Santa Claus is coming to town!!!!

They always had Christmas in July specials on Disney when I was younger. I figured it was because there was nothing else going on in the summer, not too many holidays (NONE in August!), and really you can't keep your audience in a summer lull, or else they'll find things to do outside. Especially if they're kids. (Hopefully that'll still be true, that one of our American values is that kids can always and should play outside no matter how much we modernize our society.) But yeah, a summer lull.

That's what's wonderful about summer. If this were any other season, I wouldn't be studying shirtless right now. But I am, and it doesn't feel strange; instead, it feels at one with the environment. My shirt is in its proper place: discarded. This is summer. The wonderful time to relax, throw back, and relax again. Frisbee, pizza, summer songs, echoes of your voice as you yell it down the deserted street. The street where you can't understand why it's deserted, because who wouldn't be out like this on a summer night? Mosquitoes, yeah, just run around! I guess when you grow up you start taking night bedtime seriously? I would think that growing up would mean being able to go out all night and do what you could do as kids at night when you've got the chance to do it, having worked all day while the kids played. Well, I haven't been working all day at all, no, not anything close to it, but this seems to be the typical story among people I know. Work, go home, go to sleep, work, yeah. And why that during the summer? Every waking hour should be spent appreciating the best, the freest of the seasons.

I just wish that where we live wasn't so infested by mosquitoes and other anonymous flies; I'd love to swim through the heat of the summer darkness, first parallel to the plane extended from the flat sole of where my shoes were positioned, and then down my driveway, down into the cul-de-sac, and then up, above the construction (why are they building new houses when nobody can buy them?) and off to the sky, to Japan and back, and then once more to Japan and back, and then to four years ago and back, to that summer where I first learned what Japan was all about, then to the Atlantic Ocean, alongside Salisbury Beach, Crane Beach, Good Harbor Beach and Rockport, and all along Cape Ann and down to Cape Cod, back to where my grandmother used to live, back four to six more years to when she and my grandfather were still alive, and back to that point in my childhood where I would play with the new cheap (but infinitely golden in my imagination) plastic toys my grandparents had bought me and placed in that magical cardboard box, that magical cardboard box. That was always there... and forward, forward into time, forward into this present where I sit at my computer, and then back into my soul, the gust of wind returning like Japanese representatives on the Iwakura Mission in 1873 telling all their friends and superiors about their trip to Europe, about the wonderful things they saw and how it's still better back home anyway.

Someday I will have a dream like this, perhaps. About a whisk of wind that leaves my soul, departs, sails away, through the four dimensions I know, and comes back to me, and rejoices and fills my body with a vigor I haven't known in any sense, and relaxes with me, within me, all this before I wake up.

What a wonderful summer.