Too much of a good thing

August: There's No There There

By Rick Horowitz

August: The month without a theme. Even the calendar doesn't care about August. Try to find another month that never hosts even a single decent-size holiday. You can't do it; there aren't any others. It's probably just as well. What would they do to celebrate a holiday in August -- make you go to work on some Monday? The whole month is a holiday.

Let the poets sing the praises of April and May, of June and July. By August, the best they can come up with is a verse like this: "Dead is the air, and still...a tideless expansion of slumber." Hardly inspiring, but can you do any better? By August, the tank is empty.

The word you're after, you think you remember, is "lassitude." You really should look it up in the dictionary to be sure. You just don't feel like it.

It's not an evil month, August. It's a perfectly good time to take a vacation or toast a marshmallow or take a cold shower so the neighbors don't come home and one day and find you collapsed in a sweaty heap in front of the mailbox. It's not an evil month -- it simply lacks soul.

More than anything. August is a victim of bad timing. Tuck it into the calendar a couple of moons earlier -- after March, say -- and people would welcome it. It would be like winning a trip to the tropics without ever leaving home. Tuck it in a couple of moons later, and it would be a shimmering reminder of those summer days left behind. But sitting where it is, it's got trouble.

The trouble is, you've seen it all before. It's called July. You've already had 31 days that look pretty much like these 31 -- just about as hot, just about as sticky. If you hated July, you'll go crazy in August. And if you loved July? You'll be bored.

"Show us something new," you cry. You're wasting your breath -- there's nobody around to show it to you. It's not as bad as Paris -- yet -- but it's getting there. Last August, half the people you normally call to say hello to or to get things done found that half the people they call to say hello to or get things done had vanished -- had simply disappeared for weeks at a stretch. This August, half the people you call will have vanished, too -- why should they stick around when they can't get through to anybody? Next August, somebody may be calling you. All they'll get is the sound of your phone ringing over and over again.

"Over and over again" -- a new motto for the month? But then...

You notice it's hard to see the ball by the end of the evening softball game. You find you're cleaning out the barbecue grill in the dark. You wonder what you did with the sweaters.

And then sometime in those 31 days, it will rain -- a steady, chilling rain, for a day or even two. Everything that summer is will come to a stop for as long as the rain falls. The sun will come out again, the heat and the haze will return, but you've seen around the corner.

There's a Change coming.

Rick Horowitz is a syndicated columnist, TV commentator and public speaker.