Summer's Last Stand

I walked into a staples this morning and came face-to-face with the reality that the summer is just about over, even though, here in Los Angeles, the hot season doesn't usually get cooking until September.

Staples is a strange concept to begin with. The whole idea of a massive store dedicated to probably THE most boring things for sale in the world (office supplies) is sort of like opening a shop dedicated to lovers of enemas; I don't mean that in a crude way -- I guess everybody has their thing.

But there's also something sexy about Staples. Even though I might go in there when my toner runs low or I need a new 50 pack of purple post-it notes, I always end up walking the aisles for a few minutes to see if there's something else I might want or not need.

Oh yeah, back to my point. Today was different. I needed envelopes and some other stuff, but on my sojourn through the aisles, I saw a bunch of mothers and their depressed pre-teen kids deciding between the Spongebob and Lightning McQueen backpacks. And it hit me like a whole frozen side beef -- that almost primordial feeling of dread and general unease that I felt every August growing up when the summer was nearly over. No more dragging Greg Neuwirth behind the Honda Z50 in a shopping cart (really fun turns -- for me); no more hanging out with friends at Marineland or Pepe's Kartland; no more trips to Busch Gardens amusement park, where you could see wild parrots AND take a monorail tour of a beer factory (though I got to hand it to my mother -- when she would drop my friends and I off at the main gate, she would tell us how important it was that we be back there at 3PM, but she never told us NOT to drink beer).

No, the end of summer stationary run meant that very soon there would be haircuts and homework, and, soon after that, letters sent home about my aversion to both. Basically, the stationary run was the end of living.

So today, I stood in line behind some dour teenagers who looked like someone had sucked all the blood out of their face With my envelopes and dry erase markers in hand, I happened to look down at one of the Staples Easy Buttons, which, at $4.99 has to be one of the most upsetting side-effects of consumerism gone wild. It's a red button that replays a message, that's all it does. A red button. $4.99.

Anyway, for that moment, I went past reality to Lou's Fantasyland, where I imagined that the Easy Button might actually be a way for the good people of teendom to go back in time to the beginning of summer, when there were months of easy days, freedom and Slush Puppies.

And then, smiling, I realized that I didn't have to go back to school, and I wished Staples sold beer.