It is August 25. Sunday. I awake at 5. It’s dark outside and there’s movement in the kitchen next to my room (the living room). Surely my sister (I hear the rotor of the Keurig and my sister’s dissipating will to live). It takes me a moment to remember who and where I am. I am Damien, a pizza loving teacher-platypus. It’s then I want to burst into tears.

As I have come to realize, the summer is broken up into about 4 seasons. And as all seasons change, they bring about a soul-crushing sadness that can only be cured by hours of situation comedies and salted meats in between complex carbohydrates.

Summer season 1 starts in June. My semester has just ended but I am still working. The summer is ahead of me. The weather is warm enough to wear shorts, but comfortable enough to use pants to hide my chunky thighs. The beer gardens are open and the joy is unbridled. It is the season of the happiness that exists before the happiness begins – it is the Christmas Eve of the summer seasons.  

Summer season 2 starts when I go on holiday at the end of June. A week in London. We walk around and I have left my laptop at home, thereby forcing myself to enjoy the trip. No work. I can relax. I visit cafes in the morning for my coffee and breakfast treat du jure. I worry little about the constricting waistband. I walk. Camden. Covent Garden. Trafalgar Square. I can look ahead at after-London and still be happy. At this point, I am moderately carefree.  

Summer season 3 is in the interim between London and my trip home. These are the work-a-bit and project days. I clean out my storage room and enjoy AC. At this point we begin speaking about London as though it had occurred six months before. It is also at this point that I realize in a panic one day that my summer is slipping away from me and it will be gone before I know it. I then wonder if this is a metaphor for something else, but get to a beer garden just in the nick of time to swat away any encroaching thoughts that may lead to discomfort. As long as my August trip to Langhorne is in front of me, I am well ensconced in summer.

Here are some things I’ve learned that keep me up at night for one reason or another.

Cows have best friends. They become sad if they are separated from them. And just like that I’ll never enjoy another steak. I’ll eat steak; I just won’t enjoy it.

A day on Venus is longer than a year on Venus. Venus rotates so slowly one Venetian day takes 243 earth days. But a Venetian year is 225 days. I commiserate with this as one 40-minute Latin class was longer than 500 Venetian days.

Ninety minutes after the first British person is dispatched in some sleepy, picturesque corner of Midsomer County, Tom Barnaby brings the murderer(s) to accord. In that ninety minutes, four people were murdered, one of whom was a teenager, another of whom was a woman on her wedding day in her wedding dress – thus confirming the greatest fears of 45% of society.

You know when someone’s about to get it. They’re alone, content, relaxed maybe, but then something happens that alerts their attention. They go to inspect. You, as viewer, can do nothing but wait for the inevitable. Will it be a repeated ashtray bludgeon to the skull? Will it be a shotgun blast to the face? We can wait and see.

I let out a sigh of relief. Tom has wrapped things up with the good-humored help of DS Troy. Troy will have been teased, fed, or whipped in the face throughout the episode. He needs a break.

In the kitchen my dad watches Harm Rabb bring down some bad marines. He wraps things up and goes on his merry way as the credits roll. I go upstairs to check on my mom, who is just in the middle of Jesicca Fletcher’s dénouement. She lays out such a good argument and logical sequence of events that even the bad guy nods in appreciation as he’s led away by Tom Bosley as he curb stomps a Maine accent. All is well here. I go back downstairs to my bedroom, which is the living room.

There’s no mystery as to why we love mysteries in my house. In the first place, it’s damn fun to watch fictional British people get killed by other fictional British people. Damn fun. Second, you have the joy of trying to figure out who did it. In the case of Midsomer Murders, this is narrowed down to the three people in the episode who haven’t already been murdered. (hint: it’s someone very angry)

My brother and I walk into Citizen’s Bank Park. The place is electric. We have fortified ourselves with two $25 cocktails, so I have willed myself into an it-was-worth-it buzz.   

Today it’s the Phillies vs. the Yankees. A team I love vs. a team I loathe. And so it’s funny that I would come to the game, considering the fact that I am the Philadelphia Phillies’ worst luck charm in North America. Throughout the early part of the season (i.e. before I returned to Philadelphia in late July), the Phillies were 10 games up in their division. They were unbeatable. They caught all the breaks. They were playing baseball like the 1927 New York Yankees.

Since my glorious return to the land of cheesesteaks and Amazonian humidity, that lead has been dwindled to 6 games. They have been unwinnable. They miss all the breaks. And they have been playing baseball like the sickly kids the 1927 New York Yankees hit homeruns for on demand.

So when I enter the Bank, I worry that I might be recognized as the hex, the unretractable whammy, the fat-headed voodoo doll on their doorstep; I am their Jobu. We get to our seats after buying $50 worth of drinks (aka 2) and there’s an elderly couple sitting next to us. They are Yankees fans. A Yankees fan base has surrounded us, a genial man with kids in front of us, and a jovial guy with his Phillies-rooting friend behind us. My brother wishes them all a life of doom and disaster.

Now, I am no neophyte to the hex and the in which its malignant effects can be mitigated. As I walked into the stadium, I hit the turnstile with my right index knuckle twenty-four times. I rubbed my right shoulder against two Yankees fans in order to rub my bad juju off onto them. I even muttered a ‘go yanks’ under my breath in order to trick the bad luck imps into going after the wrong allegiance.

My efforts prove worthless when the Yankees start out the game with a grand slam. Nick Castellanos may or may not give me the finger from right field. The stadium announcer resists the urge to order an all-out attack on my seat number. I slink down. I sip $9 of my cocktail. In an attempt to quell the bad luck monsters, we decide on a walk. Yes. We jump up and walk around the stadium, drinking in the atmosphere. Genuinely buzzed, I weigh up another cocktail against paying my month’s mortgage and decide that banks are known for their caring attitude towards individuals. By the time we have re-reached our seats seven innings later, the Phillies have clawed their way back, which makes sense because there are 18 of them out there. And we make the foolish mistake of retaking our seats. Cocky bastards. When it’s over, my brother tells the jubilant Yankee fans what they can do to themselves on their ebullient ride home.  

We head to a pub and sit at the bar. I feel like everyone is looking at me. That’s the guy who caused the Phils’ loss. I hunker down and keep a low profile, ordering a beer and a shot. I don’t get the whiskey I want; I don’t deserve it. And though I really want dumplings, I get a sad pizza. The barman is a young friendly chap whose best days are ahead and whose only fault is that he has never heard alcoholic drinks ordered by finger-size. (He was marvelled by my order of ‘two-fingers of Jamesons’.) There are two women on my right, clearly enjoying a post-work cocktail. They chime in.

“I never heard that neither, Jeremy.”