On the eve of my dear wife’s Citizenship Ceremony I have a few moments to untangle the skeins and make sense of august, the most august of months: playground of the leo; birth day of my daughter; string of sleepless nights; fractured arrhythmia of unfocused days; the late night slosh-and-hum of the dishwasher; the bramble thicket of inchoate words that never quite manage to stain the pages of my journal. A month of blurs, with a few moments that surface in clarity: a beach party & watching my daughter weave her way in and out of her friends; a discovered fever for the micro-blog; rattlesnake (!); an inexorable (though anxious) roll towards Iryshka’s citizenship; a watch that informs me of the tides; stunned paralysis in front of the mixer; a touch of the beautiful sunset after weeks of cloudless, clean fades; the weight of code and photoshop files that drags my face down into a soft jelly; sleep training long overdue; the teenagers’ passion-play of love & betrayal as an ancient ritual played over and over again, every generation; the gradual but inexorable metamorphosis of songs that start out too overrun by their influences but begin to sound more and more like just me every change; days of paradise walking along the ocean, feet in the clear water, watching massive waves curl in slow motion and pound the surf with a fluid strength that has built to breaking over geologic spans of time; Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace; being reminded every day how amazing humans are– what they can do with their incomparable brains– by watching the miracle of consciousness explode exponentially in my child.

As I finish this, I realize how Leonine this August really is… it’s a watershed month, it’s a turning point, it’s the peak; in so many ways, it is (imperiously) determining the months to follow. In like a lion, out like a maiden.