september επιτέλους

The passion for bathing really began with the Romantic generation and "swim" was a word that particularly appealed to its poets. The word suggests a state of suspension, a trance-like condition. There is the strange adverb "swimmingly" that implies unimpeded progress. Like Narcissus, many of the swimmers suffered from a form of autism, a self-encapsulation in an isolated world, a morbid self-admiration, an absorption in fantasy.

---from Haunts of the Black Masseur: The Swimmer as Hero, Charles Sprawson



The summer was hot, it always is, but I'm not one to complain about the weather. It was uneventful, as summers go. I gained one cat and lost another (beer night will never be the same). I watched a few good films and a lot of really bad ones. I swam, but not enough to change my stroke or learn how to breathe without getting water up my nose and hair in my mouth; things did not go swimmingly. I got burnt, but it felt good. I did some traveling in a hot car. One day in July, there was a very harrowing taxi drive, but it turned into a love story, almost a month later, to the day. One day in August, there was a harmless but ill-fated gecko, persecuted, killed, for being in the wrong place at the wrong time. The same thing happened to somebody else I know about ten days later. It was a hard month.

Thank God it's over.