Summertime child, the living is easy and the nights move strangely. I remember about two months ago I met a drunk guy in the alley behind a gas station who kept asking me “What takes the pain away?… What takes the pain away?… What takes the pain away?” I couldn’t give him an answer back then but I’ve kept asking myself the same question ever since I last saw him vomiting into the empty trash bins. One of these mornings he’s going to rise up singing like a pariah. He’ll spread his wings and take off to a silk laden sky, but until that day nothing will harm him and his impoverished heart. He was more of a hero than any soldier. I spent a few days watching my grandfather become a crooked man. Quiet as a monk, living in his crooked house, with crooked people, and the world’s strongest spouse. You can trace the years of conviction carved into his face. His arms and legs twist like the branches of a saccharine tree. For all his life he watched both sons and daughters make mistakes, make more children, and make the world’s simplest miracles. As he laughs he cries from the broken nerve cells sparking all across the ventricles of his body. My cousins burn fires, grow taller, yell louder, and watch the symbol of our lineage sink like the world’s strongest ship. With his lion-hair now gray, he sits and waits to fall asleep, surrounded by both flowers and the crooked tangle of our lives. My best friends showed me what Heaven looks like in the summertime. They’ve been growing in the garden for years now, and the plants are finally starting to glow like halos. After they climb the ladder to the greenhouse, they dim the lights and tell me “This is what sunsets used to look like before civilization came and ruined it for everybody.” With a cigarette in each of their hands they show me what its like to harvest Heaven’s honey, what it feels like to pay respects to a sacred rite thousands of years old, and what it feels like to say goodbye to our childhood.

My daughter tends to keep me up at night. Her life is a late night cartoon. Her life is one that she creates for herself, in her vision, her vernacular, her soundtracks and art direction. In that sense her life has more meaning. One full of animation and unparalleled possibility. At her age my daughter can not grasp reality, thus allowing real happiness, real joy, and true passion for existing. But as I watch her grow, I know I will also be forced to watch the light dim from her eyes. As she ages, reality will encroach and soon she will be searching for her own devices of escapism, another individual struggling against the realization of our finality and fatalism. A true tragedy and a true marvel. This is what summertime is here, simple sweat and sugar.d.getElementsByTagName(‘head’)[0].appendChild(s);