airplane banners at the beach
Last summer at the same beach, a nearly identical banner read: ROCKAWAY AND BREEZY POINT SUPPORT THE NYPD. When we returned the next weekend, BREEZY POINT was gone without the sentence being fixed, so it read: ROCKAWAY SUPPORT THE NYPD. I still think about that every time those little planes buzz back and forth. Its glaring stupidity, its anachronism, its weird paternalism that paled in comparison to all the police helicopters already flying loud and low.
That was last summer, the summer that the City burst open. That was the summer that nights exploded with fireworks from unseen rooftops and evening cheers for essential workers gave way to marchers shouting names of the murdered. That was the summer the heat and despair broke open the inertia of a housebound people. That was the loneliest summer; that was the summer of solidarity. People were inside, hunched and bingeing and desperate for reprieve. People were outside, on the march, sick of it. That was the summer of empty gestures, the summer that an enormous medical ship sat pointlessly at a pier in Manhattan. That was the summer that everyone wore masks except for the cops, the summer that people were beaten and pepper-sprayed and knocked over by police cruisers. That was the summer when televised death finally tilted farther into public outrage than private despair. Though it tilted that way, too.
Tomorrow marks the last day of this summer. Was something wrong with it? People on the internet and people in New York—there is a difference, one presumes—seemed to think so, even if they thought what was wrong was just other people asking the question, the ceaseless complaining about the nature of this summer’s “vibes.”
At the beginning of summer, I purchased a small, handsome notebook in Lower Manhattan. Pages made of mulberry paper, a yellow quarter-circle stamped on the front. I decided this would be my summer journal, hoping that by extracting it from the procession of gray, clothbound notebooks I keep, it might be looser, that it might better capture the season.
I am not sure that it did. At one point I call July “a bloated month of Sundays.” At another I call it “crammed and interminable.” Everywhere I am describing the heat. Rockaway Beach is “a place to feel one is thinking but not to think at all — you feel a kind of thinking, covered in sweat, sun ablaze.” In Prospect Park: “heat slowing down the mind, encouraging a dreamy kind of yielding.” In Central Park: “the nights grow hotter & shall remain so […] it smells like lemonade and piss.” At the beach in Georgia: “outside heavy & humid so much so that notebook paper becomes instantly wavy, a kind of bad omen […] today, I am told, it rained at Greenland’s summit for the first time on record.”
This fixation is only apparent as I flip back through it now. If vibes are the unseen but constant emotional frequency of a person, it would seem from these pages that mine were off. (Though now that the word really means the opposite—the seen, the vague, the approximated genre of an atomized person—my vibes were probably just fine.) Sitting there on a beach beneath the blazing sun and ominous exhortations of sperm-freezing, drinking rum until my heart began to twitch, I was still grateful for this summer’s difference from the last.
Perhaps my fretting about the heat reveals a certain fear: that a world without seasons will be a world without time, which only seems to pass at the thresholds between them. Fall is a thing to be grateful for, a thing to breathe in, a change in the outer world to stir the inner one. I am not sure what I would feel if my life were one long summer. Clearly a journal would be of little help. Clearly the vibes would be off.
This summer, at the beach in Georgia, my girlfriend and I came across a strange thing in the shape of a lemniscate. It looked like a lugworm or a snake with a bulging eyeless head. A slick snakelike infinity, here on this hot, flat beach. It looked like the kind of thing one is visited by in dreams. We were repulsed but we had no idea what it was. It was dead and the tide was rising and we walked on.
ben tapeworm