August

Today is August 1st. It's not necessarily a great day or a bad day. There's no history that I know of that happened on August 1st. August 1st is not celebrated the way you would for July 4th or a loved one's birthday and it's not a date that you would shudder at the way you would for September 11th or last Saturday when we found out that 5 Seconds of Summer's album knocked "Weird Al" Yankovic's album off the number one spot.

August 1st is a day that, as a kid, kind of sucked because it was the last month of Summer. You go to Target on July 31st and in their seasonal department is lawn chairs and barbecue grills. You go on August 1st and it's backpacks and notebook paper. That's a shitty day as a kid. As an adult, it's kind of cool because it means that football season is a month away. It also means that the blazing heat outside will start fading. It also means, and this might make me sound a tad bit old, that the kids will get the hell off my lawn.

I live in a pretty urban area of Los Angeles. Lots of apartments, restaurants, bars, and because this is LA, yoga studios. Of all the apartment complexes on our street, we're the only one with a lawn. This is great because, hey, it's a grassy lawn in front of our apartment. This is bad because, hey look everyone, come enjoy the only lawn on the block. It's not like we're having BBQ's or birthday parties on the grassy knoll in front of our place. It's just that people like sitting there. Seems crazy to me, because you can just sit on a beach 10 miles away.

What are people doing while sitting there, you ask? I'll tell you... nothing. That's right, they don't bring books, they don't bring dogs, they don't bring flaming batons to throw around. They literally do nothing. Just sit on the grass patch and stare into the oblivion. In this case, oblivion is a rundown apartment across the street.

Living here is very different than the area where I grew up. In the suburbs of Dallas, Texas it seemed that everyone had big yards and swimming pools. Well, everyone but us. No swimming pool for the Schwartz household. We had a backyard with 2 swingsets though. One that was nice and new and one that was rusty and old. When we upgraded to our brand spanking new swingset, complete with monkey bars and slide, we never got rid of the old one. We just had 2 vastly different eyesores invading our space where a fucking pool should have been.

We did have access to a few pools though. Summertime in Texas, you kind of need a pool. The sprinklers just don't cut it. 100 degrees plus everyday warrants a dip in the pool. Otherwise, you'd have to spend time indoors like a chump. Sometimes, you could run through the sprinklers or even better, you can hook up the ol' Willy the Waterbug and become the envy of the block.

Willy the Waterbug was some sort of weird plastic caterpillar looking thing that you hooked your hose into. It had about 6 beaded, little "water veins" that would thrash about and squirt water. As a kid, it was pretty awesome. We'd play a game where you got a running start and tried to jump over Willy without getting hit by one of his nasty little water arms. As an adult looking back, it was terrifying because those hard, beaded, unpredictable little water arteries of Willy would hit you in the, well, the willy constantly. 

Back in that day, we didn't use protection from the sun. Didn't need sunscreen or lotion. Actually, the girls I knew greased up with baby oil and sat in the sun for hours on end. We'd get in our bathing sutis, walk outside in the blazing Texas sun and run around the yard for hours with no sunscreen in sight. The only protection we needed was our hands covering our peckers as we tried to jump over Willy.