Then comes August.  August is after most things, and before all the rest.  You’ve already taken all your vacations and summertime getaways; exhausted the local water- and amusement parks; walked all the neighborhood walks.  Your yard is now officially starting to wilt under the desert heat and malevolent sprinkling system, that, I swear, if you had known about it, you would have never even bought the stupid house in the first place.  Spring is nothing but some dim memories and some new gardening implements that now sit in a filthy corner of the garage; Christmas almost does not exist in any temporal sense.  All that you have is August.  Heat, drought, the occasional acquaintance who wants to talk about baseball, and the unrelenting infinity of consecutive workdays and serious living.  In Utah, the approach of this arid expanse is marked starkly by the final holiday of summer- the 24th of July, a State holiday celebrating the entry of the first pioneers into this arid expanse.  It’s a superb holiday, just close enough to the 4th of July to hint that the whole month is mainly intended for parties and watermelon.  The whole state takes the day, if not the month, off.

July

And then you wake up the next morning and it’s pretty much August from here on out.

One does not look forward to much of anything happening in August (the exception: the one year I raised a successful garden; then August can actually be worth something).  What makes it barely tolerable is the fact that one reeeeally does look forward to September.  Everyone knows that college football is coming in September, and understands that if that month would just arrive, life would snap back into crisp, verdant vitality again, even as the leaves start to die.  There really is no oasis in any desert as refreshing, as pure, as bonecrunchingly beautiful as that first Saturday of college football.  August both reminds me of its approach, and stands as an impassable obstacle to its rewards.  Cruel, cruel month.

August

I realized a few years ago that the formula for happiness is simple, though not exactly easy to create from scratch:  You need a Saturday in early Autumn, preferably sunny but cool.  In the morning, you do a few hours of yard and housework.  In the mid-day and afternoon, you watch a college football game.  Then you go out and do something fun with your family in the evening.  Again, this is not something you can use in all situations (say, in August), but if you do happen to have a September Saturday handy, you’d be a fool to waste it in some other way.  Trust me, there is no better use for this particular resource.

But until those Saturdays become available, there’s August to contend with.  A whole month of it.  Not sure exactly how I’m going to deal with it this year, but open to suggestions.  Is it too late to start a garden?

Alright, maybe just a little bit.

No, I’m looking for a different kind of hero to worship.  I can’t exactly explain it, (although it is summed up pretty well here), but the hero I’m drawn to is the guy that establishes a superhuman record of pop excellence over a consistent span of time.  If you could construct the team of pop heroes in your mind that come as close as possible to perfection in their chosen fields, with a minimum of embarrassing mis-steps, who would be in your pantheon?  I don’t share my list often, because people usually laugh in my face when I tell them, but I’ll defend it to the death.  By the same token, just as I am extremely selective with the heroes that make it into my pantheon, there is a very select loathing reserved for those who have entered there only to prove that they were not worthy.  I’m not going to expend a lot of hatred on a Michael Bay or a Miley Cyrus, because no one ever expected anything particularly excellent out of them anyway.  But when someone comes along and fools me into thinking they are worth real devotion and then turns out to be just like everyone else- well, it’s the lowest circle of hell for them.

There are two people, my own Brutus and Judas, in the lowest circle of pop hero hell for me:  Paul McCartney and M. Night Shyamalan.  Paul- the best Beatle, the good one, the sensitive one, the peacemaker, the guy who wrote all the best songs for the best band of all time, and the guy that worked hardest to keep them all together.  Fast forward a few years, and suddenly he’s the guy writing “Silly Love Songs” and “Simply Having a Wonderful Christmas Time” and featuring his stupid wife prominently in all his concerts playing a percussion instrument that any three year old could play, and recording stuff like this.  Probably the most amazing fall from grace of all time.  What later-life career could possibly wipe out the unfathomable perfection of those few years from Please Please Me to Let it Be?  Amazingly, Paul McCartney has achieved the impossible.  May he rot.  M. Night is admittedly a lesser fraud, but still a charlatan of the highest order.  The Sixth Sense was as strong a thriller as you can find in the last twenty years, and then Unbreakable, one of the best superhero movies of all time.  I saw that movie and carved the guy on my Mount Rushmore, sure of his promise.  Then a few cracks began to show in Signs, and the Village signaled a serious decline.  Then, as if Whitman had  devoted his career exclusively to bawdy limericks, Shyamalan issued the Lady in the Water.  Has anyone ever gone from really really good to consistently, despicably, laughably awful so fast?  Shyamalan’s latest, out last week, scored a mind-bending 8% on the Tomato-Meter.  I can hardly believe that I used to worship this guy.

Torture would be too good

Mount Rushmore is still well-anchored by its current tenants, though.  For me, it’s not only about excellent output, but also a stability in the temperament that just tells me I can always trust them to turn out great stuff.  Two of my picks will need to be replaced soon, as they’re basically retired.  So long Paul Simon and John Stockton, the greatest songwriter and greatest point guard (and so much more) ever.  It’s not just how good they were, but how bad they never were, and how much they both just “got it.”  There were better songs written by others, and better individual games or seasons, but no one just understood the right way to do it in music more than Paul Simon, nor the right way to play the game better than John Stockton.  The other two picks are still in their primes, and I defy you to find anybody that gets closer to pop perfection than Christopher Nolan and Pixar.  I told everyone I know months ago that my two favorite movies of the year are Toy Story 3 and Inception, and I’m one for two so far.  In fact, it turns out that Toy Story 3 may be the best kids’ move ever made (seriously, see it).  I’ll eat this post if Inception is anything less than fantastic, by the way.

Seriously– great kids’ movie, or GREATEST KIDS’ MOVIE EVER?

So there they are- my pantheon of pop heroes, and the two infidel betrayers.  I’m currently taking applications for a few more real pop heroes, but I’m not sure I see anything on the scene.  Who else deserves it?  Who are your pop heroes, and who betrayed you?  Maybe we call a fatwa once we have an authoritative list.  Just for fun.

I think I understand coffee. Never tried it myself, but I can understand how you might want a little pick me up as you’re driving in to work in the morning, just to get the gears creaking into action again. It’s been widespread enough for long enough that most people don’t question it. Around my area you see diet coke stepping in as the wake up call of choice, but it’s all the same thing.

But coffee and DC aren’t cutting it anymore. I first started seeing signs of escalation when I was in law school. A girl came to class with a bottle of water, but it wasn’t just water, it was called something like “Water Joe,” and it had all of the cool, clean transparency of water, but all of the caffeine of a full shot of espresso. Then, as now, the coffee outsider, I asked why such a thing would be necessary. She said coffee is hard on the stomach, and water is better. Huh. As long as the energy remains the same.

Since then, the arms race has taken off like nothing we’ve seen since the great bagel proliferation of the mid-90’s. The soft drink moguls snatched up all of the easy real estate first, peddling tough guy drinks with embarrassingly silly ads and eye-grabbing packaging. The Red Bulls and Rock Stars and Monsters staked out the territory and the world moved on, assuming this was a niche market, and the niche was now filled.

Seriously, what could go wrong with Mana Energy Potion?

But it hasn’t stopped there. The smoothies followed, with their bee pollen, ginseng, and hydro-ginkgo-garlic supplements (did I leave out biloba? I never know where that fits in). Creative capitalists came up with strange bottles of pills that could be shilled right on the convenience store counter. This new wave carved out a space somewhere between pharmaceuticals and magic potions. And apparently there’s no regulatory agency in charge of monitoring pure energy, because it’s all still out there, and it’s all still promising instant pep. Now, at the very height of the race for the next best form of ingestible, digestible liveliness, you might justifiably conclude that there’s more raw energy lining the shelves inside the gas station than bubbling underneath it. You might even be right.

Behind it all is the assumption, implicit but invisible, that we are all really, really tired. Are we? Are you? That’s the apparent crisis, and it sounds crazy, but I swear it’s starting to look like there’s as much money in solving this energy crisis as there is in solving the other one.

I guess I sort of am tired, but it’s not really something I’d look to solve with a really tall can of something. Maybe I’m missing out? As we prepared for a trial a while ago, someone on our legal team walked in and passed around some tastefully designed little boxes of mints. Energy mints. Vim and vigor with a spunky citrus kick.

This is where they make energy mints (I’m pretty sure.)

I carried my box around all week but I couldn’t take the plunge. It kind of scared me to think what was in those little mints. Could they really power my big huge lurching organic machine of a body? I still don’t know. I do know that after that trial I was completely wrung out. A little energy would have helped. I chose to just get some more sleep afterward, but maybe I should have just downed that box of mints. I threw them down my gas tank instead, and I’ve been leaving people in a cloud of citrus exhaust ever since.