Ultimate Summer Pleasure
i was like, good gracious ass bodacious
Hi hunnybun!
I’m back from taking a couple weeks off to just be a lizard in the summer heat🌴
I housesat for someone for a bunch of days!
We threw a party at our house! We Prided at Pride! It was all wonderful.
IMO, summer doesn’t officially start until Pride—everything before that is just a warm-up. That’s because in the Midwest, June’s not that cute—it rains and is cloudy almost every day, and no one has their sandal situation figured out yet, and no one has their beach-day situation locked down yet, and the lakes are still too cold to swim in, anyway, and everyone is hyper about the idea of eating outside (because it feels so novel!!) but then the sun sets and oh shit, it’s freezing and your teeth are chattering above a picked-over charcuterie plate as you rebuff your tiny friend’s third offer to “just put on” their sweatshirt because honey in what world do you think your blade-of-grass-sized sweatshirt is going to slide effortlessly over these shoulders??
You know?
There has to be a time when summer really arrives, and that time is Pride. That’s when it’s going to finally be hot and stay hot, and you can count on it, the same way you can count on making firm, rock-solid Pride game plans with your friends and then watching Saturday night devolve into absolute mayhem as random people join, demand to go to a fourth location, bring their unvetted new partner, take mushrooms, hook up with their ex, take molly, and/or get sunstroke. It’s like clockwork!
Every year, the day before Pride, I methodically clean the inside and outside of my car (this appeases the more discerning gods of homosexuality), and then I try on my annual $30-or-under ultra-slutty Pride dress in front of our big mirror to make final adjustments. The cheap slutty Pride dress invariably consists of a single piece of stretchy synthetic fabric purchased a size too small on purpose, with either a horny print or multiple inventive skin peek-a-boos slashed into the fabric. Here’s this year’s model, if you’re interested:
Then we Pride all weekend, and then I take Monday off, because asking me to sit through a two-hour Zoom staff meeting with PowerPoint presentations from every team in the company on the Monday after Pride??? That’s called homophobia, baby!!!!
But now everything has settled down. We’re in it: Full Summer. Real Summer. The only time of year it feels right to go to a really bad movie (The Materialists!! hoo) just to see your trampy little boyfriend Pedro Pascal prance around Manhattan in his little outfits. The only time of year when you can randomly yell “Five-inch inseam or nothing, babe!” on a restaurant’s patio and have someone across the deck yell back, “I KNOW that’s right!”
There are so many kids in my neighborhood. They’ve been let out of their cells for the season, and they roam the sidewalks in sticky, stained packs, migrating from house to house in search of refrigerated juice boxes and unlocked adult iPads. And because Northfield is so small and feels so safe, I often see lots them doing real “childhood-summertime” things. Like playing some kind of made-up game involving a kickball and a hula hoop in the middle of the street; like biking frantically after the ice cream truck, screaming, “WAIT WAIT!!!!” as it rounds a corner, twinkling its tinkly tune. These kids are double-bouncing one another on trampolines. They’re trying to drown each other at the pool. They’re playing kick the can after dark in the park near my house, or catching lightning bugs, which we have ten million of, or sitting in the sun in a row outside the grocery store, mouths purple from popsicles, pooling their final coins in someone’s grubby hand to buy Mountain Dew from the vending machine.
Seeing them makes me nostalgic for that summertime feeling—for that wildly undersupervised 80s/90s time when my mom had no idea where I was and also didn’t really care, as long as I wasn’t setting fires, and so summer meant three solid months of absolute unstructured free time. Time that could be spent catching crayfish in the creek and screaming about how gross they were; time that could be spent trying to “catch air” going fast over hills on our bikes. We were out there digging really large holes in my friend Abby’s backyard for no reason, or watching someone’s cousin’s old VHS of Dirty Dancing with our mouths open, trying to understand what the dirty part specifically was, or nagging one of our older sisters to bring us to the mall, where we always wanted to go and where we never bought anything.
I miss that shit!! All of it. As part of my Summer of Fun, I’m trying to give myself more unstructured time to do whatever I want. More lazing around on the front porch, reading books published 30 years ago; more time at the public pool wearing outsized hats or perfecting my flip-turns.
The other morning, early, I was walking Teddy across the St. Olaf (yes! we live in a Golden Girls episode) campus, which is beautiful and fancy, because it costs $80,000 a year to go to St. Olaf. A huge hill with a green, glossy, manicured lawn rose up in front of us, and it was so early that the lawn looked almost frosty with dew droplets. I took my sandals off and walked up the hill with Teddy, and the feeling of the chilled wet dew soaking my bare feet; the sound of the grass splishing slickly through my toes; the tracks left behind us, a set of dog prints and a set of bare human feet—all of it felt like being eight years old in the summer again, waking up before everyone else to go be outside for no reason, starting the day early on purpose to do nothing.
Cold summer dew on green grass, I decided, was one of summer’s ultimate pleasures. Here, in no particular order, are more of them.
Ultimate Summer Pleasures
Slicing a just-picked heirloom tomato, putting flakes of sea salt on it, and messily devouring it
DRINKING HOSE WATER (the finest version of water!!)
When the sun doesn’t set until 9:30 PM and you’re sitting outside with your friends and the meal’s lasted three hours and it’s still somehow light out
Drinking a cold glass of dry white wine while (this is important) looking at water and fantasizing about what it would be like to be retired
The nap after swimming and before dinner (the well-known Supreme Nap)
The mid-afternoon nap when it’s so hot and you have too much to do to be napping and a lawn mower’s going in the distance (1st runner-up to Supreme Nap)
Twinkly garden lights
Casual nudity re: heat
Making friends with a Boat Gay
Making friends with someone who offhandedly mentions a “cottage” and then eventually, years later, finding out that this does not mean “a small shack with no running water and a thatched roof” like you thought and instead means “my family has a summer chateau on a lake”
a small shack with no running water and a thatched roof, tho🥺
FROZEN GRAPES (i could eat these until i throw up, a bag of grapes hates to see me coming)
A swimming hole no one else seems to know about
A crisp black cold brew when you’re out running errands at 11 AM
Someone setting a plate of cut ripe fruit in front of you
Being so hot and coming inside to ice-cold air-conditioning
Related to this one: When one of your crunchy granola-dyke-ass friends finally caves and gets air-conditioning after years of inviting unsuspecting victims over for dinner and then, as everyone visibly sweats over a hot weird stew, smugly suggesting that everyone just needs to “acclimate”
And the greatest Ultimate Summer Pleasure of them all…
NOT CAMPING
What’d I miss, bb?
"what is this? a sweatshirt for ANTS?"
The clack(?) of the bike wheel spoke beads as you ride around the neighborhood!