we need to talk about august

worst month of the year

Hi — Lots of new folks here this week, welcome! Today's newsletter is a bit more esoteric (I accidentally put too much of the Personal in personal essay), but I usually write about culture in its full spectrum. This is a paid post, but as a little welcome/anti-celebration of August as a general concept I'm running a 20% sale on annual subscriptions, making them out to $40/year — you can redeem here by Monday, August 12!

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August, as per usual, is dead. Some people enjoy this — we get to relax, they tell me, as if this is the Hakuna Matata of months and we should be grateful. And I get that, I really do, but also, respectfully: no.

The fact that I opened up Canva for the first time in years to make a collage should concern all of us. All photos taken by/of me in Augusts past. July ends and all of a sudden I care deeply about The Light.

August is not even the end of summer, Instagram has started telling me, as if a calendar's technicalities were a source of comfort to me. And maybe that's the problem — by this point, I am quite ready for the end of summer, and the length of this hellish month, with its record temperatures and its humidity and its floatiness, dangles the possibility of autumn in front of me while keeping it at a too-safe distance. It is the interlude that nobody asked for, a forced lull during which we're all caught flat-footed in the middle of our lives. 

There is something very eerie about this month. It’s almost like January-July are an addendum to the previous year, September is when the current year really begins, and August, this off-centered holding pattern, is the transition between the two periods. It is the very thin tether holding together the version of you who’s made it this far and the one who’s supposed to rally from September onwards.

It is the intermission, yes, but it is also the minutes spent in wait before the play starts, asking yourself what exactly you signed up for.

I hate it.

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