What with the theme of the week being “summer is over and you wasted it,” I guess it is appropriate that it feels ever so much like autumn out there today. This way you can get a sneak preview of what it will feel like to waste fall. Anyway, here’s music, enjoy.

★★★★★ Someone unwilling to wait for the arriving day sent the scream of a motorcycle—revved far beyond normal city speeds—up from the empty avenue, through the open window, and breaking into sleep. Outside in the regular morning, the scattered sun made a wide stretch of sky impossible to look up at. The coffee shop’s doors, with their keep-closed-f0r-air-conditioning notice attached, were propped fully open. An actual jeep, olive drab and with the windshield folded down flat, rolled up Broadway with passengers sitting atop the back like cargo. Only the microclimate down by Penn Station, sun-smacked and foul and quickly passed through, missed out on the coolness and ease. The late west was softly streaked with clouds, and the sun behind them made a bright, tapering zigzag, like a lightning bolt logo on a superhero’s chest. Somewhere north of that, something had punctured the darker cloud-lines so that they flowed together in a trailing V, as if going down a drain. The dusk sky looked clear but the moon was blurry in it.

Anyone who comes to Boston comes to see some things—the Prudential tower, the Common, theater students sweating in period clothes tossing Styrofoam blocks off a ship that never sails. They hop on and hop off the trolley that promises the freedom to hop on and off at will, and all the while they miss the best thing. Without it, much of what they happily photograph themselves in front of would not exist. The thing they fail to see is the ur-thing. It is Boston Sand & Gravel.

Boston Sand & Gravel deals, as might be readily apparent, in sand and gravel. They are, according to their website, the “leader in the ready mixed concrete and aggregate industries in southeastern New England.” The sand and gravel that comes to Boston Sand & Gravel eventually becomes concrete, which becomes buildings and stuff, which becomes progress. It has been this way for a little over 100 years.

Back in 1914, Boston Sand & Gravel was located slightly west of its current location, over in Cambridge. Then, the sand and gravel that eventually became concrete got to the gravel yard mainly by way of the ocean. A fleet of steam-powered barges cruised through Boston Harbor to deliver their cargo—in fact, Boston Sand & Gravel was even sued by the U.S. government for a collision with a destroyer on a foggy morning in 1918 (TL;DR version is, “Hey, you sunk my battleship!”).

Boston Sand & Gravel’s Charlestown home contributes to the prevailing opinion of it which is, in effect, “What the fuck?” It is, as Bob Vila points out in this extremely extra-special episode of This Old House, “literally ringed” by condos and all sorts of highway overpass, and also my office building. Many people see the spot as primo real estate, assuming (as I once did) that Boston Sand & Gravel must be holding out for a Scrooge McDuck-style pool of money. But, it’s a pretty strategic location for a couple big, not oft-considered reasons.

“My roommate doesn’t like separating out trash and recycling. What can I do to change their mind?” —Earth Angie

We’ve done some horrible things to this planet. Burned up tons of fossil fuels. Threw dinosaurs into the tar pits. Made those ridiculous McDLT styrofoam packages. Because heaven forbid your Cheeseburger heated up the tomato and lettuce a little too much. We needed to keep them separated and now there’s probably a white melted styrofoam island the size of Nebraska out in the Atlantic Ocean of those that will be here when the new zombie dinosaurs roam again. Humans by then will be long gone. And the planet will probably be better off for it. We’ve ridden it hard and it could really use a break today.

It’s hard to see the scenes from Texas and Houston and not feel despair that we’ve irreparably harmed our planet. When a 500-year flood drowns a major metropolitan city, it’s kind of like a zombie dragon melting a 500-foot ice wall. You think to yourself, “Surely we could have avoided this somehow, just by being smart and thinking ahead.” Humans really have to be forced to think ahead and act smart. It doesn’t come naturally. Instead, we’re inventing things like the CD long box. See, when records started to be replaced by CDs, all the record stores had these big long ridiculous record-sized display cases. So they put plastic jewel cases into tall thin boxes. Then we wrapped the boxes in plastic wrap. We sold billions of CDs worldwide this way. When you look out your window and see cataclysmic superstorms, think of all of those dead long boxes, rising up to destroy us like the Army of the Dead.

Weren’t we just here? Wasn’t it moments ago that we were waking up to a new week, full of dread and barely able to drag ourselves to the starting line? Didn’t we just complain about how exhausted we were and wonder how much more we could take? I guess the good news is I can copy and paste this exact block of text over and over again until it finally all comes down, because we live in a world where it’s always like this now. Here’s some music. Enjoy.

 ★★★★★ The indoors was so cool that the mind turned to jeans and corduroys. Outside, there came a sudden awareness of the bareness of the ankles above the low socks. Still, that was quickly followed by the warmth of the sun soaking into a dark shirt. The tarp at the back of a fruit stand flapped and billowed. On the table were boxes and boxes of ripe figs. The midday light and breeze were a marvel. Pale straw hats swayed on their display rack. The sun cured the aftereffects of the air conditioning. Guitar music and marijuana smoke carried over un-idyllic stretches of sidewalk. Here and there sweaters made their debut—though with cutoffs, or color-coordinated with open-toed sandals.

Illustration: Forsyth Harmon

My eyes hurt from staring at the sun and the moon through cardboard specs. They were flimsy and for kids and looked like a total joke but, as with scissored cereal boxes, they did the job—a crappy thing through which to see something stupidly magnificent: our own black moon slide over a red sun, at two forty four on a Monday afternoon.

An event which was depicted on the specs themselves. Here was the earth in miniature—a jolly one-armed globoid with a face (swathes of the planet effaced by this face! His eyes obliterated Europe and the grin took out the Eastern Seaboard), taking a selfie with his sole, Mickey-Mouse-gloved hand, while being photobombed by the moon and behind him, the sun. Just three good pals, the sun and the earth and the moon, doing it for the lols. The one-armed earth was wearing his own special specs, too, although, disappointingly, these did not bear another, even tinier selfie-taking earth and Co., ad infinitum. I stared at these glasses and their cartoon planetary drama for longer than I stared through them, at the real thing in the sky.

Wearing the special specs, my friends—sitting in a line, agape—looked like something out of a B movie: campy and credulous, like claymation monsters. Down the street a toothless-looking couple flanked a car’s bonnet, on which they’d arranged thirty or so crystals of different shapes and colors. The pair of them waiting there, sullen beside all their crystals, as if for the rapture. The extraordinarily energetic young man wearing vast and downy white wings, jouncing down the street and sending finger tip kisses to the cars that honked and the iPhone cameras that watched. A guy staggering on his own in a welder’s mask. So many grown ups clutching their doctored boxes of Cheerios and Lucky Charms. People holding colanders and marvelling, as if mad. They were marvels, though, the little crescent shadows cast. The term was correct.

The light went strange and crispy and things looked static, even as they moved. I blinked, and kept blinking, even though I knew the effect was the world, not my eyes. I wanted more, of course. I wanted The Path of Totality (intoned in a death metal voice). I wanted screams from the hillsides, Book of Revelations in widescreen 3D. I wanted the world out of joint, but in epic splendor, instead of just this human idiocy of a president staring straight at the sun.

I saw no murmurations of starlings but, later, in the everyday darkness of eleven p.m., I did see you peeing in a subway grate which was in its own way an extraordinary event. I was coming up familiar steps at the end of the day, tired and trudging and there you were to wake me up—crouched and suddenly bashful, in bright clothes and wide eyes and apologies. I failed to communicate to you the number of times I’ve raged at a lack of bathroom. “I’m glad you weren’t a man!” you said. I’m glad of that most days. “They have it easy, right?!” you called after me.

My eyes hurt. A Celestial Event seemed to me the best possible reason for a headache. Nonetheless, a headache was a headache. The earth turned, the great moon passed over the sun and even after a piece of the planet had been plunged into daytime darkness, a person still had to pee.

GENERAL KELLY has assigned JARED to interview Trump voters. Now that STEVE BANNON is gone, the GENERAL can run the White House the way he wants, which means instituting a permanent panel of Trump voters, who will be broadcast live to TRUMP whenever he is feeling sad and angry and racist. The PANELISTS will explain why they still support the President—it’s like jury duty, but they’re not voting to convict anyone of anything yet. They’ll be living out of conference room off of the bowling alley in the basement. JARED is nervous because he has to talk to strangers, and IVANKA is keeping a close eye on GENERAL KELLY, who she fears is diluting her father’s brand.

GENERAL KELLY [declaratively]: When he’s angry he goes off script.

IVANKA [one upping the chief of staff, whom she doesn’t view as her direct boss]: We can’t have him commenting on the script either. Interjecting what he really thinks between the lines we’ve prepared for him.

KUSHNER DAUGHTER [to the PANELISTS]: Meta-President. Our voters hate meta.

[The PANELISTS are idling in the hallway. One is loudly complaining that although he likes Trump, he is tired of all the tweeting and of that rich lady bragging about her designer clothes. Another is defending the rich lady, saying that it’s a free country and that means she can buy whatever she wants with her money. They’re all taking selfies with the office furniture and engaging in horseplay.]

GENERAL KELLY [getting pissed at the PANELISTS and at JARED because he is not corralling them as instructed]: Can we erase this Lord of the Flies diagram? [GENERAL KELLY points to a Freudian analysis of the novel’s characters on the white board.] I don’t think it matters who the Piggy is anymore.

[KUSHNER DAUGHTER mouths to the PANELISTS that she is the Piggy. GENERAL KELLY scrawls on the white board that Panel = Yes.]