July 2: Hot Vax Summer



I am an idiot. For the first time ever in the history of note-a-day, I have deleted an old entry so I can completely rewrite it. That's because I had a brain fart. The title given to me was "Hot Vax Summer" but for some reason, I read it as Anti Vax Summer. I apologize for the problems the original post caused.

So Hot Vax Summer and Anti Vax Summer are two completely different things. If they were movies, one might be a sex comedy and the other might be a horror movie. Hot Vax Summer refers to the summer of 2021, which could rival the summer of 69 in terms of partying and nookie. News reports say that plenty of young folk have been pent up and not allowed to socialize since buggabugga took over the world in the spring of 2020. Now that we're all getting vaccinated, beautiful young people everywhere are going to be looking for hookups. If you play the stock market, this would be an ideal time to invest in Tinder.

To give you an idea of the sort of unhip fuddy duddy that I am, I'm more interested in the reopening of churches than the reopening of Club Med.  

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Yeah, so buggabugga wasn't fun for everyone but it was surely a real bitchkitty for all the unattached twentysomethings out there. Those who had already paired off saw a heck of a lot more of each other - they saw so much of each other that there's going to be a real baby boom next year. Seriously, we might have to start building more schools in 2027. 

Thinking about this, I'm happy that I'm living through buggabugga in my 40s rather than my 20s. I hope that I would have taken advantage of the forced isolation by concentrating on my writing and my magic, but I know that the extreme lack of socialization would have seriously messed with my head. I'm as prone to FOMO as the next person and I guess we get this terrible fantasy that there's this secret underground club somewhere where beautiful people are partying and you'd be welcome there if you only had the temerity to show up.

In March of 2020, I got a brief taste of how my life would have been if buggabugga had hit in the mid 1990s. In March of 2020, I was in Calgary to do some school presentations. I was doing one on a Friday when I learned that the province was locking everything down. I had four schools planned for the following week and all of them cancelled on me. I had plans for that week too. I was going to visit friends, go out for chicken wings, see a couple movies. Instead, I spent every day and every evening with my parents. Most of the evenings were occupied by playing a dice game called Las Vegas, a photo of which serves as the artwork for this note. This is probably doubly appropriate since Vegas, I'm sure, will be a preferred destination for people looking to experience a Hot Vax Summer.

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Neither the summer of 2020 nor the summer of 2021 will be Hot Vax for me. I am sure that my spare time will be dominated by taking my kid to various splash pads and watching him frolic therein. I am blessed that my kid enjoys splash pads so much that he is willing to spend an entire day there, giving me ample time to work on my writing and my magic. I have been scolded for this before. It's just not right to let a kid spend so much time in the sun. So I try to steal him away for brief periods of respite but he's never happy about it. He just wants to "swim."

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After the third night in a row of playing Las Vegas with my parents, my dad said that I should be happy I was getting on an airplane soon as I would likely grow tired of him and my mom before long. It was a sad albeit pragmatic thing to say. I love my family very much, and I know they love me too, but I think they'd get pretty tired of my nonsense if they were forced to endure an uninterrupted stream of it for a whole year and a half.

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Last month, restaurateurs across the province rejoiced when the government announced that they were allowing patio dining (on a limited basis, of course.) For months, I had heard restaurant people complain that the closure of their indoor dining rooms had resulted in massive losses of revenue and employee layoffs. Now comes the announcement that more diners will be allowed on patios and, I hope, that this will make diners flock to the restaurants. So many of them had to close permanently because of buggabugga. Honestly, I care more about their plights than I do the clientele of Tinder.

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It is a failing of note-a-day that it has grown so solipsistic. I fear that, as I grow older, I will lose my goofy outlook on life and morph into a latter-day Jonathan Edwards. (This may not be a bad thing as long as I don't have to wear a powdered wig.) 

Jonathan Edwards would have surely disapproved of Hot Vax Summers.

It is a failing of note-a-day that it has grown so solipsistic. I fear that, as I grow older, I will lose my goofy outlook on life and morph into a latter-day Jonathan Edwards. (This may not be a bad thing as long as I don't have to wear a powdered wig.) Maybe someone should give me a title like "awful presents" again. That was one of the funniest things I've ever written.

48 sometimes has difficulty remembering what 20 is like. I have long grown bored of partying and the emotionally detached rendezvous that so often accompanies it. I have spent much of my kid's splash pad times calling up various campgrounds and pitching my family-friendly campground magic show to them. My calls are pretty much universally rejected. Can't book you. Buggabugga. Sorry, old chap. Sure you understand.

So phooey on the Hot Vax Summer. I just want a magical one. And as long as kiddo gets some splash pad time and my wallet can get a little bit fatter, well then this summer will be a good one for me, at least. 



 

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