Have Some Fun, For the Love of God

All the people who didn’t get sick last year didn’t get well this year, either

Here we are, end of July, smack in the middle of yet another impossibly bizarre summer. Aside from the fact that you can, in theory, go to a restaurant – sometimes, if they are open – I can’t help but feel as though this summer is somehow stranger than the last one. The sense of out and out oppression we knew so well in 2020 (whether from the disease itself or its social effects) is absent, but all the people who didn’t get sick last year didn’t get well this year, either. And given how rapidly we seem to be careening right back to masks-and-lockdowns again, maybe all this is a natural consequence of a story that has yet to arrive at a real conclusion, if it ever will.

I’ve noticed an unconscious inclination in many to already refer to the summer of 2021 in the past tense, as though it were over already, even as we’ve still got more than half of it remaining ahead of us. I’ve even caught myself doing it a couple of times. Possibly, this is an illusion generated by the odd and unseasonable weather of this past month. Possibly, it’s just some kind of admission of defeat – and I won’t admit defeat personally, but I guess I can understand the urge. What’s painfully clear is that absolutely nobody seems to be having any fun.

We hosted a glorious party just after the solstice, on June 26; it’s hard to remember, but people actually did have fun there. The following weekend was Independence Day and we held a special welcome home barbecue for my dearest friend, returning from two years’ exile in Northern Italy. That was fun, too. The fireworks were spectacular, as were the food and the company.

Then the rains came. Noah’s second 40-day deluge, or so it would seem.

All of July it rained. It didn’t just rain, it poured. It poured so much that the ground began washing away, taking huge chunks of road with it. It happened again, just now – even as I write, the rains are tapering (for how long?) from last evening’s fresh watery hell, during which some of the prior repairs to washed-out roads were undone. I swear at one point I heard a tree fall and a minor explosion – gonna have to wait until daylight to figure out what the hell that was.

All of my tiki torches, purchased for the St. John’s party, along with even my Breaking Bad apron, are covered in mold. This would not normally be something I’d even have to think about, except apparently this is what happens when it rains and it never stops. It hasn’t at any point gotten warm or dry enough for long enough for me to attempt to salvage these tropical, ritualistic bug deterrents (or my apron).

We got to hear all the people who wrung their hands furiously in June about the mild drought we were sort of in remind us again and again that this rain didn’t count and there were no silver linings allowed. (Supposedly, when it pours a lot of rain in a short amount of time, it just runs off, eating topsoil and dumping it into rivers, instead of healing the groundwater or whatever; given that we’ve had a lot of rain over a very, very long period of time, I find it very difficult to believe that anything that needs water didn’t get it – but I’m no hand-wringing expert.) Naturally, we’ve also had to contend with the captains of obviousness holding signs of doom, reminding us that climate change means we will have strange weather like lots of rain forever, until we die – and imply pretty heavily, whether they realize it or not (they don’t), that climate change can somehow be mitigated by the level to which we’re all collectively willing to be morose about it.

Like, Christ Almighty, I just want to go to the beach. Even if the world is ending, I’d still like to go to the beach, thank you, because it’s July and that’s what you do in July, and that’s what I plan to do as long as I somehow remain here in this delightful incarnation.

This is an option for you, too – if it ever stops raining. Maybe it will. Maybe tonight was the end of the Deluge.

Maybe.

*

For a brief moment on the golf course yesterday (it was partly sunny long enough to allow for this), I was reminded what a great month July is. It’s not as great as June, of course, and typically I have a little more fun in August, but July’s still pretty great. I was further reminded, due to a confluence of different conversations and a piece I wrote two years ago, one of my favorites, that by this time of year I have usually transformed into “Late-July Chris” – the most relaxed, laid back, fun-loving, music-seeking, shorts-wearing version of myself.

This year, being such a strange year, my rhythm is a little bit different, and it’s not just because July felt so unlike July that it lacked a lot of the bechillifying effect that normally works so well on me. Owing to very unusual circumstances (unemployment!), I’ve actually been more relaxed and loose than I’ve been in at least a decade, but probably much more, and that started many weeks ago. The unemployment isn’t good, obviously, but the relief and peacefulness very much are.

This leaves me as summery as ever before, but for the last month bereft of a proper summer to enjoy, and bereft of more than a dozen or so people actually interested in having fun.

I can’t prove it, but I swear that if all of this happened a decade ago, or fifteen years ago, most everyone would still be out there, relentlessly pursuing a good time. This used to be something we collectively viewed as important, regardless of circumstances. It used to be okay to think that it was important to have fun, that it was necessary. I still think it’s okay, and it’s still important to me.

*

I’ll tell you what’s fun in July even when it rains the whole time and everyone’s in a bad mood: the Summer Olympics.

Consistent with everything else, we’re not really allowed to have fun with this, either. Also consistent is that somehow, our mass collective dissatisfaction and distaste with the Olympic Games is divided along bizarre partisan lines. From conservatives, I hear that the Games have degraded from some prior state of greatness and have “become political now” – millions of little Rip van Winkles who apparently managed to sleep through the last, oh, I dunno, 125 years or so.

Liberals, to their credit (?), have been much more creative, hard-working, and determined in coming up with their multivarious reasons why the Olympics are bad. Some say it’s immoral (or something) to hold this international event “in the middle of a pandemic.” That’s an opinion, I guess. Some point to the (real) corruption of the IOC or to the fact that the Olympics have a net negative effect on the poor and working class in any given host city. Both of these are certainly valid areas in which to seek reform (although not, I would argue, to brand the entire Olympics as “bad”).

I see and hear many more, however, adopting a some position or other related to the idea that the Olympics are a waste of time and money that could go toward making the world a better place – as if the time and money spent on the Olympics were ever otherwise going to be spent on making the world a better place, and as though we now have no more time or money left to make the world a better place. Ask yourself if that’s a strong argument.

Not that I haven’t been guilty of some of this in the past myself – in 2000, for example, I was an angsty teenager too cool and aloof for empty bullshit like international competition. I’m also certain that there were points in the twenty-teens, during my heavy socialist period, when I would have declared that nothing so clearly a product of bourgeois society like the Olympics should be enjoyed, by anyone, ever. (I’m certain that I felt the same way, during this time, about space exploration.)

But I also remember watching the Games with absolute wonder at eight years old in 1992, a pivotal year in my life, thrilled to the gills at the opportunity to watch a once-in-a-lifetime Dream Team show the world the best that the game of basketball would ever offer. I think of another crucially important year in my life, 2004, when I discovered with utter fascination in the middle of the day in my buddy Greg’s Boston apartment many of the “strange” minor events rarely covered in primetime or in highlights: the boxing, the fencing, the archery.

When else can you find sword-fighting and arrow-shooting on television, while fiery badminton is played on a different channel, skateboarding competitions on another, canoe slalom on another? And it wasn’t until just this year that I learned of the mysterious wonders of the pentathlon.

Why should athletic competition be expected be more than it is, to somehow save the world, or to be eschewed if the world resists saving? Why is it so hard to see that – like the ability to go into space – the ability for all of the nations of the world to send athletes every four years to a single event at which every imaginable warm-weather contest will be played out is a remarkable human achievement? Particularly in an age of diversified and specialized entertainment, what else outside of war and politics has the ability to capture the eyes and attention of viewers and fans (and even malcontents) around the world? These are the major periodic events that break up and largely can help us give sense and meter to our very lives.

In a society devoid of proper periodic celebration and communal festivals, these Games are the closest thing we get to a global, all-of-humanity ritual. Sure, they’re “just games,” but I say it’s significant that what we’re able to do to get ourselves all together is a showcase of the best of that which we are physically and mentally capable.

The lesson here is simple: we do not have to be perfect to strive for greatness. Of course sports can’t redeem the world – nobody ever said that they could. But this global spectacle can yet point the way forward, which lies in hope for humanity, faith in our individual and collective potential, and the determination and will required to do the best we can with everything that we have.

It is critical that adults understand that just because everything isn’t good does not mean that everything is bad.

And whether or not it ever stops raining, the summer of 2021 is very much still alive. If you’re bound to a school-based calendar, you’ve got a whole month to go; if not, add three more weeks. What are you going to do with that time? Is spreading dourness the best way to arrive at something better? Let it go. Seek out a good time. Have fun. I promise you, in this climate, that in itself may be the best you can do for yourself and even for the world. This is the only life you have, and it’s complicated and fraught, but it’s yours to do with what you will.

What do you want to do with it?