The great dildo of consequence often arrives unlubed 

Summer

 These silent summer nights

even the stars
seem to whisper.
—Kobayashi Issa,

These brown summer grasses?
The only remains
of "invincible" warriors ...
—Matsuo Basho,

Forbearing the night
with its growing brilliance:
the summer moon.
—Tsukioka Yoshitoshi

The moon still appears,
though far from home:
summer vagrant.
—Matsuo Basho

On a hot summer night
dreams and reality
merge.
—Takahama Kyoshi,

Every time I see the lightening
Every time I hear the thunder
Every time I close the window
When this happens in the summer
Oh the night is so inviting
I can feel that you are so close
I can feel you when the wind blows
Blows right through my heart

It's hot here at night

Lonely, black and quiet
On a hot summer night

For all the dreams and schemes
People are as they seem
On a hot summer night

Hot summer streets
And the pavements are burning
I sit around

Trying to smile
But the air is so heavy and dry

The city is crowded
My friends are away
And I'm on my own

It's too hot to handle
So I got to get up and go

Summer breeze makes me feel fine
Blowing through the jasmine in my mind

Sweet days of summer, the jasmine's in bloom

summer afternoon; 

to me those have always been the two most beautiful words in the English language

The summer night is like a perfection of thought

Summer Afternoon

 

summer afternoon; 

to me those have always been the two most beautiful words in the English language

Summer breeze makes me feel fine
Blowing through the jasmine in my mind

Sweet days of summer, the jasmine's in bloom

 Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?

Thou art more lovely and more temperate:
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer’s lease hath all too short a date:

Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And often is his gold complexion dimm’d;
And every fair from fair sometime declines,
By chance or nature’s changing course untrimm’d;

But thy eternal summer shall not fade
Nor lose possession of that fair thou owest;
Nor shall Death brag thou wander’st in his shade,
When in eternal lines to time thou growest:

So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,

So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.

Summer night

 

The summer night is like a perfection of thought

When this happens in the summer
Oh the night is so inviting

It's hot here at night

Lonely, black and quiet
On a hot summer night

For all the dreams and schemes
People are as they seem
On a hot summer night

These silent summer nights

even the stars
seem to whisper.
—Kobayashi Issa

Forbearing the night

with its growing brilliance:
the summer moon.
—Tsukioka Yoshitoshi

The moon still appears,
though far from home:
summer vagrant.
—Matsuo Basho

On a hot summer night
dreams and reality
merge.
—Takahama Kyoshi,

 summer’s lease 

hath all too short a date

 

Everything good, 

everything magical 

happens between the months of June and August

 

 If June was the beginning of a hopeful summer, 

and July the juice middle,

 August was suddenly feeling like the bitter end.

 Every time I see the lightening

Every time I hear the thunder
Every time I close the window
When this happens in the summer
Oh the night is so inviting
I can feel that you are so close
I can feel you when the wind blows
Blows right through my heart

July

 

July

July is the seventh month of the year in the Gregorian calendar. It has 31 days and is a summer month in the Northern Hemisphere, and a winter month in the Southern Hemisphere. It is named after Roman general Julius Caesar. In the Northern Hemisphere, it is often the warmest month of the year 

The July birthstone is ruby. It is a vibrant red gemstone known for its association with love, passion, and vitality,

Flowers that represent the month of July are the larkspur and water lily. In the Astrological zodiac, the zodiac sign of a person born between July 1st and July 22nd is the crab, Cancer, and the zodiac sign of a person born between July 23rd and July 31st is the lion, Leo.

July is named in honor of Julius Caesar. Originally, the month was called Quintilis (meaning "fifth" in Latin) as it was the fifth month in the early Roman calendar, which started with March. However, in 44 BC, after Caesar's death, the Roman Senate renamed it July

As the heart of summer, July represents a time of growth, abundance, and inner illumination. In many cultures and traditions, the seventh month of the year holds deep spiritual meaning, connecting to themes of transformation, creativity, and personal empowerment

July

 

July

My emblem is the Lion, 
and I breathe The breath of Libyan deserts 
o'er the land; 
My sickle as a sabre I unsheathe, 
And bent before me 
the pale harvests stand.
 
The lakes and rivers shrink at my command, 
And there is thirst and fever in the air; 
The sky is changed to brass, 
the earth to sand; 
I am the Emperor whose name I bear.

 

Sweet days of summer, the jasmine's in bloom

July is dressed up and playing her tune

July

 

July's for Independence Day,
For flags and speeches and for play,
For hiding deep in meadow grass
And watching flying creatures pass,
For sailing boats on little seas,
Where just the smallest summer breeze
Can blow; for picking flowers any day;
July comes for flags and play.

A very pleasant month is this
To be in a country town.
The sunlight doth the foliage kiss,
Each verdant leaflet beams with bliss,
I see not one that's brown.

Fresh zephyrs fan the thrifty trees
The oaks, the elms, the willows,
The lake's face caressed by the breeze
In imitation of the seas,
Is flecked with tiny billows.

I am for the open meadows,
Open meadows full of sun,
Where the hot bee hugs the clover,
The hot breezes drop and run.

Now 'tis the time when, tall,
The long blue torches of the bellflower gleam
Among the trees; and, by the wooded stream,
In many a fragrant ball,
Blooms of the button-bush fall.

Gone are Spring's graces! mute her melodies!
Yet in their place what Summer can bestow,
Freely she yields; she tunes the river's flow
To gentlest music,—fills with sweets the breeze,—
Gives the last flush of leafage to the trees,—
Flowers to Earth's nursing bosom,—to the sky
Brightness oppressive from intensity,—
And calms, with halcyon wing, the azure seas.
Such are her spells!—yet I look back on Spring
(As middle age delights on youth to pore)
With feelings mournful, but unmurmuring.
I ever loved the bud more than the flower
And hope than full enjoyment: thence I cling
Alike to life's and nature's budding hour.

When the scarlet cardinal tells
Her dream to the dragon fly,
And the lazy breeze makes a nest in the trees,
And murmurs a lullaby,
It is July.

In idle mood, this happy day,
I let the moments drift away;
I lie among the tangled grass
And watch the crinkling billows pass
O'er seas of clover. Like a tide
That sets across the meadow wide,
The crimson-crested ripples run
From isles of shade to shores of sun;
And one white lily seems to be
A sail upon this summer sea,
Blown northward, bringing me, to-day,
A fragrant freight from far Cathay.

The sun gleams over the mountains,
And through the hazy air
It lightens the sombre hill-sides,
And meadows green and fair.
It gilds the light clouds drifting
Adown the summer sky;
There's beauty in the dawning
Of a morning in July.

Strawberry Moon June

 While a full, red moon might resemble a strawberry, this moon is named for the fruit that's usually ready to pick around the time of it.

June 30: Strawberry Moon

 

 At midnight, in the month of June, 

I stand beneath the mystic moon  

—Edgar Allan Poe

 

The brooks flow to their lover, the sea, 

and the flowers smile at the object of their passion, the light. 

The mist rolls down to its beloved, the valley. 

 

maybe we have to break everything to make something better out of ourselves

 

We are all growing and changing shape, 

we notice certain weaknesses that need to be corrected,

 we don't always choose the best solutions, 

but we carry on regardless, 

trying to remain upright and decent,

 in order to do honor not to the walls or the doors or the windows,

 but to the empty space inside,

 the space where we worship and venerate 

what is dearest and most important to us 

 

if you force yourself to be the same as everyone else. 

It causes neuroses, psychoses, and paranoia.

 it's a distortion of nature, 

it goes against God's laws,

 for in all the world's woods and forests

 he did not create a single leaf the same as another.

 

God knew what he was doing when he drew their attention to the tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. 

If he hadn’t wanted them to eat it, he would never have mentioned it

 

Everyone's looking for the perfect teacher, 

but although their teachings might be divine, teachers are all too human, and that's something people find all too hard to accept. 

Don't confuse the teacher with the lesson, the ritual with the ecstasy, the transmitter of the symbol with the symbol itself.

 our encounter with the forces of life and not with the people who bring this about.

Pity those who seek for shepherds, instead of longing for freedom! 

 

Just as your hand has the power to hide the sun, 

mediocrity has the power to hide your inner light

 

From the moment we are born, people tell us that the world is like this and like that, this way, that way.

 It is natural that - for a certain period of time - we end up believing what we are told. 

But we must soon push these ideas aside and discover our own way of living reality

 

There was a time when people accepted magical experiences as natural. 

There were no priests then, and no one went chasing after the secrets of the occult

 

If you pay attention to the present, you can improve upon it. 

And, if you improve on the present, what comes later will also be better..

 

 that willpower and courage are not the same thing. 

Courage can attract fear and adulation, 

but willpower requires patience and commitment

 

Every man is two men; 

One is awake in the darkness, 

the other asleep in the light

Fight Club Chapter Six

 

Two screens into my demo to Microsoft, I taste blood and have to start swallowing. My boss doesn't know the material, but he won't let me run the demo with a black eye and half my face swollen from stitches inside my cheek. The stitches have come loose, and I can feel them with my tongue against the inside of my cheek. Picture snarled fishing line on the beach. I can picture them as the black stitches on a dog after it's been fixed, and I keep swallowing blood. My boss is making the presentation from my script, and I'm running the laptop projector so I'm off to one side of the room, in the dark.

More of my lips are sticky with blood as I try to lick the blood off, and when the lights come up, I will turn to consultants Ellen and Walter and Norbert and Linda from Microsoft and say, thank you for coming, my mouth shining with blood and blood climbing the cracks between my teeth.

You can swallow about a pint of blood before you're sick.

Fight club is tomorrow, and I'm not going to miss fight club.

Before the presentation, Walter from Microsoft smiles his steam shovel jaw like a marketing tool tanned the color of a barbequed potato chip. Walter with his signet ring shakes my hand, wrapped in his smooth soft hand and says, "I'd hate to see what happened to the other guy."

The first rule of fight club is you don't talk about fight club.

I tell Walter I fell.
I did this to myself.

Before the presentation, when I sat across from my boss, telling him where in the script each slide cues and when I wanted to run the video segment, my boss says, "What do you get yourself into every weekend?"

I just don't want to die without a few scars, I say. It's nothing anymore to have a beautiful stock body. You see those cars that are completely stock cherry, right out of the dealer's showroom in 1955, I always think, what a waste.

The second rule of fight club is you don't talk about fight club.

Maybe at lunch, the waiter comes to your table and the waiter has the two black eyes of a giant panda from fight club last weekend when you saw him get his head punched between the concrete floor and the knee of a two-hundred-pound stock boy who kept slamming a fist into the bridge of the waiter's nose again and again in flat hard packing sounds you could hear over all over the yelling until the waiter caught enough breath and sprayed blood to say, stop.

You don't say anything because fight club exists only in the hours between when fight club starts and when fight club ends.

You saw the kid who works in the copy center, a month ago you saw this kid who can't remember the three-hole-punch an order or put colored slip sheets between the copy packets, but this kid was a god for ten minutes when you saw him kick the air out of an account representative twice his size then land on the man and pound him limp until the kid had to stop. That's the third rule of fight club, when someone says stop, or goes limp, even if he's just faking it, the fight is over. Every time you see this kid, you can't tell him what a great fight he had.

Only two guys two a fight. One fight at a time. They fight without shirts or shoes. The fights go on as long as they have to. Those are the other rules of fight club.

Who guys are in fight club is not who they are in the real world. Even if you told the id in the copy center that he had a good fight, you wouldn't be talking to the same man.

Who I am in fight club is not someone my boss knows.

After a night in fight club, everything in the real world gets the volume turned down. Nothing can piss you off. Your word is law. And if people break that law or question you, even that doesn't piss you off.

In the real world, I'm a recall campaign coordinator in a shirt and tie, sitting in the dark with a mouthful of blood and changing the overhead and slides as my boss tells Microsoft how he chose a particular shade of pale cornflower blue for an icon.

The first fight club was just Tyler and I pounding on each other.

It used to be enough that when I came home angry and knowing that my life wasn't toeing my five-year plan, I could clean my condominium or detail my car. Someday I'd be dead without a scar and there would be a really nice condo and car. Really, really nice, until the dust settled or the next owner. Nothing is static. Even the Mona Lisa is falling apart. Since fight club, I can't wiggle half the teeth in my jaw.

Maybe self-improvement isn't in the answer.

Tyler never knew is father.

Maybe self-destruction is the answer.

Tyler and I still go to fight club, together. Fight club is the basement of a bar, now, after the bar closes on Saturday night, and every week you go and there's more guys there.

Tyler gets under the one light in the middle of the black concrete basement and he can see that light flickering in the back out of the dark in a hundred pairs of eyes. First thing Tyler yells is, "The first rule about fight club is you don't talk about fight club.

"The second rule about fight club," Tyler yells, "is you don't talk about fight club."

Me, I knew my dad for about six years, but I don't remember anything. My dad, he starts a new family in a new town about every six years. This isn't so much like a family as it's like he sets up a franchise.

What you see at fight club is a generation of men raised by women.

Tyler standing under the one light in the after-midnight blackness of a basement full of men, Tyler runs through the other rules: two men per fight, one fight at a time, no shoes no shirts, fights go on as long as they have to.

"And the seventh rule," Tyler yells, "is if this is your first night at fight club, you have to fight."

Fight club is not football on television. You aren't watching a bunch of men you don't know halfway around the world beating on each other live by satellite with a two-minute delay, commercials pitching beer every ten minutes, and a pause now for station identification. After you've been to fight club, watching football on television is watching pornography when you could be having great sex.

Fight club gets to be your reason for going to the gym and keeping your hair cut short and cutting your nails. The gyms you go to are crowded with guys trying to look like men, as if being a man means looking the way a sculptor or an art director says.

Like Tyler says, even a souffle looks pumped.

My father never went to college so it was really important to go to college. After college, I called him long distance and said, now what?

My dad didn't know.

When i got a job and turned twenty-five, long distance, I said, now what? My dad didn't know, so he said, get married.

I'm a thirty-year-old boy, and I'm wondering if another woman is really the answer I need.

What happens at fight club doesn't happen in words. Some guys need a fight every week. This week, Tyler says its the first fifty guys through the door and that's it. No more.

Last week, I tapped a guy and I got on the list for a fight. This guy must've had a bad week, got both my arms behind my head in a full nelson and rammed my face into the concrete until my teeth b it open the inside of my cheek and my eye was swollen shut and was bleeding, and after I said, stop, I could look down and there was a print of half my face in blood on the floor.

Tyler stood next to me, both of us looking down at the big O of my mouth with blood all around it and the little slit of my eye staring up at us from the floor, and Tyler says, "Cool,"

I shake the guy's hand and say, good fight.

This guy, he says, "How about next week?"

I try to smile against all the swelling, and I say, look at me. How about next month?

You aren't alive anywhere like you're alive in fight club. When it's you and one other guy under that one light in the middle of all those watching. Fight club isn't about winning or losing fights. Fight club isn't about words. You see a guy come to fight club for the first time, and his ass is a loaf of white bread. You see this same guy here six months later, and he looks carved out of wood. This guy trusts himself to handle anything. There's grunting and noise at fight club like at the gym, but fight club isn't about looking good. There's hysterical shouting in tongues like at church, and when you wake up Sunday afternoon you feel saved.

After my last fight, the guy who fought me mopped the floor while I called my insurance to pre-approve a visit to the emergency room. At the hospital, Tyler tells them I fell down.

Sometimes, Tyler speaks for me.

I did this to myself.

Outside, the sun was coming up.

You don't talk about fight club because except for five hours from two until seven on Sunday morning, fight club doesn't exist.

When we invented fight club, Tyler and I, neither of us had ever been in a fight before. If you've never been in a fight, you wonder. About getting hurt, about what you're capable of doing against another man. I was the first guy Tyler ever felt safe enough to ask, and we were both drunk in a bar where no one would care so Tyler said, "I want you to do me a favor. I want you to hit me as hard as you can."

I didn't want to, but Tyler explained it all, about not wanting to die without any scars, about being tired of watching only professionals fight, and wanting to know more about himself.

About self-destruction.

At the time, my life just seemed too complete, and maybe we have to break everything to make something better out of ourselves. I looked around and said, okay. Okay, I said, but outside in the parking lot.

So we went outside, and I asked if Tyler wanted it in the face or in the stomach.

Tyler said, "Surprise me."

I said I had never hit anybody.

Tyler said, "So go crazy, man."

I said, close your eyes.

Tyler said, "No."

Like every guy on his first night in fight club, I breathed in and swung my fist in a roundhouse at Tyler's jaw like every cowboy movie we'd ever seen, and me, my fist connected with the side of Tyler's neck.

Shit, I said, that didn't count. I want to try it again.

Tyler said, "Yeah it counted," and hit me, straight on, pow, just like a cartoon boxing glove on a spring on Saturday morning cartoons, right in the middle of my chest and I fell back against a car. We both stood there, Tyler rubbing the side of his neck and me holding a hand on my chest, both of us knowing we'd gotten somewhere we'd never been and like the cat and mouse in cartoons, we were still alive and wanted to see how far we could take this thing and still be alive.

Tyler said, "Cool."

I said, hit ma again.

Tyler said, "No, you hit me.'

So I hit him, a girl's wide roundhouse to right under his ear, and Tyler shoved me back and stomped the heel of his shoe in my stomach. What happened next and after didn't happen in words, but the bar closed and people came out and shouted around us in the parking lot.

Instead of Tyler, I felt finally I could get my hands on everything int he world that didn't work, my cleaning that came back with the collar buttons broken, the bank that says I'm hundreds of dollars overdrawn. My job where my boss got on my computer and fiddled with my DOS execute commands. And Marla Singer, who stole the support groups from me.

Nothing was solved when then fight was over, but nothing mattered.

The first night we ought was a Sunday night, and Tyler hadn't shaved all weekend so my knuckles burned raw from his weekend beard. Lying on our backs in the parking lot, staring yup at the one star that came through the streetlights, I asked Tyler what he'd been fighting.

Tyler said, his father.

Maybe we didn't need a father to complete ourselves. There's nothing personal about who you fight in fight club. You fight to fight. You're not supposed to talk about fight club, but we talked and for the next couple of weeks, guys met in the parking lot after the bar had closed, and by the time it got cold, another bar offered the basement where we meet now.

When fight club meets, Tyler gives the rules he and I decided. "Most of you," Tyler yells in the cone of light in the center of the basement full of men, "You're here because somebody broke the rules. Somebody told you about fight club."

Tyler says, "Well, you better stop talking or you'd better start another fight club, because next week you put your name on a list when you get her, and only the first fifty names on the list get in. If you get in, you set up your fight right away if you want a fight. If you don't want a fight, there are guys who do, so maybe you should just stay home.

"If this is your first night at fight club," Tyler yells, "you have to fight."

Most guys are at fight club because of something they're too scared to fight. After a few fights, you're afraid a lot less.

A lot of best friends meet for the first time in fight club. Now I go to meetings or conferences and see faces at conference tables, accountants and junior executives or attorneys with broken noses spreading out like an eggplant under the edges of bandages or they have a couple of stitches under an eye or a jaw wired shut. These are the quiet young men who listen until it's time to decide.

We nod to each other.

Later, my boss will ask me how I know so many of these guys.

According to my boss, there are fewer and fewer gentlemen in business and more thugs.

The demo goes on.

Walter from Microsoft catches my eye. Here's a young guy with perfect teeth and clear skin and the kind of job you bother to write the alumni magazine about getting. You know he was too young to fight in any wars, and if his parents were divorced, his father was never home, and here he's looking at me with half my face clean shaved and half leering bruise hidden in the dark. Blood shining on my lips. And maybe Walter's thinking about a meatless, pain-free potluck he went to last weekend or the ozone or the Earth's desperate need to stop cruel product testing on animals, but probably he's not.