it to be, and that can’t be helped.
I was Cleopatra, I was young and an actress When you knelt by my mattress, and asked for my hand But I was sad you asked it, as I laid in a black dress With my father in a casket, I had no plans, yeah
And I left the footprints, the mud stain on the carpet And it hardened like my heart did when you left town But I must admit it, that I would marry you in an instant Damn your wife, I’d be your mistress just to have you around
But I was late for this, late for that, late for the love of my life And when I die alone, when I die alone, die I’ll be on time, ah, yeah
Hurtling toward the last days of my fiftieth year here on earth, I suppose it’s as good a time as any to consider death, even if it’s in an abstract or musical way – perhaps it’s easier that way too. I’ve brushed up against it at such an early age, it doesn’t scare me – it never has – in some ways it feels like a friend I haven’t seen for many years, but with whom I can pick up and rejoin as if no time at all has passed. Better to make some sort of peace with the end than fight it – as it comes for everyone.
While the church discouraged, any lust that burned within me Yes my flesh, it was my currency, but I held true So I drive a taxi, and the traffic distracts me From the strangers in my backseat, they remind me of you
But I was late for this, late for that, late for the love of my life And when I die alone, when I die alone, when I die I’ll be on time
For so much of my life, every day was a pose, an act, an expectation delivered from the perfectionist nature of a Virgo who didn’t dare deviate from what he thought the world wanted. A series of guises, all in service of hiding who I really was – and even when I finally came into my own and accepted who I was, the pattern was set, the lines etched too deep in my forehead, the pathways of the brain already too well-tread to re-route. It was sometimes easier to pretend, always safer, and usually worked out better anyway. If someone were to see behind the curtain, I didn’t trust they would like it, and I cared too much about what other people thought back then. It makes for a sticky way of being true to yourself – makes it almost impossible. And so I would become just about anybody else – Mr. Oud, Father Time, the Godfather, the Exhibitionist, the Introvert – anybody to not have to be myself. That made for the perfect conditions for a disaster, and disasters came more often than I’d like to admit. Once I started therapy and meditation, it was time to stop being anyone other than myself, and all the faults and failures that comprised the person I’d been concealing had to be acknowledged and confronted. It turned out they weren’t as bad as I thought they were – and that I wasn’t as bad as I thought I’d been. It was an effort in forgiveness, and acceptance, and it came just in time for what will hopefully be the second half of my journey here.
I was Cleopatra, I was taller than the rafters But that’s all in the past love, gone with the wind Now a nurse in white shoes leads me back to my guestroom It’s a bed and a bathroom And a place for the end
I won’t be late for this, late for that, late for the love of my life And when I die alone, when I die alone, die I’ll be on time, ah
Caravans transport the precious across the sand. They move at night, the only time when it’s not too hot, and even then the heat has soaked into the ground and comes at you from below rather than above, which is somehow even worse. Silk curtains are a silly way of keeping the dust out of the peopled carriages, but they’re mostly for the sun anyway. Centuries ago this was how you moved – at night, cloaked for protection, jostled and uncomfortably confined. Whoever thought this was romantic was senseless.
“What is the endgame of all these megaconstructions? Well, in ancient Egypt, the late 6th-dynasty state had not only become so large that it was nonfunctional (think of the giant cable company that never answers the phone), it had also become a mass of intercompeting elites who used the government to serve no one but themselves. (Think of today’s relentless multimillion-dollar bonuses, payoffs, bribes, insider trading, and fraud, all happening openly with no one going to prison.) As the competition ramped up, and as the Egyptian state became impoverished from mismanagement, the end result was nothing less than war.” – Kara Cooney
At the time of this writing – very early in the morning before house or town are even awake – it’s still raining, as it’s been for the past two days. This has been a consistent hard rain, with flooding in many places. After a stretch of sunny warm days, this change has felt especially jarring, and maybe that’s the reason for the melancholy of late. “If I hadn’t seen such riches I could live with being poor…”
Maybe this should have been the farewell to summer song come September, but some goodbyes happen before you’re ready and willing – those are the toughest ones. And when endings happen in the middle of summer, they somehow seem even sadder. This is the spot of the year when Dad left us; I found myself crying in the shower the other day for seemingly no reason before I realized what was happening. The body and mind will insist on release even if you don’t think you’re ready. At times of great upheaval, I find it best to go with the flow while letting the river simply rush around you. It also helps to accept the sadness and sorrow and loss, let the torrents out while feeling every last blade of hurt, and then, slowly, coming back to your breathing, back to the only way you learned to survive, back to the exquisite beauty of being alive and being vulnerable. Back to the ritual of saying goodbye.
Our recent episode of Mercury in retrograde motion wreaked much havoc with certain astrological signs – yours truly and my fellow Virgos especially – and now we have a full Buck Moon with which to contend tonight. There’s a lot of messiness on both fronts usually. Additionally, Saturn is now in retrograde motion through the end of the year, but this may be beneficial to anyone who has been wronged, secretly or not-so-secretly, as this is supposedly the justice and come-uppance moment for those situations. People generally know enough not to wrong me, but sometimes attacks manage to get through, especially when least expected, and perhaps even least intended. That all finds resolution if we are to believe the current Saturn placement, or any astrological nonsense that’s flying about right now.
Happily for me, and I mean that in quite a literal sense, I no longer seek vengeance or retribution as I once did. Harboring hate and resentment and bitterness only ever hurts the harborer – the villains have already moved on to their next victim. It is so rarely ever about you, and anyone with a healthy ego finds that difficult to fathom. I’ve worked on my ego over the years and have reached a place where there’s a genuine sense of self-worth rather than the vain show-off nature of an unhealthy ego. At the ripe old age of fifty, I’m also more grounded and solid than I’ve ever been, and daily meditations keep my wandering, overthinking and overanalyzing mind in helpful check. It’s boring to relate – you all want the drama and the heartache, and I’m happy to not supply it. Finally, my good friends have been with me for decades, and have yet to go anywhere, so I must be doing something right; my friendships sustain and see me through the rough patches, and I continually work on nourishing and fostering them because that’s what good friends do.
As for this period of comeuppance and justice, I’m hoping my own reckoning spares me any great pain because no one is perfect.
This continues our recent run of Egyptian-themed posts, and if you were coming here for some serious and somber politically-slanted ramblings, you don’t know me or this blog very well. We don’t dive into sociopolitical discourse very often, and certainly not on a global scale. We walk like an Egyptian, Bangles-style, making no apologies for the superficial glancing – you can find hard news just about anywhere else (if such a thing even exists anymore). Here we are fantasy and fun and glamorous accents – and if there’s a deeper message it’s usually of the more personal sort rather than a broader social commentary. You have to dig deep for that, and summer isn’t a time for digging deep. Summer is for light listening, as in this evocative piece from Amir Hossein Feyzi called ‘Shahrzad’.
Evoking markets of magic carpets, spices and enchanted lanterns, the summer whispers of warm climes, of riding the stars high above the desert on inky blue midnights. Lands far away, close in mind and spirit, grasped when never even seen…
Hieroglyphics may have been the first form of blogging as we know it, which is just another form of storytelling and sharing information and pictures. Limited to their physical confines, wall drawings were bound to their time and place, whereas we have been released to deliver such stories worldwide in the space of a few seconds. The world spins faster than it realizes – too fast perhaps. And once you start something in motion it can be very difficult to stop it. Laws of inertia and what-not….
Summer thunder rumbles somewhere to the East, while a multitude of the lightest taps sound on the roof above me. Lying on the bed in the attic, I attempt to read a few pages from my book, but the sound of a summer storm is always the most conducive to falling swiftly asleep, and on this late afternoon I allow it to happen. I’m in a melancholy mood, and sleep feels like the best way to work through it, especially when all the world is able to do is rain.
When I would get depressed in college I would find solace in sleep – not in a dangerous, wish-my-life-would-end way, but in a resigned, resolute, and determined decision to lose consciousness in the name of brief relief. It afforded me just enough peace to keep going, to get through my studies, to greet another day. Right when I was about to slip into a total state of despondency, things would look up, my mood would shift, and I’d be back to myself. No pills, no therapy, no magic. On this afternoon, as sky bleeds into earth and light bleeds into night, I let a little heartbreak at the world push me into my own proverbial bloodletting.
What is there to do? Only rain falling down from the sky Only me and you fair and plain, Nothing lost and nothing gained
Only the love nothing more, nothing less comes between us Temperatures rising, my passion is burning inside…
My world in light saving all as one A love that no one can deny My one true light, same for everyone A love we dare you to defy
Only rain
‘The Summer Book’ is easy reading, though surprisingly dark for a book about summer. It is the perfect read for this very moment, for this rainy night. More thunder, ominous and strangely comforting, sounds in the distance. Rain patters on the air conditioner in the window, its gentle cadence the ideal bit of white noise to quiet the voices in my head, or at least to override them. Some things cannot be silenced, so you adjust other sounds around you, shifting perspective, changing prominence – all tricks leading to peace, even if it is a false peace. Anything to get through the night.
“She started thinking about all the euphemisms for death, all the anxious taboos that had always fascinated her. It was too bad you could never have an intelligent discussion on the subject. People were either too young or too old, or else they didn’t have time.” – Tove Jansson
I won’t settle for less, but no regrets See myself in your own reflection (see myself in your reflection) Something in your eyes that tells me why I’m a fool for your warm affection (I’m a fool for your affection)
Only the love, nothing more, nothing less comes between us Temperature’s rising, My passion is burning inside
My world in light saving all as one A love that no one can deny My one true light, same for everyone A love we dare you to defy
Only rain
Birdsong trills outside – brave birds to be calling in these thunderstruck skies – and I wonder at why they’re singing during such a time. Perhaps they need their spirits lifted too, and a song is all they have to approximate joy on such a dim day. This little song by Erasure called ‘Rain’ sounds cheery and its lyrics are defiantly, ebulliently joyful. Rain and light, at odds and peace, an unlikely partnership that persists in spite of their seemingly-opposite nature. Maybe they need one another to truly embody who they were meant to be, or maybe it’s just a troublesome twosome that will never reconcile, their tension the energy and friction that keeps them moving forward, only and always together. A treacherous trick of the world. Meanwhile, all the sky can manage to do is rain – only rain…
You are my, my one true, my world in light You are my, my one true, my world in light
My world in light saving all as one A love that no one can deny My one true light, same for everyone A love we dare you to defy My world in light saving all as one A love we dare you to defy
Only rain
“It is still summer, but the summer is no longer alive. It has come to a standstill; nothing withers, and fall is not ready to begin. There are no stars yet, just darkness.” ~ Tove Jansson
This post should probably come later in the day, as this song has a late-night vibe that doesn’t quite gel with the morning, but here it is anyway. Come back tonight and play it again if you are so inclined – for now, let the summer jam of ‘Summer Is Here‘ fill the silence as we traverse our Egyptian excursion on this Solid Gold Summer journey. From the album ‘Egyptian Secrets’, this is the Adam Deitch Quartet giving us summer living, late or early or just about right on time.
Ah the blues The ball and chain that is ’round every English musician’s leg In fact every musician’s leg Tryin’ to kick it off baby? No no. You’ll just never do it And these are the blues of time And the blues of a woman And a man thinkin’ of her As time goes by…
Fast-forward to this autumn, when the blues plays backdrop to a certain Fall by a certain someone you’ve seen here for a certain two-decades-plus, and you have a preview of what the next season is going to bring. A soothsayer sometimes is just an educated guesser. Or the master of their own destiny. Right now I am not feeling very much like either, so I slow things down to remind myself it’s still summer, that there are still sunny days to come – though maybe not this week – and I have a little less than a month left of my fiftieth year on earth. A song, then, for my deceased youth – a song to my former self – a song for the ages:
There is nothin’ I can do If you leave me here to cry There is nothin’ I can do If you leave me here to cry You know my love will follow you baby Mmm until the day I die
Some days you feel all of your fifty years – you creak and crack as you slowly push against gravity, awkwardly raising yourself into an upright position then stumbling into the dark of early morning. It’s a wakening that has taken place every day for fifty years – not always in the same room, or the same time, or the same city – but at least once a day for all this time I have risen and done this same routine of getting up. Seems like such a simple thing, but oh how much it sometimes takes to face the day, and how much so many will never know…
I’ve given you all I own; That is one thing you cannot deny Oh I’ve given you all I own; Baby that is one thing you cannot deny And my love will follow you baby Yeah Till the day this man dies.
Feeling all these fifty years, I stand before the mirror of the camera’s gaze in underwear and morning grogginess, having reached the point where such revelatory actions no longer thrill or scare me; chalk that up to this very blog, which has taught me to be nakedly myself in a twenty-three-year trajectory to reach an emotional couch of comfort and genuine confidence. Realizing one’s worth takes time – in my case at least fifty years, and counting, because I am far from done. I am also tired – some of the fuel gone now that I know there is nothing left to prove – and weary from the toll it takes to realize this, to live it, and to get up another day. Happily, it happens mostly on autopilot these mornings, and the muscle memory of rising still sees me through this essential task – most of the time I don’t even think about it.
I’ve got failure all around me No matter how hard I try. I’ve got failure It’s all around me No matter how hard I Try try You know my ghost will haunt you baby Until the day you stop down and die Well you better get up Right now right now
The music sounds like fall, and I know it’s coming, and still I sing these words to my younger self, my former selves, a battle between me and the other versions of me that came before – that quintessential battle with the self that never ends without Pyrrhic retribution. To conquer yourself is to conquer yourself. One can’t help that certain parts of former selves be vanquished, exiled – and you will miss those parts of yourself, even if you knew they couldn’t and shouldn’t last.
Well You think that you have left me behind And that with your other man you’re safe And you’re away from me baby but uh One o’ these days you’re gonna break down and cry Because there is no escape from this man Because this man’s love is so strong He’s gonna haunt you You know my love will follow you Mmm until the day I die
Yet as much as you will try leave your past behind, by my age you realize that it can’t really be done. With each realization and determination of leaving something behind, you understand that you have brought it with you by acknowledging it. You are who you are because of all the things that happened to you in the past, and to lose any of that is to sunder the person you’ve become. The soul wasn’t made to take that kind of cleaving. And so we dance – me and all my former selves – me and all the past – a dance to the death, because death isn’t anything more than a celebration of a life made whole, made complete by its imminent arrival; death is confirmation that you were here, that once you lived. I write this to render it less frightening, as I’m closer to dying than to being born, and I sing this song to myself as a reminder to stop trying to get away from who I once was. Learning to forgive myself is something I couldn’t do back then – it’s something I have to work on now.
There is just one thing I want to tell you before I go I’m gonna leave it I’m gonna leave it Leave it up to you So long, baby, bye-bye Hey I’m gonna leave it up to you baby So long, baby ,bye-bye
Well you know my love will follow you Mmm ’til the day I die
This blog recap begins as we are set to get rain for the next five days, so all the sunny recounting will officially be in the past. Just as I was getting back into the sunny swing of summer, the forecast changes. We change, we shift, we adapt, and we complain. Summer will happen rain or shine. On with the weekly recap…
Taming this beast is more than a literary reference, and I made it through the wilderness. (Somehow I made it through…)
Celebrating my Godson’s birthday brought me back to my hometown for a quick visit, and after watching him charge around the backyard on his new wheels with his cousin, I went indoors to find the twins and see how they were faring in this golden summer. They were gearing up for some travels, and Noah showed me his impressive cologne cabinet (modeled after yours truly). I sampled a few, and he has surprisingly sophisticated tastes for such a young age. (My teen years were marred by flights of Curve and Cool Water.)
Emi joined us in the dining room and Jaxon came in just long enough to pose for a few pics. Siblings are funny, as exemplified by the antics only half-captured here. Uncle Al did not have to step in as it was mostly play (I think). Anyway, what am I really going to do? It was a lovely visit, and we went out for ice cream all the way to Broadalbin because that’s what an Uncle with wheels is for. Emi paid because she has a job now. I thanked her with great pride, and just the slightest bit of sorrow, because it seems they really are growing up this quickly. A silly song that rekindles our 70’s vibe from this Solid Gold Summer, as it was on the playlist on our way to the ice cream stand.
