This I Wrote in Summer

Usually at this time, midnight, I'm dreading the fact that I have to be up for another 9 hours, baking cookies, scones, muffins and croissants for a wealthy audience at Rosemont, who would just as soon toss their egg cartons in their blue expensive City of Portland trash bags than return them to the chicken farmer, let alone turn them into yellow-painted caterpillars with googly eyeballs. Actually, they probably would make an effort to at least return the cartons to the store, one at a time, in their great big air conditioned cars which eat babies and small animals for fuel, so that they may feel good about conserving the environment. But stop that sk, stop with the generalizations. I've been having a real problem with them lately, having emotions that feel like things and experiences and interpreting them as stereotypical truths, which is not a fruitful use of my time. They are not necessarily mean and terrible lumpings together, but rushed conclusions nonetheless, and I have to slap my wrists and bite my tongue sometimes for forming opinions based on impressions. According to the number of Polish joke books out there, this is a natural part of being a human, right? Everybody does it. But I've never known it to factor into my own life so much, and now I'm stuck here, scorning folks who live in Maine but "aren't real Mainers" and can't possibly understand, and recognizing differences between northern climate folks and southern climate folks, and feeling like an all around cruel human being. Generaliztions, categorizations, labels and boxes are all very conducive to some variety of conversation, sure, but in trying to imagine a discussion without generalizations, I am left with a great new appreciation for my mother, who asks me what's new and talks about the past two days and what's fresh in the garden. I think right now the snap peas and strawberries are prime, and the tomatoes are just beginning to blush.