Everything August Still Owes You
August was always the best month as a kid—summer break, outdoor pools, grilling in the garden, long evenings on a bicycle, and hunting down someone to fool around with in the park before dark. Something about it felt genuinely free in a way nothing else in the calendar managed. Then adulthood arrived and August became just another stretch of working, sweating, and forgetting what the sun is actually for.
So here’s my annual reckoning. Things that belong to August and should be defended: showing up at a sweaty club smelling decent and leaving smelling of everyone else. Surviving a stupid bike crash and feeling more alive than you have in months. Getting properly drunk with your grandparents. Letting yourself be melodramatic about small things—a sunset, a bad mood, someone walking away. Homemade dips. Dancing in the rain not as a romantic gesture but because you’re already soaked. Leaving work exactly at the hour you’re supposed to. Watching Russ Meyer films with the curtains drawn in the middle of the afternoon.
And if you can arrange it: outdoor sex without insect bites. That’s the August holy grail. The thing you attempt every year and never quite pull off cleanly.
The things that should be left behind: conversations about rain. The kind of gray, basement-dweller complexion that broadcasts "I’ve been inside since April." Ignoring your mother’s calls. Forgetting to go to the cinema. Hating small talk but also being terrible at it—pick a lane. Having no decent tea in the house. Putting your life on silent. Songs with dripping sounds buried pointlessly in the mix.
Also, genuinely bad: not donating to a humanitarian crisis when you have the money to spare. The fact that Shin Chan has over 700 episodes and almost none of them made it to Western audiences. White boys rapping badly. Internet trolls with nothing else going on. Not liking Adventure Time. The eternal truth that after sex is before sex—the cycle never ends, and somehow that’s both the best and worst thing about being alive.
August deserves better than you give it. Thirty-one days and you’ll spend twenty of them complaining about the heat.