Flag Pants and F16s

July is Iulius, named for Caesar. Before that, this month was called Quintilis. Latin for fifth month. Just a number, until someone decided a man deserved to be permanent. Seems we’re always doing that. Giving big names to ordinary things.

More garden green beans than two people should reasonably eat. 61 treadmill miles. 269,000 pounds moved on Hevy. 9 Beli stops, including my first cheese fire. Opa! Baked my own hamburger buns for the Fourth because a proper medium rare deserves better than store bought. $12,400 riding on “What is Juneau?” A number and an answer for a TV game show I’m still training to play.

Some of July was spent being watched. Stood in front of a camera to film a behind-the-scenes sizzle. Which is a funny phrase when you think about it. We stage the behind-the-scenes now. Lighting and scripting the candid. Even reality gets a shot list.

Was I on Jeopardy? A dream I’ve trained for but never lived, rendered in seconds by a machine that doesn’t dream. It looks real and sure looks like me. Yet it’s neither.

The holiday called for my Napoleon Dynamite pants. A grown man in flag-print costume, flipping burgers, and performing patriotism for an audience of squirrels.

Caught a minor delay flying home. Reminded myself I was still partaking in the miracle of flight. Humans waited thousands of years to leave the ground. I was late by twenty minutes. Perspective is a powerful drug.

Hosted a Show and Tell with coworkers like we were in grade school. Then made a bracelet inspired by Ranger Bob. Stamped “strict with yourself” into the metal, a thing he embodied, a thing I need to hear. Then I stamped a letter wrong. A permanent typo.

I thought about starting it over. A factory of robots could make a hundred per minute, each one flawless, each one identical. Machines can do a lot of things, but they can’t be peculiar on purpose. Humans have that covered. Robots can’t mess up a word about discipline and decide the mistake was the whole point. Ranger Bob would have liked the goof better anyway.

Most days happened without an audience. Two F-16s tore over the pond, low and loud, gone before I got a better shot. Canadian wildfires made the sky look like that old Instagram filter I never used. I got bullied online for using a DIY weed killer. Apparently men can be mansplained to. Always baking something. Black snakes in the garden, cat cuddles in the house, and a bouquet of flowers from a friend’s housewarming party.

My July gave big names to ordinary things: verisimilitude, panification, simulacrum, punctiliousness, didacticism, and semiquincentennial.

A month I'd rather live than spell.