Word on the Street: Christmas in July

There aren't many celebrations in life that annoy me. I generally consider most holidays, weddings, toppled governments, quadrennial sporting tournaments and obscure astronomical phenomena as all reasonable excuses to tip back a dozen pints and skip through the streets howling Billy Joel choruses. In some circles this is dubbed "alcoholism", while we the enlightened know it simply as "good times."

Christmas in July however is one of the few that get under my skin and transmit pathogenic trypanosomes like a tsetse fly. And I mean that literally. Bars participating in the out-of-place festivities by decorating everything in cheap lights and shitty tinsel bring on anemia, joint pains, and various cardiac, endocrine and kidney dysfunctions. If I see people in the hot sun running relay races, rowing boats or pub crawling in Santa suits, I develop exuberant ulcerated lesions on my tongue and eyeballs. And if God forbid I hear Christmas muzak in a department store while shopping for BBQ tools, the parasite then invades my central nervous system and enters its final neurological phase, leaving me helplessly stranded in a convulsing heap of confusion, tremor, hemiparesis and psychotic delirium. 

Summer in the City

Sea Isle City that is. It's where I'm headed for the week. For those of you who don't know, Sea Isle City is a tiny little speck of a shore town in Cape May County, New Jersey. It's inhabited mostly by families with young children and shiny guidos with hairless, sculpted muscles. My mission for the week is simple: eat crab, drink rum, pretend to be 20 years younger. My wife's mission is similar, but much more difficult. She'll be eating oysters, drinking sangria and searching deep inside her soul for what it was that initially attracted her to the sunburned albino walrus with a hairy chest who just tore his Achilles tendon trying to dive over a child's sandcastle to catch a frisbee.