I feel like I have only a vague sense of what the phrase “the human condition” means. I tried to look it up, but started getting answers like, “The human condition is everything,” or “Yeah, what is the human condition?” or “The act of asking this question is, in itself, the human condition.” I think I was less than two links away from an existential crisis, and nobody has time for that, so I gave up.

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Every weekend has been an endless loop of “hot, humid, and probably thunderstorms” with an occasional side dish of “dense smoke from western wildfires.” We finally decided to give up on the idea of waiting until the weekend. The forecast for Friday was clear skies, 75°F, 10kts of breeze, and a weirdly comfortable dew point of 55°F. There was no way that I could work through that.

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Seasons are tough. Some, like Vivaldi, say that there are four seasons. Indeed, many moderate-latitude locales experience four seasons, although there are apparently two Four Seasons in Philadelphia…both the Four Seasons Hotel and Four Seasons Total Landscaping. It seems as if some Fuzzy Bunny mixed them up and took the show up to, what is that? Tacony? Bravo, sir. For me, there are only really two seasons: sailing season and non-sailing season. While now may be the winter of our discontent in many ways, autumn is the spring of my discontent as it relates to the end of the summer of my sailing season.

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I was going to call this “Winds of Change,” but I have Martin Amis’s The War Against Cliché on my reading list, and decided to preemptively stop myself at its potential behest. This may be equally unoriginal, or at least uninspiring, but I’d rather go with bland than have it titled like a mediocre prog album by trying to jam the word “entropy” in there. “Winds of Change” would probably have given me all the wrong sort of SEO anyway, when the famished Scorpions fans came sniffing around for hot gossip.

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