Summertime Rolls

There are things about every season that I like and dislike. Summer, being my least favorite season overall, still holds a heavy psychic sway over me, in part because I live in Southern California, and seasons only exist tangentially here, so it's always kinda summer. At least, sometimes it's 90 degrees in December. But June is a very weird month, being pretty warm overall, but often having grey, overcast mornings that offer the illusion that I won't have to spend the entire afternoon hiding from the Sun.

The thing I like about summertime is the sense of disconnection it engenders. It often feels like it's too hot to move, and therefore too hot to do anything important, and I'll frequently try to finish any pressing tasks before 10am or so, since my resolve dissolves as the mercury rises. We own a small portable AC unit that works okay for cooling down the bedroom, but it's loud and feels woefully insufficient, so we'll often open as many windows as possible in the apartment to try to keep cool, but this can also be fairly loud, as we live on a busy street, and we inevitably have to close all windows late in the afternoon when the daily fireworks begin in earnest.

Having lived the vast majority of my life in and around Los Angeles, I'm very familiar with fireworks season, which lasts approximately all of June through July 4th, with recurrences on major holidays and when a local (or national, or universally popular) sports team wins an important match. Last year we made an appointment with our vet to see if we could get some medications to help the dogs cope with the holiday cacophony, and she prescribed them Xanax and Trazadone, which have come in very handy in helping them take the edge off over the past year. Supplies are dwindling, however, as we've had to medicate Tess a lot this month, so hopefully we can get a refill before the 4th.

We've also been attending some of the inaugural season games of our new local minor league baseball team, which has been fun since we can walk from our place to the stadium in about 15 minutes. All-in-all, things have been going reasonably well, except...

If you read the last one of these, you may have noticed the frustrated footnote over my dad's lack of communication and my intent to travel to Las Vegas to figure out what was going on. Well, I did, and I was able to determine that he'd had some kind of car accident, on top of the general ravages of age that Time has bestowed upon him. He's never been the most communicative or transparent person in the best of times, and these are not the best of times. Between the heavy medication and his longstanding aversion to burdening others with how he's feeling, getting anything meaningful out of him has been incredibly difficult, exacerbated by the fact that he's convinced he's on the way out, imminently, and won't discuss any palliative care or other options with me, either in person or by phone. I dealt with a distressed call from his brother yesterday, as he'd had the exact kind of frustrating interaction I have been dealing with for a few weeks now, and I was able to provide a bit of additional info, which I think made both of us feel a bit better. When I left Vegas two weeks ago, I felt like the end was fast approaching, a sentiment shared by my dad, who still refused almost any offers of aid or assistance, insisting that he wanted nothing except to expire as soon as possible. It was depressing and frustrating and felt final.

And then he didn't die.

It's only been two weeks, and he is 85, so I don't want to paint a rosy picture of the future, but where it felt borderline neglectful to leave at the time, I've talked to him every day since then and some days he sounds like his usual self. Unfortunately, because of the aforementioned longstanding difficulty in communicating with him, this still doesn't give a great picture of his overall health, but he's able to follow and hold a conversation, and he's receiving some kind of medical aftercare, both things I wasn't able to confirm when I did see him in person.

So it's been a weird couple of weeks and I've had a hard time focusing or feeling like I'm getting much accomplished. Everything has felt like it's stuck in neutral, waiting for something determinate to occur to get things moving one way or another. I suppose there are way worse ways things could be.

No news is often good news, after all.

Song of the day (what else?) - "Summertime Rolls," Jane's Addiction