Well, here it is the last week of August. Summer is more or less over. Did you have a good summer? I think I had a good summer. My impression is one of a big bright full summer season that walked by at the proper pace. There were no adventures or vacations or life changes. No interesting stories to relate. No great projects embarked upon. It was a much-needed boring summer, a summer of air, of free motion, of wide open spaces in our after-work and weekend schedules — a summer of staying in with all the windows open and rereading books and magazines in massively-windowed sunlight-flooded breeze-kissed rooms with bottomless cocktails standing by. Erasing all M-F 9:30-5:30 hours from memory, losing ourselves in text and weather.

Anyway, a fine first summer, here at the yuppie ant farm, but we now must gear up for our second Hotel Fantod fall and winter, both of which are on track to be nightmares. Daylight hours have started ebbing conspicuously. We’ve started waking up into dimmer mornings. Each evening the sunset creeps a little further south. Tomorrow will be two minutes and forty-six seconds shorter, says the internet tonight. The curtain is coming down. The leaves are loosening. The stores’ sale signs cheerfully scream BACK TO SCHOOL at us. We are all still students. What lessons will the cold teach us this year?

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Flight to Arras, 1942, piloting his plane and reluctantly descending:

At five hundred miles an hour and three thousand five hundred and thirty revolutions a minute, I am losing height. As I banked I left behind a grotesquely red polar sun. Before me now and three or four miles below, I can see a rectilinear icefield of cloud. A whole region of France lies buried in its shadow. Arras lies in its shadow. In my mind the world under that icefield is shaded black. It’s the belly of a great soup-pot where the war is stewing. Traffic jams, fires, scattered hardware, smashed villages, chaos … a vast shambles. People moving in absurdity under their cloud, like woodlice under a stone.

And:

At least up here death is clean! A death in ice and fire. In sunlight, sky, ice and fire. Down there, it is a slow digestion by the slimy clay!

Sigh. My preferred brand of green tea has gone with the Nuclear Option, in terms of Canadian marketing. Normally the box does not look like this. But now that His Holiness The Great One has signed on as Bigelow’s new celebrity shill, the suits have obliged him with a vanity-branded line of green teas, complete with oversized box.

How on earth did this deal go down? I realize many celebrities endorse products that seem ludicrously unconnected with their profession or public image, but I still wonder about this one. Who approached whom? How was the hockey/tea connection dreamed up, pitched, brokered? Is green tea now kind of like old-people Wheaties?

Luckily for us non-hockey-fan green-tea drinkers, “Gretzky’s Green” (kill me now) happens to taste the same as Bigelow’s non-Gretzky formula. Because I can’t get enough of that invigorating taste of vaguely dusty hot water.

Cancel previous entry’s aimless ruminations. I forgot that obviously the true changeover occurs when I drink down the post-swim protein shake. Like Carroll’s Alice or Stevenson’s Jekyll. The latest innard-dissolving protein death-potion I have gotten suckered into is a neon pink four-stage-release isolate concoction in a flavor called Strawberry Fields, made by a company whose horrifying motivational slogan is: Override Your Genetics. I’m assuming it’s motivational. It might be an order.

Amis’s theory about drinking in the evening to get away from your daytime self has me thinking about where the initial changeover occurs, how you become that daytime self in the first place each day. Increasingly I suspect that part of why I’m so attached to my morning swim routine is that it serves as a going-to-work ritual. Instead of waking up late and slouching listlessly around the house until I have to log on for the day job, I get up early, kiss the wife goodbye, leave the house, start walking. A sense of departure, a traversal of ground. Then I get to the Y and swim until the sleep-soured non-daytime self is stunned and wrung out and boiled away by the exercise and/or the brain-poaching pool chemicals. Returning home in the usual state of post-swim exhaustion has the quality of arriving somewhere else, and being someone else.

Kingsley Amis writes in Everyday Drinking that the early-evening drink is, at its most basic, “a convenient way of becoming a slightly different person from your daytime self, less methodical, less calculating — however you put it, somebody different, and the prospect of that has helped to make the day tolerable”. He continues:

Changing for dinner used to be another way of switching roles. Coming home from work has a touch of the same effect.

Writers haven’t got that advantage — when they finish work they’re at home already. So perhaps they need that glass of gin extra badly. Any excuse is better than none.

I would of course add “web designers who work from home” to that last category. Fellow work-from-homers (I can’t stand to use the t-word), I trust you will substitute your own line of work.

Charles Simic: He could read the mind of a lit match as it entered a dark room.