Tales from the Third Lobe - Title Track

About the author: Descended from old English money, Vidicon was raised by spiny echidnas in the mountainous rainforests of the North American Southeast. Lured back to society by time-traveling gray/reptiloid alien hybrids posing as renegade Jesuits, he has managed to maintain his outsider's perspective and an appetite for crunchy insects. Today, Vidicon is a world-class synchronicity surfer and an unlicensed quantum mechanic. He has a fourth-degree black belt in weird. About his bi-weekly column: Tales from the Third Lobe are the unfocused meanderings of the World's Smartest Moron. Topics range widely over the sciences, religion, philosophy, technology, modern culture, mysticism, Vidicon's personal history and viewpoints, and whatever pissed him off in the media last week. View all articles by Laszlo Q. V. St-J. "Vidicon" Xalieri, 2HC Columnist...

Motherfucking August is almost over. August, of the goddamn Dog Days, is over. Time to stop panting from the heat and get back to work.

Half the Northern Hemisphere fucks off during the month of August. Shops close, businesses coast, people take vacations and spend the hottest part of the year submerged to their necks in the closest ocean they can find. No self-respecting crop has August for a harvest season. There are no feasts or holidays or celebrations. Birthdays get ignored.

August is no blur. It's a long, flat landscape obscured by heat-ripples from scorched asphalt and concrete. Hot water has less air dissolved in it, so even fish gasp for breath, swimming up into the sky if they have to. In Georgia humidity, it's even possible.

And it's over. Time to get back to work. Nothing got solved while you were away. Nothing.

Apathy is a great word. The root is pathos, which translates to feeling. The single-letter prefix at the front changes that to an absence of feeling. Numbness. But that's not the word that applies here.

We're not numb. Far from it. We've had our legs axed out from under us by the heat. Our motor neurons have stopped firing. We are catatonic and paralyzed, but we still care. You can tell because the fear hasn't stopped building.

You can still feel it, surely. It's a weight like a stone in your stomach, bumping into your heart and lungs as you shift uncomfortably. It's a suspiciously swelling lump buried in the third lobe of your liver, and it says to you, through a constant icy trickle of adrenaline into your bloodstream, "You can ignore me for just as long as you like—as long as you can handle the consequences."

You can handle those consequences, can't you?

Apathy doesn't apply as long as the sweat keeps trickling, and if August isn't about sweating, then August isn't about anything.

Soaring fuel and power prices that made your last 3.5% raise actually a 1.5% salary cut? Still there. That annoying little war in the Middle East? Still there and festering. Credit card balances? Still there. Student loans still coming due? Yup. Parents' health still getting worse? Yup. Rent still going up? Yup. Savings dwindling? Yup. Retirement fund still getting plundered to pay for all of the above? What retirement fund? Still have no health insurance? Engine still making that funny knock-and-squeal sound?

The dead man's float may keep you from drowning, but it doesn't get your ass any closer to shore.

No, apathy isn't quite the word we're looking for. We need another term. One that's like dream-paralysis, only triggered by the unnatural exhaustion brought on by unnatural heat. One that's meaning won't shift like bored did.

Being bored used to imply being drilled through the eardrum by a nagging/droning voice, a form of torture that made one dream of escape. If someone was a bore, if someone was boring you, you pictured them with a drill coming at your head. Nothing got the blood pumping like an approaching bore. A yawn used to be thought of as a silent scream. The thought of being drilled used to be exciting. What the hell happened?

You think you're bored now? You're not half as bored as you will be soon. Bored, as it were, from the inside out.

The back burner is still on, and it was on the entire time you were away.

The corporate criminals who had their judicial buddies crowbar them into office back in 2000 are mere inches from grand jury indictments for the lies they told that helped get us into the Iraq War. They've been winning friends and influencing people in their own special way world-wide for five years. What do you think will happen when the guillotine falls? What do you think will happen if the guillotine fails to fall? Either way, for how many years will things get worse before they get better?

People are already quitting their jobs because they can't afford gas for the commute. What will this winter be like when the weather turns cold? When more and more is being taken out of your paycheck because your company is taking more and more from your checks to cover your health insurance? I don't know about you, but I'm already shivering. And it's still August. If only for a few more days.

Man, I wish I could move. Hell. I wish I could breathe. Man, I hope that lump is operable.

It's time to go back to work.

[*]

Vidicon was the Buddha but the pay was lousy.