Summertime Funtime: Taking All the Fun Out of This Edition

Let’s start with the bad weather
– tornadoes, heat waves, and hurricanes, oh my. We have bad weather year round
though. It’s not just a summer thing. I think what makes it worse is that
summer does feel like a time for fun. It’s a time to get outside and swim, and
other activities that don’t require too much clothing. It’s not a time to worry
about being displaced from your home. In the wintertime, you don’t really want
to go outside anyway, so having to be inside during an ice storm feels less
disruptive.

Heat can be bad though. We spend
a lot of time in cars, and the heat can get oppressive if you don’t have AC. Or
maybe you do have AC, but it’s what they call 240 AC… wait for it. Where you
roll down 2 windows and drive 40 miles per hour! Wait, you read that as
“two-hundred and forty AC” and the joke was ruined? Sorry. I didn’t realize it
was a verbal joke. Admit it though. If I had said 420 AC, you would have read
it as “four twenty,” so it’s not my fault. You also would have thought that it
was where you roll down all four windows, smoke a blunt, and drive real slow so
the cops don’t think you’re high. Does marijuana talk make you too happy for
this downer of a post? Read this.

All that being said, even
swimming isn’t always good (and neither are my segues, given that I setup the
swimming segue a number of paragraphs ago, but then used it for the lack of AC
segue). Miguel and I may have had a good time swimming in Lake Worth during Summer Project ’94, but a couple of years later a former co-worker of mine died
while swimming in Lake Worth. He just ended up losing strength while too far
from the shore, they think. The people on the shore were helpless to do
anything.

The US is insanely opposed to
people vacationing, by the way (Chris the segue master strikes again). In the
US, it feels like two weeks paid vacation is living the high life. Vacation is
still all in all a good thing, but there was a summer vacation from my youth
that I haven’t gotten to yet where bad things happened. And how about some more
summer themed music to listen to while I tell you about it?

Bananarama – Cruel Summer

I mentioned our neighbours in
Oklahoma in a previous post. Well, we went to visit them once after we’d left Oklahoma, and stayed for a
couple of weeks. They had a couple of guys staying with them who I believe
worked for their family company. One of the guys was sleeping in the laundry
room, and went out to take a weekend nap during the day. He ended up having a
low level heat stroke. He was ok ultimately, but it made me aware of the
deadliness of high temperatures.

The Motels – Suddenly, Last
Summer

During that same stay, we were
all riding bikes, and there was a steep hill with a path that went into a small
forested area. Along that path there was a nice little hump of dirt that worked
fantastically as a bike ramp, so we started rolling down the hill and jumping
the dirt ramp. It started out reasonably enough with us just rolling down the
hill and gaining whatever speed we could get, but kids can’t just let it go at
that. We started getting a good amount of speed going before we even hit the
downhill decline, and we were getting more of a jump out of it. I got the
highest jump out of all the kids. It was so high in fact that I remember
hearing one of the other kids going, “Whoa!” as I flew by… and landed wrong.

Cherokee Red – Lonely Summer

So a mere day or two after they
had taken the worker guy to the hospital for heat stroke, I was in the hospital
with a broken wrist. So much for summer being fun.

Chris McGinty is a blogger who
figures he has about a 25% chance of dying during the summer.