I’ve always wanted to ask someone “Where do you summer?” but I worry if I did, I would immediately be struck by falling space debris. Summer as a verb. An action. To devastate others with your summering. No one will ever summer as greatly as you do. You don’t experience summer, you wield it. You weaponize it. I didn’t believe summering was a real thing until I was in my 30s. Now it seems like everyone besides me summers. They possess the summer. They use it how they want. They shout it from the rooftops and on Instagram. Everyone is in Italy and I’m in Hollywood and can’t poop. When I travel my body shuts down. Flying or driving, it reboots and I can’t do anything normally for at least two days. I am 34 going on 300. I traveled because I was on tour! The podcast I co-host was on tour for a month. Six live shows over four weeks.
I’ve never summered, but I have toured. That’s something. I miss touring already. I got to be in San Francisco and walk through fog and park bramble with my husband, and see driverless cars circling the neighborhood to spy on pedestrians, and I got walk to Starbucks and imagine San Francisco in the early 1900s, nearly swallowed by the earth and glowing along the rolling hills in broken sunlight
I’m now someone who tours sometimes. “Touring is life!” What if I said that out loud? I’m going to power-walk down Hollywood Blvd find a Scandinavian family in front of the Ripley’s Believe It Or Not museum and say “To tour is life!” They’ll be patient and silent. Maybe a cool, bored American teen hanging nearby will chuck a Dr. Pepper at my head. I’ll deserve it, but at least I’ll have gotten to let people now I was on tour.
We’ve entered the part of the season where every day is one endless Sunday afternoon. Sometimes summer in Los Angeles doesn’t commit till August. There will be a terrifyingly hot week in mid-September where putting tinfoil on your windows seems like the best course of action. And then it will be Autumn, and cold till next June. It might thunderstorm today in LA. I saw it’s storming in Texas, and on the east coast. I wonder how long it will be until there’s one giant thunderstorm over the entire US? You know where it’s not storming, though? In Italy! Where everyone is.
The Gay Rapture has also happened: gays dematerializing in place and transported to Fire Island, to Provincetown, to Italy and Puerto Vallarta. To Greece and Beh-lin. I’ve never been Gay Raptured. I long to be dematerialized and spat up in thorny bramble on an Italian island with dried cum on my stomach and dusky cicadas shrieking all around me. God has not chosen me as one of God’s Gays, though. I am simply a Gay Gay.
I’m smart, though. I would never complain about not being able to afford to Summer or afford to be Gay Raptured. Imagine I write a series of tweets about why it’s so hard to see Other Gays being able to go on vacation when you can’t. “Why It’s So Hard To See Other Gays Enjoying Their Lives: a THREAD” Even writing that scenario, I see myself getting The Lottery’d on Twitter, and rightfully so. No good ever came from a Twitter thread. Or a Thread Thread. Have you heard of Threads? I won’t waste your time.
Actually, I will. Here’s a great Thread:
We are in Hell.
***
I just saw videos of Disneyland characters walking the red carpet at the Disneyland premiere of Haunted Mansion. The movie’s cast wasn’t there because of the strike. Mary Poppins twirled her parasol while a tepid flurry of cameras shuttered just off screen. Bob Iger is sucking on a turkey leg in Sun Valley while Disney characters cross the picket line at gunpoint.
You're such an excellent writer, young man.