Summertime Rolls

Okay, so I’ve got good news and bad news. Which do you want to hear first? Well, I can't hear you, so I’m gonna assume you said the bad news. If you didn’t, well, skip down past the next paragraph and then scroll back up later; I’ll let you know when it’s safe.

The bad news is that there isn’t enough money in the University’s fall budget to pay for my position, which means that, contrary to expectations, I will not be coming back to work at the library on August 13. That’s a bit of a blow. I’ll have to start looking for work again, which I sincerely hate. But, that’s life under capitalism.

The good news is that the job I have, the research job I told you about a few days ago, has just gotten far less odious. You’ll remember my problem here, I expect: I was using the Congressional Record, which at Marshall is stored in the Government Documents library. GovDocs closes at 4:30, so in order to spend a decent time each day researching, I had to get up much earlier than I’m used to (I don’t usually get up ‘til about 2:00, and sometimes later). Plus, the CR is all on microfilm, and a few hours of reading microfilm will melt yer brain for ya. Finally, there aren’t any computers in GovDocs (besides the OPACs, which are for finding materials, not typing on), so I had to take all my notes by notes by hand. As a general rule, the only thing I ever write out by hand is my signature on a bar tab; and if they’d take a rubber stamp, I wouldn’t even do that. My handwriting is only barely legible, even to me. And (perhaps because I’m out of practice) writing for more than a few minutes gives me terrible cramps in my hand and wrist.

Never fear for your long-suffering Ogre, however, for relief turned out to be right around the next corner: I found that the main library has the Congressional Quarterly. This very excellent publication goes into detail on each piece of legislation that comes up before Congress, and includes the roll-call votes on each issue.

Why is this so wonderful, you ask? Well, it takes care of all three major problems with having to go to GovDocs. First, the main library stays open ‘til 8:00 during summer, and is attached to the study center, which is open 24 hours. The CQ volumes are reference books, so I can’t check them out, but I can take them into the study center with me. So, forget getting up early. As long as I get to the library before eight, I can carry whichever volume of the CQ I’m using over to there and work all night if I like. Thus I avoid most people, and can easily slip outside for smoke breaks. Last night I worked ‘til 5:00 AM, and probably got more work done than I did the first two weeks combined. Piece of cake.

Second, the CQ is in book form. I can read books for hours without any problem. Anything that lets me avoid microfilm is good news. Plus, it’s much easier to check various sections within the same book than it is to do the same on microfilm, as you might have guessed. Using a hardcopy for research streamlines operations immeasurably. Did I mention how much I got done last night?

Third, the study center is chock full of computers. I haven’t taken a single handwritten note since I’ve moved over here. My wrists and fingers are so happy. And I type much faster than I write. Also, if all my notes had been hand-written, I would have had to type them all up before I could have given them to the filmmakers. Being able to type them as I go further streamlines the process. Once again, got a lot done last night. Have you gathered that yet?

So, there’s the good news. I can do twice, maybe even three times the work over here that I could over there, and I’m happier doing it. And all that being said, them amongst ya as skipped the bad news can go back up top now.

* * * * * * *

So it’s summertime. It took a long time to get warm here in Huntington, but we seem to have settled in to the summertime groove at last. I’m changing my habits along with the seasons, as I always do. Wintertime Ogre has been put away (he sticks around through the spring, although he wears less clothing) and Summertime Ogre, Happy Sunshine Ogre, Ogre aestate, is rolling.

The principal difference in summer is that I spend less time in bars. This is obvious right now, of course, but even if I was still going to Hank’s I’d be there less. I’d spend a lot of time taking walks at night, sitting in the park or the Quad drinking and reading and thinking, and would kind of wander in and out of Hank’s to see what everyone was up to occasionally. I use bars to escape the afternoon sun in summer, but at night I wanna be out and about, not chained to a barstool.

I think also that part of the reason I spend less time over summer in bars, and more outside, drinking store-bought alcohol and spending little or no money, is that summer, historically, has been kind of a dry time for me financially. When I was young, summer was when the wanderlust was strongest, and I couldn’t bear to stay in any one place for long. As a result, I rarely had steady work in summer, and being warm kind of evokes a reflex in my soul that revolts against spending money.

Of course, for the last few years I’ve been pretty sedentary and have had steady jobs: working in bars, and working at the library. But my library job vanishes over the summer, and then I come back in the fall (well, until this year, anyway). Now, the library paid enough to cover my bills, so the money I made at the bar was mine to do whatever I wanted with. I built up a decent pile of savings. I bought maybe ten or twelve new books a month, along with two or three records and a couple of Rotten Cotton T-shirts. I ate good food as much as possible, and drank quality liquor almost without exception, and so forth. But in summer that bar money had to go to the rent and electric and phone, so I lived a little less large.

This summer, of course, is going to be more cash-strapped than usual, ‘cause there’s no bar job at all (the pay doing research pales in comparison) and there isn’t a library at the end of the tunnel. But that’s okay. As long as the bills get paid and I can drink a bottle of wine in the park, I’m happy.

* * * * * * *

Tastes change in summer, as well. I listen to different music in hot weather, certainly. I listen to Jane’s Addiction all the time (named this post in their honor, actually), and Zombie (my generic name for the combined Rob Zombie/White Zombie catalog) as well, but I dig it more when it’s hot. And some things, like Creedence Clearwater Revival and Steve Miller and the Beach Boys, I listen to only in summer.

Creedence, in particular, is pure summertime music. Growing up in Richmond (if you grew up without air conditioning, anyway) meant being outside on a lot of days when the temperature was an even 100º and the humidity was at around 85-90%. In those circumstances you grab a lawn chair, sit in the shade of a big tree or a decent front porch with a great big sweet tea or a whiskey rocks (depending on age and habits). You read a good book or talk to a close friend, and listen to Creedence while you wait for the rain.

And in a Richmond summer, the rain is coming. It rains just about every day in summer there, which is the only mercy granted us. Dry days are uncommon enough that you use them to remember when something happened (“It was Tuesday or Wednesday, I think… remember that day last week when it didn’t rain?”). And we get storms coming in off the ocean; serious all-day eight-hour storms that folks in Huntington or Dayton or St. Louis or whatever have little experience of, storms where you can hear the roar of the rain's approach before it gets to you, where you walk out into the street and see the wall of water rushing towards you.

Anyway, yeah, in a Richmond summer you spend a lot of time waiting for the rain, and Creedence and a good book are perfect pastimes while you wait. I read different things in summer than in winter, too. Flannery O’Connor is a favorite summer read. Every summer I do a bunch of her short stories, and maybe The Violent Bear It Away or something like that. She suits me, because she writes the way I talk, or writes in my voice, or whatever the fancy term is that literary people use. I mean, I read her out loud to myself, and it sounds so perfect and natural. I really enjoy that. A little Flannery every summer is a treat I look forward to, but I never read her in cold weather.

This summer I’m devoting to the classics (I was gonna devote it to French cooking, but I can’t afford the ingredients). I just finished David Copperfield (usually a cold-weather book, but I made an exception). I’ve been reading lots of John Steinbeck, another summertime author. I just checked out For Whom the Bell Tolls and The Sun Also Rises to satisfy my Hemingway jones, and I’m in the process of reading Don Quixote, which I’ve heard called the first modern novel (I have no opinion on the veracity of this statement; I include it to fill space).

I don’t know if you’ve ever read Don Quixote. This is my first time, and I’m the first person to check this out of the library since Daddy Bush was in the White House, so apparently it doesn’t fly off the shelves anymore. Anyway, I didn’t know much about it really, but I thought I did. It isn’t at all what I expected.

In the first place, I assumed it would be the tale of the gradual descent-into-madness of a Spanish nobleman. But no, he’s crazy as shit on the first page and is out carrying his crazy to the world by page four or so.

In the second place, I expected it to be serious. I mean, I know the whole tilting at windmills thing is kinda goofy, but I thought the tone of the book would be serious. But no, Cervantes wrote a comedy here, consciously and conspicuously. It’s full of little jokes and dry humor and ridiculous situations, sometimes to the point where you think you’re reading the script of a Monty Python routine. Not at all what I expected. You don’t think of people from long ago being really funny, at least not intentionally. But Cervantes is, and his novel is a damn good summertime read.

* * * * * * *

The other thing that changes in summer is my drinking. I don’t drink any less, but what I drink changes.

Those of you who know me (or read this thing regularly) know that the overwhelming majority of my alcohol intake comes in the form of whiskey, single-malt scotch when I can afford it, preferably Glenlivet, always on the rocks. When I’m broke (and sometimes when I’m not) I’m not above cheap old blended whiskeys, which are passable if mixed with water, and can cool you down considerably when it’s ugly hot. Whiskey makes up probably a good 70-75% of what I drink, no matter the weather.

Outside of that, rum and wine probably combine for about another 15-20%. Wine I drink more in hot weather, and rum less. I drink almost no beer; if you see me drinking beer, it means I’m broke or sick (beer’s good for curing hangovers, heartburn, and upset stomachs). When I do drink beer, it’s Rolling Rock, or if I’m in a backwater hole-in-the-wall that doesn’t carry that, High Life or Honey Brown. But mostly it’s whiskey, wine, and rum. To all practical purposes, I don’t drink anything else.

Certainly, I’m not a vodka drinker. I’ve discovered over the years that, whereas whiskey makes me loose and jolly, and wine makes me philosophical, and rum makes me kinda giddy and boisterous, vodka makes me mean as hell. I don’t know why, but I can’t drink much of it without getting vicious. I could tell you some stories about me drinking vodka that would curl your toes; maybe that’ll be a subject for a later post. I do love Katy’s White Russians, but I usually start with those and then have a beer or two while she closes up. My vodka intake is strictly limited.

But in hot weather, again, you make exceptions. Most of the vodka I do drink, I drink in summer. Nothing is better when you’re hot and worn out than a vodka and 7-Up with a slice of lime. In hot weather I actually keep a bottle of cheap vodka in my apartment in case of emergencies. I won’t drink very many of them, maybe two, before moving on to something else; but those two drinks are profoundly refreshing, and I’d hate to be without them when it’s hot.

* * * * * * *

The extra summer wine consumption probably contributes to another change in my behavior. I become much more political in hot weather. Like I say, wine makes me philosophical, but being me, I’m not really into metaphysics or linguistics. Philosophy, to me, is political and economic. My heroes aren’t Kant and Aristotle, they’re John Stuart Mill and J.J. Rousseau, Karl Marx and Friedrich Nietzsche, and of course John Rawls, though I wish he was a bit less cumbersome. My philosophy, my whole belief pattern, is about justice and beauty, the only two things in the whole world that really matter.

So, I get philosophical in hot weather, and I get caught up in politics much more than in the winter (not that I ignore politics then, either). One particular manifestation of this is my continuing dream to write a volume of my own, a coherent political philosophy. I study this subject a lot, you see, and though most political philosophies have something worthwhile to offer, each on its own leaves me, to varying degrees, unsatisfied. I’m generally leftist, but philosophies of both left and right leave much to be desired. It’s my opinion that we desperately need a new way of looking at the world, our relation to it, and our relation to each other. Some kind of synthesis, you know? I don’t know where that new system is gonna come from, but I suppose (in my more arrogant moments) that it might as well come from me.

There’s a small problem with this, though, which is that, as a younger man, I didn’t really believe anything in particular. I was more of a devil’s advocate; whatever anyone else believed, I tried to tear down. So I would go from arguing, say, pro-choice principles in the afternoon to a hard-core pro-life stance over dinner. On Monday I wanted the death penalty abolished, but on Tuesday I would talk of "thinning the herd." The result is that, though I have now come to believe in the truth of certain positions, I understand both sides of most issues (though some things just strike me as obvious bullshit, or demonstrably and unarguably correct), and when I try to express my larger beliefs in words, I end up with a whole passel of asides and exceptions and caveats.

This is a problem, because I want to systematize what I believe into a simple, straightforward manifesto. But, you know, even if you’re sure what you want to say (and again, in some cases I’m not), it’s really hard to organize thoughts on a subject that big in a way that they’ll make sense. It’s an enormous project. Every summer I start it afresh, and every winter finds it still undone. I probably never will finish, but it’s a nice dream.

* * * * * * *

So, that’s summer. Different books, different music, different drinks, different settings, different outlooks. It’s funny how much the weather affects us, being the rational and dominant species that we are. No matter how smart we get, no matter how much control we exert over the natural world, the world still exerts a considerable control over us, doesn’t it? We may be the kingfish on this planet, but ultimately we’re still very small fish in a VERY big pond. That’s always a comfort to me, really.

Humans seem so terribly small and weak to me, and I tend so much to contempt for most of them, that the idea of the world itself being so much greater than us, the knowledge that she’ll be here still long after we’re gone, is very cheering to me; and nothing (outside of the odd earthquake or tsunami) demonstrates her power over us better than the change of seasons. I revel, especially in summer, in belonging to her. Tell me, how different is your life now than it was in January, or will be in November? How much does the world itself affect your tastes and desires and pleasures?

* * * * * * *

"For we are held by more than the force of gravity to the earth. It is the entity from which we are sprung, and that into which we are dissolved in time. It is the calendar of life as we know it, from the time of origin. Human evolution, like a vagrant moment in geologic time, is there, deep in the comprehensive earth. The blood of the whole human race is invested in it. We are moored there, rooted as surely, as deeply as are the ancient redwoods or bristlecones."

--N. Scott Momaday, The Way to Rainy Mountain

"…the earth which bore us and sustains us, the only home we shall ever know, the only paradise we shall ever need—if only we had the eyes to see."

--Edward Abbey, Desert Solitaire