Goodbye summer!

Tomorrow, after an appreciated twelve month sabbatical, our demotions taking effect immediately, or in twenty-four hours, Slothrop and I return to the rhetoric department to persuade students to study hard to learn to persuade others to give them money. Thus does Plato turn a corporate raider. Actually, I look forward to it. Over the summer I settled on a new approach to teaching rhetoric, which turns out to be a very old approach, the oldest, in fact, and I anticipate much Socratic corruption of the young. But I will miss the carefree evenings of pissed-off tennis, and the egregious oversleeping until nine at night (seriously), and the spontaneous decisions to reread T.S. Eliot's essays in The Sacred Wood, which are way funnier and crisper and younger than I remembered them being, whose sentences are so tight you can feel them crackle on your fingers, and. . .

What the HELL is he doing up there? Proof, anyway, that his organizational method was less mythic than senile; and baiting my new addiction to the letters of Flannery O'Connor,

in which she proclaims, "I know I believe in the complete chicken," and then advises her friend, "Think about the complete chicken for a while." I'll miss having the conviction to be in dereliction of duty, choosing to read instead of the prescribed literature this or that letter from the crazy old lupus lady or the banker's muffled yips about Byron. I'll miss staring at my rabbits for hours, not intending to do so but also not intending to do anything else. I'll miss taking angry, reckless whacks at the tennis ball, knowing that I have an entire day's opportunity to squander until the sun rises again and it actually is day. How in God's name did it end so fast? How will I convince myself to wake up before 2pm? Oh, these questions require all my rhetorical cunning to. . . defer. And I will!

May the autumn favor you, dead old woman and old man and rabbits and bad tennis. You kept me safe this summer, despite the abrupt and total disintegration of Rafael Nadal, which could have killed me, probably, and you prevented the worst from happening. Again.