Boy, I hate summer. Oh, sure, there are warm, sunny days and long, beautiful nights. Blissful hours spent by the side of the ocean. Camping among nature, backyard baseball and an almost absolute lack of need for footwear.
I almost never wear shoes in summertime. When I was a young man, my friends called me “Savage” because I would wander around for days shirtless, shoeless and oblivious to dress codes even in corner stores. I also carried a sharp stick and grunted a lot, but I don’t believe that contributed to the clever nickname.
But my point is that I hate summer. Because though it’s nice to go without shoes, it is an absolute pain in the buttocks to spend entire days without a coat.
I need a coat, even in 98-degree weather. I have stuff that needs to be concealed in pockets. There’s the folding knife, the slingshot and the pack of smokes I’m holding for someone else. There are indecipherable notes on crumpled pieces of paper, at least a dozen pens and that cool, sparkly thing I found on Lisbon Street.
Try stuffing all of that into pants pockets and you will look like a circus freak who just swallowed nine rolls of quarters. You will try running to the scene of the crime and you will fall face forward into a mound of dog poo.
Summer strips me of the ability to wear a coat and I’m left like a jouster without armor. I need the coat to hide things, such as the police scanner. Wander to a crime scene with a police scanner dangling from your belt, perfectly fine witnesses will consider you a cop or a grownup man playing G.I. Joe. They will avoid you like a tax evaluation and you will get nothing.
The coat conceals what needs to be concealed. It pockets things in a beautiful, weight-distributed manner. A coat is an absolute necessity to anyone who wants to wade gracefully into the downtown mayhem. But by some flaw of design, coats also trap in heat. Whomever invented the coat clearly overlooked this troublesome quirk.
So, it’s a Friday afternoon and the sun is blazing. The clock in front of the Sun Journal shows that it is 757 degrees outside, the way it will announce that it’s minus 9 o’clock Celsius later in the evening. The Sun Journal clock apparently keeps track of things happening in another dimension, the way it has since the day it was put up out there on Park Street.
It may not be 757 degrees, but it’s hot. I’m on Bartlett Street, watching the aftermath of a fight that appears to have started over a bag of laundry. Gawkers are gawking in their cool, breeze-inviting tank tops and earnestly enjoying the show. Me, I’m weaving back and forth like a willow tree because I’m wearing a split-leather coat and all the stuff inside the pockets is weighting me down unbearably.
The split-leather coat spikes my cool factor by 10 points. But my core body temperature has also risen dramatically and the heat inside my skull is boiling my brain. I begin to hallucinate. The three-headed supermodel in front of me is about to tell me the whole story about who started the laundry scrap and why, when I swoon a final time. I fall in a heap on the curb and land in a mound of trash bags. At which point, a dashing, cool-shirt-wearing Sun Journal photographer bounds over to take my picture.
The following day, the photo of me floundering among the trash and babbling about a three-headed supermodel hits the front page and I’m ruined. I’m a bigger laughingstock than I was that night in January when I got sprayed by a fire hose and froze up like a snowman. My credibility is shot. Cops and punks alike laugh at me instead of telling me riveting crime stories and I run away crying every time.
My wife leaves me, my pets won’t talk to me, and legions of editors come from miles around to witnesses my dramatic decline. It’s the kind of nightmarish scenario I might have envisioned years ago after a bad experience with Nyquil.
And so, while nobody appreciates the joy of summer more than I, it also pains me. And I thought this would be a good time to announce to you all that I have solved the problem in a clever new way. I’m getting a fanny pack.
You know the fanny pack. They were big in the ’80s, when you could buy them in Day-Glo colors. You strap them around your waist, stuff all your necessary items into the wide, accommodating pouch, and you’re good to go.
And the best thing about this plan is that fanny packs are cool. I mean, right? Fanny packs are still as cool as “Baby on board” window decals, am I right? Three-headed supermodels will still love me when I’m wearing a fanny pack.
Right?
Mark LaFlamme is the Sun Journal crime reporter. If he asks, tell him he looks cool in his fanny pack.
Send questions/comments to the editors.
