Max Sloan

A rare literal usage of one of my favorite phrases

It really is everything, and the Tar Heels just keep ticking along

There are relatively few differences between national touring companies and Broadway productions of the same show. This may seem like an obvious statement, but you have to understand the lengths to which these touring productions must go in order to avoid anything more than those small deviations. In a previous life, I worked at a local performing arts center, and was privileged to watch touring companies come in and build their temporary sets, settling in like so many migratory birds for a one-week or one-month run in the theater before once again hitting the road to bring the show tunes to another city’s throngs of musical theater nerds.

There’s a specific kind of heat in the center of the calendar and the middle of North Carolina, a heat that settles in the bones of anyone who lives in the piedmont middle ground in any of a handful of southeastern states. “Singin’ hot,” some would call it; my dad often opts to rightfully identify it as “hotter than fish grease.” Either way, triple digits on the dashboard of your car give the lie to a real feel that is often seven-to-ten degrees higher in that brutal summer sun. The heat and humidity will bring the water out of you on the walk from the car to the grocery store, so imagine running sprints in it.

Do not stop at the point of contact. A good form tackle necessitates running through the would-be ball carrier, as if you are attempting to tackle someone five yards behind them. Head up, shoulders square, legs driving through the body of the runner, arms wrapping the ball carrier to secure the tackle and prevent extra yardage. Wear the brunt of the collision on your shoulder; never drop your head or risk being juked. A good linebacker, reading run, flows toward the line of scrimmage, taking on would-be blockers with one shoulder while maintaining leverage necessary to shed the block and make the tackle. Fill your gap. Watch out for the pulling guard. Get downhill.

It’s been a long summer (he writes, fully knowing that we are still smack-dab in the middle of it). The hard-baked heat of June and early July has given way to the afternoon storms that you can set your watch to here in the middle of North Carolina. Life has continued, somehow, shuffling ever onward under the humidity and crushing heat, days melting off of the calendar one after another. There is a week remaining in July, then it’s a truly downhill (albeit still hotter than fish grease) run to the end of August and the beginning of football season.

I reckon I was born this stubborn. My grandmother used to call me hard-headed, identifying in me what had been passed down honestly from her son; a quiet kind of unyielding, the almost-imperceptible unwillingness to learn a lesson, or even to stay cussed out for a single minute. It’s not something I’m proud of, to be clear; it’s more of a feature of the landscape that is my existence than anything groundbreaking or otherwise noteworthy. That stubbornness has served me well, at times, but has also destroyed relationships in equal measure—a deep-rooted character flaw exacting commensurate payment for every time it benefits me.

Every minute passes faster than the one before it. With every moment we grow older, the totality of our time spent alive diminishes the perceived length of a given stretch of time. Do you remember the way the summer between, say, fourth and fifth grade stretched out endlessly before you on the last day of school? Now, with deadlines and projects and everyday life consuming the day-to-day, a month can vanish almost into thin air. As we begin to move faster and faster into the future, the little quotidian details compress our view until we look up and the summer is nearly over. The pages of my calendar exist only to be perpetually in need of updating, it seems, and it feels like the first truly hot day of June was something like last week.

This may not surprise you, dear reader, but I was not the best student. I’m a chronic procrastinator, and was almost always just smart enough to skate by in class, hand-waving away studying sessions to a tomorrow that never really arrived (never smart enough, it should absolutely be noted, to actually study). I became intimately familiar with winging things, or coming into exams underprepared and hoping for the best. Typically, I had retained enough information from things I had read or heard that I was in good shape, but there were times that I had to depend on the curve, which is never the best feeling.

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