Dangerous Dog Days of Summer

So, here we are in the middle of August - my favourite Summer month - and that 'August feeling is finally sinking in; the feeling that the entire world is on holiday, that we are in some kind of hiatus, with nothing happening.  It is like time is standing still for a few weeks.  Except, of course, that things are happening, quite disturbing things.  Right now the White House is occupied by someone who, when he isn't trying to ramp up the tension with North Korea, is defending racists and neo Nazis.  I'd like to say that it is unbelievable that, in the twenty first century, he have a President of the United States trying to draw a moral equivalence between Confederate generals who fought to break up the Union and the US' own founding fathers.  But with Trump, anything is believable.  When the President gives a press conference where he argues that the Nazi protestors in Charlottesville (one of whom, let us not forget, killed someone by driving a car into a crowd)  are no different to those who were on the streets objecting to their presence, which draws praise only from David Dukes, the leader of the Ku Klux Klan, then you know that western civilisation is in trouble.  Trump has gone beyond simply being an incompetent and ignorant buffoon, to being a living, breathing, affront to deceny and human values. 

Unfortunately, there's little I can do about the disgraceful apologist for racists that Trump is, other than fume about him from the opposite side of the Atlantic.  At least the prospect of him initiating a nuclear exchange with North Korea seems to have receded.  It looks like I might be able to get through the other two weeks of my Summer leave without being fried to death in a nuclear holocaust.  Speaking of which, (the leave, rather than the holocaust, that is), this week at work separating the two parts of my time off this August is proving as exasperating as expected.  I'm just trying to keep my head down at work - I've managed to avoid speaking to nearly everyone when I've been in the office so far this week.  I'm hoping that I can continue doing so for the rest of the week.  There seems to be a growing consensus among people I know that I should jack this job in - fuelled by how awful I looked before I took last week off.  They are undoubtedly right - I felt even worse than I looked - but I still don't quite feel right about walking away at this juncture.  I need something to walk into, rather than just wandering into the wilderness.  Right now, though, my main objective is just getting through this week at work so that I can get back to the beach.  Unless Trump starts a war, or something to derail my plans.  This August isn't so much the dog days of Summer as the dangerous dog days.