The August of Farewells

So many things came to an end in one month, one-half century ago.

It is impossible to overstate how much changed in global popular culture between 9 February 1964 when The Beatles first appeared on U.S. television and 22 August 1969, when that same band, looking like they’d aged ten years instead of five, posed for their last publicity photos. Styles of hair and dress that would have been unthinkable in the U.S. around the time of John F. Kennedy’s assassination had become commonplace, and would get even stranger in the succeeding decades.

I would later learn the band was indeed all together in one room the following month holding contentious meetings, from which John Lennon eventually walked away. The exact last day is unknown, only that it was sometime between 15-19 September. The story is here, but for my purposes, I’ll count The Very Last Day of The Beatles as 22 August.

You see it in their faces. They had just put their final album to bed two days before. Few people realized how utterly final Abbey Road was; Let It Be, the “new phase Beatles album” was the salvaging of an aborted project the winter before. When they had crossed the street for its iconic cover on the 8th, recording engineer Geoff Emerick noted that the chosen shot was of them walking away from EMI Studios. They were done.

The world’s first superstar rock band was finished in time for the leaves to start changing, before the new decade brought its numerous fads and fashions of music and dress, from earnest long-haired singer-songwriters to spangly dressed disco divas to spiky-haired punks. More than a mere “dream” was over. It was the end of a five and one-half year-long era that changed nearly everything.

No one seemed to know it at the time, though, not even The Beatles themselves. It’s poignant to note that no one thought to call it over until April 1970 when Paul answered in the negative to a question in a promotional interview for his solo album regarding whether he would consider working with John Lennon again. To be fair, by 22 August 1969, maybe only Ringo could imagine them all together in the studio again. 

It had been a long, intense ride since their days as teenagers taking the bus to wherever they needed to go in Liverpool. Now they were almost 30. It was ending sometime. It may not have ended well, but half a century down the road it’s apparent it ended when it had to.

The last photo of them all together, ever. I’ve noted this before, but it’s interesting that the two now long-deceased ones are the ones looking away at something else.

I smile to think that, as a teenager in the far more creatively and culturally diverse 1970s (thanks to the 1960s, mind you), my two biggest wishes were for The Beatles to get back together and for new episodes of a revived Star Trek. Thank God neither happened. These core bits of what would eventually become worn-out, chewed-over, flavorless franchises ended when they had to. And their endings marked the end of the beginning of whatever it was that’s led us here.

To mash things up a bit. I don’t know who made this, but my hat’s off and my glass is raised.

On what was either 26 August or the day after Labor, the last re-run of the original Star Trek was broadcast on U.S. network television. I haven’t been able to find precise listings for those specific months, but the last month of summer seems a fitting month to consider that all over. I wonder what famously cringe-inducing third season episode repeated that Tuesday night. The struggling sci-fi TV show that would eventually become a huge franchise over ten years later died with a whimpering of embarrassingly awful scripts and dinner theater budgeting amid a rapidly changing cultural landscape.

I note the passage of Star Trek on network TV primarily because it marked the ignoble end of an era of imaginative television that encompassed The Twilight Zone, The Outer Limits, The Wild, Wild West, Irwin Allen’s sci-fi shows, et al. Television might get more “sophisticated” in the 1970s with urban sitcoms and Norman Lear’s reworkings of BBC shows, but it would never have the sense of weird, wacky, good-natured fun one got from most television in the 1960s.

James Bama’s 1966 promotional art, featuring
a “pulp” aesthetic impossible to imagine for anything
in the 1970s, save for that movie that came out
in May 1977. Even that original Star Wars was one of a
kind in that regard, and, like Trek, it never replicated
that original excitement. Yes, “inb4 Empire Strikes Back,”
my favorite movie, but you can’t imagine what it was
like seeing that first one after so many dark and
depressing things between 1970 and 1977.

Star Trek is oft praised for its presumably rare optimism about the future, but it was far from the only television show expressing that. The Robinsons may have been Lost in Space, but they were having a good time. Admiral Nelson’s and Captain Crane’s Seaview dealt decisively with whatever rubber-suit strangeness it came against in their Voyage to the Bottom of Sea. Any darkness and back-stabbing intrigue were the work of foreign agents, but the good guys always triumphed. There was none of the cynicism you saw, say, exactly ten years later in the movie Alien. Captain Kirk may have directly disobeyed Starfleet on occasion, but only on very special occasions, because Starfleet and the United Federation of Planets were honorable organizations.

By August 1969, all that, too, had passed. Passing with it was an make-do/can-do aesthetic of filming television sci-fi that required the viewer to meet the set designers and effects people halfway. For all the remakes and rehashes and re-imaginings to come, this particular flavor of magic would never spark again.

It couldn’t. The very environment which had spawned it had changed. The world of August 1969 was markedly different from the world of August 1968, which in turn was markedly different from August 1966. You get the idea.

As with The Beatles one-half century later, it’s impossible to imagine new episodes of original Star Trek sallying on into 1970. Even as the show’s popularity exploded during the show’s syndication in the following decade, those original 79 episodes were all she wrote. There would be no more because there could be no more.

I’d have preferred the standard flyaway shot into the generic void from the original effects but I must admit this final shot made especially for the “Turnabout Intruder” remaster, in honor of the last original Star Trek episode, is nicer.

Somewhere in the middle of all that a thing called Woodstock happened. It was a music festival that the promoters lost all control over (and quite a bit of money) that marked the high-water mark of the hippie scene. The band lineup was a Who’s Who of those whose stars would rise with the next decade as well as those who would soon pass into memory.

Truth be told, there really isn’t much to say about Woodstock except that it was a music festival that marked the beginning of many music festivals to come, much better managed and far more tightly controlled. When Woodstock happened—and for maybe four or five more years, when disco would put that lie to rest—people believed that Music Can Change the World. Oh, the insane, blank-eyed naivete of it all!

The generation everyone loves to hate when they’re not hating on Millennials. Most of it’s well-earned, I’ll grant that.

Looking back, though, it’s easy to see how people came to feel that way. The new pop music, with its new sounds and arrangements, if it aggravated and terrified the oldsters so much, it had to be doing something right. And speaking as an old duffer who remembers those old duffers of the past—I’m here to tell all you New Traditionalists out there who want to revive the old architecture and mores of days gone by, people threw all that good old stuff to the wayside because no one gave them any reasons to hang onto it other than, “‘Cause I’m yer elder, and I done told you so! Now turn that dang noise off and git back to wuck!”

And then our wise elders sent our jobs overseas. The jobs they couldn’t send overseas, they depressed the wages on by bringing people into the U.S. to work. But they got a handle on controlling—and milking—large crowds for music festivals. So there’s that.

And the music, well, whatever you’re into, it’s something to just get you through your day, however that’s going.

Hendrix was one of those you wondered how he would have turned out had he lived. Jim Morrison and The Doors were clearly finished after L.A. Woman, but Hendrix might have made a career clear through the 1970s for his tremendous talent and willingness to explore.

This isn’t so much an exercise in nostalgia as it is noting that, for one narrow window of time within one numerical decade that happened to coincide with The Beatles’ U.S. television debut in 1964 and their dissolution in 1969, a lot came and went. Much was changed forever. Network television went from broadcasting in black-and-white to color, for one. For a fun exercise, consider all the popular television shows that came and went. Some of the best remembered ones, e.g., The Munsters, The Addams Family, Batman, barely lasted two seasons. There was the spy craze, the “camp” fad, all those sci-fi shows. The movies from that time frame are another thread altogether.

Few people seem to remember what a big deal it was for a man to wear his hair any longer than a buzzcut. “Izzat a man or a woman, I cain’t tell! Hyuck!” By 1970, a few brave souls were sporting locks over their ears. I still remember seeing grown men losing their composure at the sound of the most anodyne pop songs on the radio up until 1978.  But everyone else knew at the time these old men were just ridiculous. They were on their way out, thank God, and not a minute too soon.

There was actually a time when the music one listened to and how you wore your hair was a political statement, much like the U.S. flag decals in the curve of the lower left rear windshield that said at once, “I support the war in Vietnam because @#$% communists and you stupid longhair hippies, too.” The sides were squaring off, between the Establishment-worshiping squares and everyone else who was sick of being yelled at by blustering, authoritarian old fools with more skeletons in their closets than clothes.

I’m old enough to remember when wearing an American flag on the butt-pocket of your jeans was an invitation to fight you some PATE-tree-otic Amurricans who didn’t cotton to no disrespect to the ol’ Red, White, and Blue, no sir! Up until about 1974, but that’s just me. And, yes, these same people would be scandalized by the above image. Pornography! On one hand, I could see where they were coming from. On the other, what a sadly skewed sense of priorities. That’s why that attitude died out.

August 1969, as The Beatles wound up their last full-band recording sessions and posed for one last set of publicity shots, as the last of the Star Trek third season reruns broadcast on NBC, as The Who played the entirety of Tommy for their largest audience so far and Jimi Hendrix redefined the “Star Spangled Banner” for a generation defined by electric guitar... fifty years ago was the end of the beginning. 

If people keep coming back to all this, it’s because there hasn’t been a whole hell of a lot else as gobsmackingly original since. Most of your all-time greats of anything are one-offs, and these just happened to one-off all at once. 

It’s nobody’s fault, really. Just the way things happened. It is what it was.

Arguing with G.K. Chesterton on a Sunday Morning

It’s not the smartest thing to do at any time, but I’m not the smartest man. Still, consider the following:

G.K. Chesterton isn’t as well known a Christian apologist as C.S. Lewis, yet he was every bit the approachable and easygoing — yet uncompromising, and supremely knowledgeable — writer and philosopher we wish we all knew and hung out with. I always chuckle to think of these proud, obese slobs from one of my old schools with one or two divorces behind them who want to talk to this old apostate about Jesus like they would know anything about the subject. These blustering fools couldn’t spell Aquinas, let alone tell me who he was. It’s impressive enough if they can name all the books in the Protestant Bible.

With respect to the venerable Mr. Chesterton, the crux of my counter-argument is that no hero is ordinary to begin with. Our protagonist likely isn’t anyone’s idea of a hero at the beginning of the story, but a good writer makes it clear the potential is there. Sometimes our hero-in-waiting will have what German author Hermann Hesse once referred to as the Mark of Cain. That is to say, ordinary people will despise him on sight and treat him badly. If not that, he’s behind the metaphorical 8-ball one way or another.

Your ordinary person is a coward who folds in the face of conflict then goes around finding ways to justify his failure. It’s not uncharacteristic to imagine an ordinary person telling everyone afterward how he put that monster in his place. We live among these people. “Most people are garbage” is a cliche for a reason, because most people are. Of course, Nietzsche would have told you as much, and long since has.

Heroes engage and defeat (most of the time, and certainly not at first) the monster against the pressures of their own terror and feelings of inadequacy, and sometimes even the carping of the “good” ordinary people who wonder aloud why he’s picking on the poor, misunderstood monster. The hero only appears ordinary on the outside. But he’s an outsider from the git-go, and the good ordinary people often never let him forget it. It just takes that One Big Event on top of some smaller ones to tease out the heroism that truly defines him.

Ordinary people serve only two purposes to me. To antagonize my protagonist, and to die horribly when their beat comes ‘round.

Oh, but Chesterton is talking about “the modern psychological novel” versus the classic fairy story here. Do such things as psychological novels still exist? Frankly, I don’t need to know that badly.

But even Jack of “Jack and the Beanstalk” fame was cursed for a fool for trading for the magic seeds that set him on his hero’s journey. Hansel and Gretel were special enough to be despised by their step-mother and proved resourceful in their circumstances even before they were captured by the old witch in the woods. I could go on. 

Heroes are outliers, always. Given that a lot of us feel like outsiders where we are (especially if we’re weirdos who actually read and stuff like that), these stories serve to inspire what heroics we may be called upon to do one day. Provided, of course, we’re not merely ordinary. 

There’s only one way to find out.

Random Thoughts on the Second Hottest Day of the Year

Friday was the worst. Let’s see how far I can get today before I have to shut down my computer because the room is too hot and the cooling fans are screaming.

For those scratching their heads at the header, I live in a part of the country where it gets uncomfortably hot for maybe two weeks out of the year. If I had the disposable income, I might install a swamp cooler (which, at our altitude, would work better than a standard air conditioner), but as when I lived in California, and 1,000 feet lower in Colorado Springs, it makes as much sense to open windows, run fans, and then close the windows and draw the curtains by 9 a.m.

Looking at the forecast, and going by my memory of how the seasons work after three years here in the central San Luis Valley, the worst is close to over. Saturday looked as if it were going to be second hottest day, but then a cold front tore through and rendered the day cool and unsettled until clearing by sundown. We won’t get such a break today, but we’re due for a couple of more classic July scorchers before the month is up and the temperatures begin slowly ratcheting down. As uncomfortable as it gets sometimes, I remind myself we’re three, maybe four weeks out from the leaves changing.

The year is slipping away.

Fade to bright yellow, then orange, then red, then black.

On the bright side, I’m getting a lot of writing done because the browser strains the processor in the heat. Word 2010 uses very little resources, even with a 259-page document open. So, no trawling for silly memes in my downtime. Heck, what downtime? I’ve got nothing else to do but write. It’s a beautiful thing.

An Encouragement of Surprises

Notes on stuff, thangs, since the last time it occurred to me to post something.

The days have blurred into weeks since I last posted. No one’s died this time around (thank God, and I’m not being funny), but I did get a surprising e-mail from Severed Press on 20 June. And by surprising, I mean I had to print it out and read it three times with my glasses to make sure I wasn’t hallucinating a notice for a three-digit royalty payment.

In keeping with my tradition of breaking up text with unrelated images, here’s an antique manure spreader on display amid flowers. Okay, so maybe not entirely unrelated....

It was a low three digits, hardly anyone’s idea of a weekly paycheck, let alone a quarterly royalty. Still, it’s the first of such size I’ve gotten in six years of having books for sale. That I’m getting royalties at all from Bleeding Kansas and Grace Among the Dead after six years is phenomenal in and of itself. When Severed Press published Bleeding Kansas in July 2013, I read somewhere the average e-book author sold 600 books and was good for maybe six months on the charts. I’ve tried to get stats since then, but, honestly, no one seems to really know.

The main thing is I’m still here. Also, I’ve sold a lot more than 600 books. The money has added up over the years, and if it still seems too little, too late for the countless hours of effort putting into creating both novels over the course of a year each, that’s not my problem. I’m happy to be alive and still in the game. Heck, I’d gone for 50 whole years wondering if I’d ever figure out how to write a novel. And here I am.

Still trying to get that perfect shot of these buttes and mountains. I like the details that reveal themselves when the light is muted just so.

A lot of people suffer from the delusion that the money just rolls in when you publish a book. If you’re of the top dozen or so name-brand authors selling off the racks at the airport, sure. Otherwise, you’d better learn to be happy with a couple of night’s beer money every three months. The big money doesn’t come until someone decides your book would make a fine movie or streaming television series. 

Naturally, this is all the more incentive to finish The Wrong Kind of Dead, the third and final book of my zombie post-apocalypse action-adventure series. For my part, I just want to finish it. I think of Samuel Johnson’s famous decree that “None but a blockhead wrote but for the money,” which I’ve always misinterpreted for the better. Realistically speaking, if you’re writing just for the money, you’re going to be disappointed. You’d better be doing this for the love of putting something together, whether it’s an imaginary world of heroes and villains or monsters or an ordinary political argument. You need to be in love with the craft.

A very blockheaded and cornball thing to say, I know. I also know a guy who got placed with a Big Name House, whose book got optioned for film. Life solved, problems over, right? I forget the precise details, but Big Name House screwed him over regarding publishing the rest of the books in his series. He’s back to shopping novels to indies, and though he’s still doing better than the thousands who throw in with the Great American Writer Sweepstakes every year, he’s not happy.

“My advice to you is to start drinking heavily.” —Bluto Blutarsky, Animal House.

I should also note this guy is also one of the thousands who is absolutely nothing without an editor. You can read any one of his several novels out there and you can tell which ones had someone coming in behind him to clean up his prose and force him to make sense. His general philosophy, like that of too many others, is that if the words are spelled correctly and the grammar more or less works, you’ve got a prose style.

He was in it to make money and get famous. Of course, if making money and getting famous is all you’re about, fine. I’m in no position to make moral judgments here. (That PayPal button is there for reasons.) What I’m saying is, if fame and fortune are your primary reasons for making up stories and selling them, you’ll be lucky to end up like this guy. Not everyone sells to the movies. Not everyone makes as much money as he did.

He did light-years better than most. Make no mistake. But he didn’t get filthy rich. He didn’t get famous. 

After decades of slogging away, he only grew older, and more and more embittered. 

So ends another morality play in...the Twilight Zone. And now the lesson is yours.

One should really take time to stop and smell the...what are those pale purply things, anway? They look like something from another world.

Meanwhile, yes, I’m running late—way, way late—on that third book. I’ve been wondering how to describe the difficulties I’ve encountered in the last five years. After wondering for a minute, I’m back to working through whatever those difficulties are in the novel itself.

Many thanks to everyone who purchased my books. I’m throwing everything I’ve got at the keyboard to make this last book worth the wait.

The Blue Porch Kitty Committee waits also. For kibble.

Social Media Isn’t Evil; People Are Careless, Cruel, and Stupid

...and shortsighted. But who saw this coming?

This story is as old as kindergarten, when that one hateful little brat would shadow other children for the purposes of observing minor infractions they could report to the authorities, in this case, the teacher. Most commonly, it was for saying Bad Words, followed by Expressions of Unacceptable Attitude.

While most teachers would say, “No one likes a tattletale,” in the late 1960s when I was coming up, no one today questions the character of the adult who pores through years of social media to find that one phrase, that one expression, even that one association—liking a Tweet by a Designated Evil Person, for instance—in order to ruin someone’s life. 

To extend my metaphor, the targeted child doesn’t just miss recess. Any infraction is enough to get him expelled from school entirely. Which, when you think about it (and you shouldn’t have to), is putting deplatforming, unemployment, and loss of income mildly.

As the saying goes, guns don’t kill people, people kill people. So it is with social media when things get mean. It’s people going after people. What part of the “social” in the “social media” did you miss?

Where every turn is a wrong turn.

As I write this, YouTube is in the news because one “journalist” working for a dying clickbait site managed to get several content creators shut down. Given the rapidly turning political tides, this does not bode well for the dying clickbait site, which already doesn’t enjoy much goodwill, given its trollish notoriety. Meanwhile, YouTube and all the other social media sites have all but grabbed the sign that says “Duck Season” and screamed, “It’s duck season! Shoot me now!” There has been such a sloppy arbitrariness to many of the deplatformings, several law offices no doubt have another pot of coffee on as they prepare for the harvest of monetary settlements to come. And then there’s the possibility of the U.S. government getting involved.

This is small comfort to those fighting to get their livelihoods back while the “journalist,” like the creature who promoted the University of Virginia rape hoax for Rolling Stone, will likely move on quietly to another job. (These people are assiduous at taking care of one another and keeping each other employed, which contributes greatly to their resilience.) So what’s the lesson for the rest of us?

We’ll just have to do the best we can. Like the classroom tattletales of days gone by, these creatures can turn the most innocuous thing you’ve said into a Grand Manifesto of Most Abhorrent Evil Intent, so don’t sweat too much of what you say. The terrorists win that way, after all. Most importantly, as a matter of policy, never apologize, especially if you suspect you may have said something to offend someone. It sounds counter-intuitive, but apologies are always taken as admission of guilt. The hostilities are thus escalated, never mitigated. 

Part of what makes these monsters so evil is how they use the best qualities of good people against them. And these monsters are monsters, by the way. They’re not here to right injustice or make the world a better place. They’re here to hurt people. Ruin people. Because they can.

That said, I recommend keeping all anger in check. As the saying goes when dealing with obstreperous children, “Remember, you’re the grownup.” Most everything you see in the media, including our beloved Internet, is designed to get a rise out of you. When enough of us meet these outrages with a stone face and say quietly, but firmly, “Enough,” is when this madness stops.

As I read the chan boards and Facebook pages dedicated to slagging on the current culture, it occurs to me that many, many more people are lurking for the entertainment as I am. What could they possibly be thinking of all this? How will they make decisions on what to buy, whom to buy it from, whom to hire, whom to vote for, etc., based on what they’ve seen?

For my part, I can’t wait to find out.

There’s always a sunny day, if you’re up early enough for it. The clouds still close in by 11 a.m. around here.

Psychic Bath Bombs

...because “Stinky Potpourri” didn’t smell right. [Ba-dum-TSSSSH!] Seriously, what am I, twelve? Thus, under new branding, I present the latest in disconnected thoughts interrupted by semi-relevant to entirely irrelevant photos:

WEATHER REPORT
After our drought-busting winter (finally) in Colorado’s scenic central San Luis Valley, we had the usual spring windstorms. Unfortunately, the windstorms have continued into a daily feature of our summer. 

If you want to see a pretty day, you need to get up with the birds. Everything is gorgeous, the sky cloudless, the air warm and promising. By 11 a.m., though, fat stacks of cumulonimbus clouds are piling in from the south and west, and it’s dark in time for lunch. The wind picks up, the air cools. Quick, five- to ten-minute long squalls of high-intensity winds over the last couple of days have done a number on the shingles of the neighbor’s roof, and I’m sweating bullets for ours. 

It’s the joy-murdering gloom that predominates throughout the day that really wears on the soul, though. The heavy wall-to-wall cloud cover breaks up just in time for sunset. On a good day, you’ll see the sun through the breaks, maybe get some color.

On the other hand, we’re out of the drought, and that’s no small thing. Given the hellish heat I’m reading about from my home state of South Carolina, I don’t mind running the heat a little bit in the pre-dawn versus running the air conditioner 24/7.

I was going to make a joke about being under attack by gay aliens or cartoon frogs in clown wigs but I have to remember not everyone goes to the same weird places on the Web I do.

WARNING: THINGS NOTICED OUT LOUD ON THE INTERNET
I’ve seen many a complaint about the proliferation of gay-friendly ads released by corporations for Pride Week/Month. Oddly, the only gay-friendly ads I’m seeing are posted by the very Facebook meme pages complaining about the “flood” of ads. You’d think these people would know a thing or two about how to block and filter online content—and you’d be right. It’s just something to complain about to get the great masses of people who neither know nor care to learn filtering and blocking to feel validated.

This is where most writers would say, “I can’t wait for this month to be over so I won’t have to read about people celebrating _________ (and where’s OUR month?)” but I’m happy to see every month there is, even January and February, and especially June, which marks the anniversary of my cancerous prostate removal. If stuff bothers me, I bl0ck it. Ironically, for as sheltered as I deliberately engineer my social media life, I seek out these complainers. Sometimes I even join in their various Two Minute Hates against whomever, whatever, if only to hate myself for it later. Crazy, right? Yes. It is.

Because....

From the Aborted Dreams Facebook page.

I came across this halfway through my first cup of coffee at 4:30 in the morning. I was in a funk the entire day, thinking of the characters I miss. I thought of how it was when I learned a friend from school days had died, how he’d spent the last ten years of his life struggling through Huntington’s chorea while I was losing my mind acquiring an MCSA (remember those?) in time for the bottom to fall out of the economy, and I thought I had problems. The two times I was back in South Carolina in the last seven years I could have looked him up. 

You know the rest. Watching the sunset through the picture window I realized it had been one year since what I thought might be my last night on Earth, because I was facing a five-hour prostatectomy the next morning. As of today, it’s been one year since I’ve been prostate-free. As for cancer-free, I’m overdue for a checkup.

This was taken on 19 May before the current pattern set in. The high clouds colored the dawn light in such a way it made the trees and the mountain behind it look like peak fall. (The ruddy evergreens give it away, though.)

STATE OF THE POST-APOCALYPSE
Meanwhile, in the wonderful world of writing The Wrong Kind of Dead, I’m pleased to report that it’s filling out at the end as I write the scenes I need to write up to along my outline. Meanwhile, I’ve been rewriting the two longest chapters at the beginning to better reflect the characters involved. It’s not just Derek Grace’s story anymore. Agnes Grace, Elyssa Godwin, “Brother” Christopher Grier have their own sagas within the larger saga of what happens to the human race when the elites press the reset button by way of releasing the Final Flu.

We’re not against petty warlords here. We’re against the very people who started it from behind the safety of their walls—and those survivors in the dead-infested Wilderness outside who know they got shafted. And the living dead, some of whom have developed primitive self-awareness and the ability to command entire hordes via pheromones released by the flesh-eating bacteria animating their bodies. Oh, and I forgot to mention that misanthropic colonel gone rogue with a virtual doomsday arsenal of conventional weapons at his disposal. 

So far it stands at 227 finished pages. I always knew it was going to be a monster. What’s important that it’s a well-built monster that can pass among the humans. Until it doesn’t.

And so, with thoughts of language and mortality and character development among the living dead, I leave with a photo of poppies and lilacs blooming in colorful defiance beneath the gloomy June skies. It’s a metaphor for something. You fill in the blanks.