Arizona Summers, part 1

This is the first part of several entries on Arizona summers:

Summers have not always meant to me what they might mean to the rest of the American population. When I think back on the summers of my childhood, I think of waking up to a brightly lit room that was already as hot as it looked. That blinding light and piercing heat oppressed the rest of my lonely days.

My days went something like this: wake up, be lonely, talk to Anne, be hot, watch All My Children with Mark, be lonely, listen to the Javalina Cantina on KSLX 100.7, read a little, be hot, wonder what my friends were doing, go to a movie to escape heat, lay in the pool, call girls, go to bed. For some people, this might sound like a dream vacation day, but I hated it. I needed direction or friends, and too often the summer didn’t have either. Most of my friends’ families had lots of money, which meant they went on long vacations during the summer to escape the oppressive Maricopa County heat. My happiness tends to depend on the proximity of others, so this had the effect of making me extremely lonely to the point where Mark and I eventually would watch All My Children to drown our sorrows away. We even kept close track of the character Chandler, the older guy who had an evil twin.

I imagine that most of my friends that grew up in Phoenix have similar memories of summer, unless they are the ones who were at Lake Powell most of the time, like Crato, or in Vail, like Darren. Adam probably has similar memories, but his are better because at least he had the entertainment of watching his mom flutter around making miniature chairs and Russian babushkas out of wood. Speaking of Adam, summers were often spent doing the activities above even when you were with friends, so when I slept over at Adam’s house, our activities looked something like this: midnight to 3:00 AM: talk about girls that didn’t like us very much, 3:00 AM to 5:00 AM: watch Adam’s mom do the laundry, 5:00 AM to 8:00 AM: sleep, 8:00 AM to 11:00 AM: wonder when Adam was going to get up and read his reptile fetish magazines in the meantime, 11:00 to 2:00 PM: watch channels I didn’t have at home with Adam and his little brother and drink his mom’s diet cokes. Those were the good days.

Needless to say, with all the downtime, and the impossibility of going outside in the summer heat, Adam and I had to figure out stuff that would entertain us because he would eventually get tired of watching me watch channels that I didn’t have at home. On one of these occasions, we were discussing the virtues of Christina Ricci, who had only appeared in the Addams Family movies at the time, and who was about the same age as us, when we decided to write her a fan letter.

Now this wasn’t just any fan letter, this was the greatest fan letter ever written in the history of all fan letters. It wasn’t creepy, it wasn’t banal, it was just the right mix of irony and sincerity and longing that an Arizona summer will inevitably produce. This blog post is going to be anticlimactic because I don’t remember any specifics of what the letter said—I think there was something about Adam’s cousin being a really cool guy and something else about how we liked pizza. Adam can correct me if I am wrong and add details. But I am writing this because I am still convinced that letter is the best thing that I ever wrote, which proves these things: 1) A muse is necessary for literary brilliance, and if you can get a muse as good as Ricci in the Addams Family movies, you will write your masterpiece; 2) Arizona summers produce good activities because there is nothing to do but invent; 3) Writing is not as solitary an experience as it is romanticized to be, and if you can get a like-minded soul to collaborate, you may write your greatest opus yet.

This entry began with a description of loneliness and unintentionally veered into a recounting of one of the better collaborations that ever occurred. I did not set out to write about that, but writing about loneliness sucks, so I had to change the subject. I guess the final point of this post is that being alone is horrible, and all that is good happens when you are with somebody, which would corroborate all the recent findings about what makes a happy life. This is news to nobody, but I just thought I should reiterate that you should never let yourself or anyone you know be alone. After all, if I had written that Ricci fan letter by myself, the whole tenor of the activity would have completely changed, and it probably would have ended up like one of those Christina Ricci tribute videos on Youtube. Who knew we weren’t the only fans?