It’s like my brain has been completely broiled by the worst season of them all.  

…but the only reason I can actually sit down and type something out today is because I actually woke up to some cool, cloudy weather after being slowly roasted to death over the last several days, and so I am here, motivated and refreshed and ready to complain.  Yes, complain!  This is my blog, these are my words, these are my thoughts, and doggone it, if you don’t want to read it, shut it off!  Walk away!  Leave town!  Change your name! Strap on some trainers and never stop walking towards your own goals!  Slather yourself in Crisco and find the hottest, sunniest, barest patch of world that you can, and have at it! 

And stop stalking me, while you’re at it!

Because I truly despise this season.  I truly, truly do.  I think I wrote about it last year as well, although there is no archive section in my useless WordPress account here unless I pay them even more money for even more mediocrity, so finding it is going to take me a few minutes as I scroll back, back, back.  Glancing at it now (found it), it’s far tamer than where I am at now, which is entirely fed up.  Right up to my eyebrows and beyond!  

It seems that people constantly moan about winter, about seasonal affective disorder, about how the dark and rain and cold make them so tired and despairing and unmotivated…and it’s considered entirely normal.  Expected, even. People receive great moans of sympathy and understanding for expressing this.  Books have been written on it.  I remember when I was teaching ESL, there was an entire lesson planned around this alleged phenomenon in some outdated resource book that was lying around, and of course, it was standard to point out that the acronym for seasonal affective disorder is, wouldn’t you know it, SAD.  Such clever folks who dreamed this up, amiright?!

But what about those of us who experience it during the summer?  Where are the folks offering their compassionate ears, their noises of sympathy, their acceptance that this particularly heinous time of year actually affects our mental health entirely?  I guess they’re on their boats, or their Jet-Skis, or scratching bug bites on their ass at the campsite, or tossing some slaughtered baby animals onto the grill, or whatever it is that people do when they really throw themselves into summertime and roll their eyes at how ridiculous it is that there really are some of us who become depressed, who becomes hopeless, who feel massive anxiety, and who feel like they’re in an inescapable cauldron of fire, noise, crowds, and apathy.  

It calls to mind, actually, the sort of disdain I’m faced with when I tell people I don’t like fruit (apart from lemons, limes, and grapefruit, that is).  I don’t and I never have.  Fruit is howlingly unappealing to me: the mushy, pulpy, seedy texture of most of it, the sickly-sweetness, the easy bruising, the sounds people make when they eat it…it’s been this way since I was a kid.  I will eat absolutely any vegetable you give me, though.  I always have a stocked crisper, I have been known to air-fry zucchini as a delightful snack, I will eat an entire English cucumber sprinkled with Tajin seasoning while standing by my kitchen sink, I save all of my veg scraps in the freezer and make my own homemade stock with them.  It’s safe to say that I am a massive fan and advocate of vegetables, and can actually feel it in my aging body when I haven’t had any for longer than a day, which is rare, anyway.  

Yet!  I tell people I don’t like fruit, and they think I’m legitimately crazy (I’ve heard this many, many times; people will actually say, without compunction, “You’re crazy,” at which point, they get quite a reply from me, the likes of which they never anticipated).  Tell people you don’t like vegetables, however, and they somehow understand.  It’s accepted.  A bit on the infantile side, sure…it is indeed an indication of a very babyish and underdeveloped palate, but nobody reacts with horror, amusement, or disgust if you state you will never, ever touch a single bell pepper even if your life hinges upon doing so.  

Same goes with the seasons.  Tell people you hate winter, they’re fine with it, and will probably agree on some level.  Tell people you hate summer, and you may as well tell them you wish the Grinch had dropped napalm on Whoville and that Bryan Kohberger is simply a very misunderstood young man.  

I loathe summer, and it gets worse every year.  I cannot recall the last summer I enjoyed.  Perhaps something like 2008?  Yes, I’d say that was a good summer for me; in fact, the whole year was absolutely stellar.  I was working full-time for a national theatre festival, I’d just had to say adeus to my young Brazilian lover, I had great friends and company, and I even managed to borrow a car and make it over to Grand Forks for a group camping trip, where tubing down the river whilst getting completely leathered on vodka coolers was the stuff of legend, but two nights of dealing with sand and tents and obnoxious fellow campers had me fleeing to a family friend’s house for a shower, a home-cooked meal, and a bed.  But overall, that July and August were pretty great, in retrospect; it’s the last summer I can recall as being not merely bearable, but enjoyable.

First of all, I’ve lived in the West End of Vancouver for a decade, and it’s a very densely-populated area of the city that is actually quite a feat of urban planning: tens of thousands of people live in this rather small grid of streets, and you’d never really know it.  I’m completely over living here for many reasons, but I’ve got an affordable apartment, and if you’ve got that anywhere in Vancouver, you do not leave.  Ever. It’s an expensive, utterly boring city, and if I hear people rhapsodize about the ocean and mountains one more time, I’m going to do something drastic; it’s an overrated, overpriced, addict-enabling, stressed-out, corrupt, dysfunctional city that just happens to have geographically-pleasant advantages. As I’ve always said, if you picked up Vancouver–keeping everything about it entirely intact–and plonked it into northern Saskatchewan, it would likely be considered one of the worst places in North America to live.  And incidentally, I grew up here, so I’m allowed to talk like this. If you’re a transplant and you bellyache about my hometown, I might not-so-politely suggest that you thumb a ride with a guy driving a flatbed truck and never, ever look back.

Once the summer hits the West End, that’s it: don’t expect to get a moment of peace, even though it’s actually a surprisingly quiet place for the rest of the year.  The worst offenders are the motorcycles, and I hope every last biker ends up smashed into a giant concrete barrier at some point.  Chromosome-impaired dingbats rub their hands together with glee because the weather’s cleared up, hauling out their death rockets with seemingly no mufflers, and absolutely roar up and down my street despite it being a 30 km/hr zone.  Why?  Because it has no traffic lights and it’s close to the main street, Davie, which has plenty of traffic lights and lots of cars, so they prefer my quiet residential street for their pavement-peeling, utterly obnoxious chaos; they noise-pollute and disturb the neighbourhood twenty-four hours a day with impunity and defiance.  I’ve thought for years about standing on my balcony with a bucket of rotten produce and pelting it at all the imbecilic bikers who ruin things for everyone, but I’m just not that kind of girl. 

I’m not!  

Along with the bikers, the construction crews also do a dance of merriment every morning, knowing that this is their season to absolutely sparkle.  The weather’s good, so it’s time to BUILD!  It’s time to DESTROY!  It’s time to JACKHAMMER and DRILL and FRONT-LOAD and RAZE!  They get out every single machine and arrange themselves all around my neighbourhood–in fact, all around downtown…in fact, all around everywhere in Metro Vancouver, come to think of it–and just have at it.  All morning, all afternoon.  With some road crews, it’s all night.  Not a moment of respite from the agony of their equipment which never shuts off.  Right now, I’m gritting my teeth as some crew at the building next door to me (of course it has to be the building next door to me!) completely demolish, much to my shock and misery, a gorgeous old pine tree that has probably been there for a century.  We’ve got a telescopic sawing machine, we’ve got guys with chainsaws breaking down the chunks of abused tree, we’ve got a truck that acts as a wood chipper, all going simultaneously.  This din, this infernal cacophony of construction machines transforming this city into an even more sterile hellscape, is the soundtrack to every last day in the summertime.

The garbage and recycling trucks are out at 7 a.m. every morning without fail, roaring about the alleys and clanking and braking and dumping and dropping giant waste dumpsters back onto the pavement with an unceremonious, teeth-rattling crash.  I know they’re doing their jobs, these fellas (I’ve yet to see a woman work in waste removal), but my God, every morning?  Since it’s so dense here with apartment buildings, this is the noise that greets many of us upon waking (or even before waking), and goes on for the entirety of each day.  This does not happen during the rest of the year.  I had no idea there was such a thing as “garbage season,” but in my barrio, apparently, there is!

People are out in droves during this time of year.  Tourists cram every city block, the LGBQ community flock here for gay month and the various events, and the kidz are out of school, so they’re downtown and at the beach and roaming the streets, yelping and squealing and strolling four abreast on the sidewalks obnoxiously, or even in packs that move very slowly while the rest of us are just trying to get somewhere.  Walking almost anywhere during this time of year when you live in the city core is an exercise in absolute madness and masochism.  So as often as possible, I don’t.  

…meaning that I pan-fry myself alive in my apartment a lot of the time.  It’s a small, early-60s walkup that appears to have a concrete structure, since I can’t really hammer nails through the walls to put things up, never mind attempting a pushpin for a calendar.  It has one whole wall of windows facing north yet still gets plenty of light, which is terrific for my array of beautiful plants, but there is zero cross-breeze, no windows on either side of the rooms, the kitchen still has a big wall blocking it from the living room, meaning that when I keep my balcony door open for air, it can’t reach me when I’m in the kitchen, dripping perspiration onto my salmon.  

My bedroom has one thin, measly west-facing window with blackout drapes, and there is a column fan I also regularly haul into the living room during the day.  That dim little bedroom somehow traps heat, and becomes stale quickly and constantly.  I cannot sleep with cold air blowing onto me, it’s horrible, so I keep the fan turned slightly to the side.  It does cool up the room a bit, but then my blanket becomes oppressive.  So I kick it off, and feel exposed, far too cold; who sleeps without a blanket?  In the past, during the zenith of our increasingly regular heatwaves (I won’t say “heat dome,” as this isn’t Mad Max…yet), I have been known to take one of my flat sheets, soak it in cold water, wring it out, and use it as my blanket.  It actually worked; I slept!  Everyone deserves to snooze in relative comfort, but in my 60s bunker, it takes a great deal of effort, careful fan adjustment, blanket physics, earplugs, sleep masks, melatonin, magnesium, gabapentin, trazodone, and barely-intact sanity to get a few hours during the summer.

It’s just too HOT.  It’s too hot, and I hate it.  There’s no escaping it.  During the other seasons, especially winter, if it’s cold, you can take care of that.  You can bundle up, layer your clothing, haul out a thick duvet, wear hats, wrap a scarf around your face, put on a balaclava, swaddle yourself in fleece blankets on your couch, turn up the heat in your house, soak in a beautiful, steaming epsom salt bath, have raging piles of sex with someone…there are endless options for keeping warm and dry, and I am comfortable and content with all of them.

Summer?  

When it’s thirty degrees out and it’s an urban rainforest that has no proper infrastructure for these temperatures in older buildings and houses, such as my own?  When you strut out of your front door and a blast of hot air thwacks you in the face like a fist, exactly the same way your oven does when it’s cranked up to 400 degrees and you open it up to check on the roast, and you know it’s going to be another day of inescapable hell?  When you are in the thinnest, loosest clothing you own, you have to walk several blocks somewhere, and still there’s this incendiary, celestial spotlight following you around, searing your flesh and cooking you alive and the only relief you get is ducking into what are hopefully air-conditioned establishments that actually won’t let you hang around unless you buy something, and you don’t want to buy anything, so you’re doing laps in the Safeway and browsing the overpriced lemons at No Frills but you know you have to go back into that red-hot coal pit in a few minutes because you don’t actually want to hang out in a supermarket?  When you live very close to the colourful gay neighbourhood of Vancouver, and thus it’s utterly crammed with curious spectators and out-of-town community members and visitors and tourists and teenagers and more cracked-out, public-disturbing drug addicts than there ever were before because as soon as that sun comes out, it’s as though they sprout like sunflowers?

No.

To put it eloquently:

Get fucked, summer.  I’m Xing off my calendar until October.