Light In August

      As most of you have noticed, the Not-So-Good Doctor hasn't felt much like blogging lately, which I am increasingly prone to realize is a persistent condition rather than an occasional one.   Somehow, though, these dog days of summer-- despite such events as the miraculous evacuation, without fatalities, of Air France Flight 358 in Toronto-- either fry the imagination, or they simply fail to stir the ambition to write.   The news cycle in summer just seems, however inexplicably, less propitious, or less provocative, or something, I'm not entirely sure what.   "Or," as Major Clipton (James Donald) famously wonders in The Bridge On The River Kwai, "maybe it's the sun..."  

      Ah, yes, sun plus ennui, there is a killer combination which creates a lethargy synergistically greater than its parts.   Sometimes, one gathers, an ort of inertia is worth two weeks in the Kush.

      Further to wit, summer's eventlessness makes answering even innocuous questions like "Hey, so how's it goin'?" seem unanswerable except with ambivalent clichés.   (Tut, tut, you say; Rut, rut, one tut-taciously retorts.)   Oddly enough, this also tends to coincide with strange remanifestations, particularly of long-unseen friends and onetime "acquaintances" of, er, well, "feminine regard."   (Did anyone ever come up with a good euphemism for euphemism? Cunninglingo, perhaps?)   One hems, one haws, one shrugs and sighs and rolls one's eyes, more implicitly than tangibly.   Meh.   Call me a raisin in the sun.   You can say you heard it through the-- oh, nevermind.

      All this reminds me, though, how much I've come to dislike August, and not just for the reason that some of you are best to forget immediately upon threat of torture.   August reminds me of a star, always burning toward its death, and it has a kind of pointlessness connected to it that even November and January do not possess.   Meh, one says again, pondering the unbearable lightness of August.   What was that about two in the Kush?