“Joe Waters Down Time”
KARL WALLACE
Joe Waters asked, “Why do people vacation their pants off, literally, in the case of males-- but stink at relaxing, The logical argument says Summer time should be three words long (men in shorts.) Alas, shorts are
being worn year-round by us graying porkers with legs as ugly as stump fences—if stump fences have hairy legs.
But there are plenty of other things wrong with summer. Starting with the fact that it comes at the wrong time of
year. In the contiguous forty-eight states, the best weather isn't in June, July, and August. Spring is glorious in
the south. Fall is splendid in the North. And winter is swell in Florida and the part of California where the four
seasons are Smog, Mudslides, Brush Fir
Our summer weather in 2011 consisted of tornados, heat waves, earthquakes, and hurricanes. For
everyone, this side of Nome, summer vacation in the summer is like having a coffee break at two o’clock in the
morning. Supposedly, summer vacation happens because that's when the kids are home from school,
although having the kid’s home from school is no vacation. Supposedly they are actually home from school
because of a vestigial throwback to our agricultural past. Nonsense, the little helping hands of farm children
were needed during spring planting and fall harvest. They were more helpful than the little hands of today's
children or our grandparents who would have died of starvation. Farm kids, if they went to school at all in the
good old days, went in midsummer and midwinter, when nothing much was going on around the barn. Horse
crap, predated the automobile. Horses and what they leave behind them clogged cities that were already
insalubrious from coal smoke, industry, and notional sewage systems. Come summer, it was vacation time if
you had any sense, common or olfactory, you vacated. Men who could afford it sent their wives, children and, if
possible, themselves off to the mountains or the shore.
I live in Utah, several hours from Boston, which has been full of prosperous urbanites for possibly longer
than anyplace. Every summer, people who use “summer" as a verb dutifully peregrinates to Boston out of
nowhere and take up residence in crumbling ancestral 30-room shingle cottages, and most of them can't quite
remember why.
What are we Americans doing taking summer vacations anyway? Our economy is a shambles. Debt has been
downgraded. GDP has flat-lined. The unemployment rate—with everyone on vacation—is nearing 100%. We
should be in the office right now, trying to get the price of small-cap stocks up, developing new techniques of
program trading, maintaining confidence in dot-com start-ups, building a fire under the housing market, and
generally working our stems off the way we were in the summer of 1776, and ‘29. At the very least, our elected
officials should be back on the job. They left some unfinished business-such as survival of housing into the
second quarter of the 21st century. Swarms of politicians running for president are crawling around on every
channel on TV this winter. They ought to be in the Washington, where I'm sure they'd be doing good things.
They can't spend more money, because there isn’t any left. They can't pass new legislation that's worse than
what we've got, or is my mind in a haze from a relaxing summer vacation? Not that it's been a relaxing summer
vacation, We can vacation our pants off; it literally happens with senior age males, talking about stub fences
with varicose veins again.
A tense and busy futility is the best we can do in our down time. How else to explain golf? And how else to
explain all those politicians running for president when they should be kicking back and cooling it, while the
current president manages their campaigns for them by destroying his political base, his poll ratings, the
economy and our nation are messing around with the international community. That's what the President just
did while relaxing in Hawaii for two weeks of golf.
To be continued….
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