A famous poet once said that April was the cruelest month.  I’ve got the internet so it would be easy enough for me to log onto the virtual equivalent of ‘Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations’, find out, and appear better read than I am, and more importantly, better read than you are.. Easier still, I could reach the five feet or so to my bookcase, take down my actual Bartlett’s and look it up, except that’s not a book I own and most of my reading material is kept under my mattress or in the bathroom.  Alright, fine, it was T.S. Elliot, ‘The Wasteland’, Part 1 - Burial of the Dead.  And yes, I had to look it up, for which I was rewarded by finding a link to audio of the poet himself reading the work, a reminder that author’s shouldn’t always record their own stuff
and that it’s hard to look busy at work with a poncey, dead, English poet moaning out your Macintosh.  I knew who’s quote it was back in highschool.  Of course I also knew a foreign language which may have been French, who Arch Duke Ferdinand was, what being ‘offsides’ in soccer constitutes and a whole other pile of stuff that’s now so gone a trained hypnotherapist couldn’t find it even after clearing out repressed memories of Alien Abduction, Ritual Abuse and that time I went on the Richard Bey show.  Kids today have it easy.  You don’t have to remember your own name while you’re writing a term paper, much less who ate what at the Diet of Worms.  The Internet does it all for you.  Back in highschool the only computer I had access to spat punched paper tape out it’s side, making interactive pornography almost more work than it was worth.

So what was I talking about?  Anybody?

I’m from New England and it’s hard to say if April is the Cruelest Month or not.  January is pretty much of a Bastard too and February enjoys placing your nuts in a vise, metaphorically speaking.  March, which is often said to come in like a Lion, tends, in my neck of the woods, to go out like a different, Larger Lion that is soaking wet, rabid, hypoglycemic and vengeful.  For sheer cruelty though, I suppose April is still the go-to month.

April in New England is beautiful spring weather that lasts just long enough for your family and a picnic lunch to go exactly as many miles on a nature walk as it takes to ensure that when things turn ugly you can’t get back to the car before totally dieing of hypothermia and your kids ending up like those slides they show in Health Ed on the dangers of frostbite.

April in New England is the Crocus, peeking up through the dirt and looking all fragile and sweet when in reality natural selection has designed it to survive seventeen straight days of something resembling a 7-11 Slushy falling on it.  It’s amazing those little liars don’t squirt you in the eye when you lean down to look at them.  With Acid.  Hot Acid that blinds and disfigures you.

April in New England is like that popular girl you knew in junior high who you thought smiled at you in Social Studies, but when you went over to her table at lunch and said ‘hi’ she tripped you, grabbed your throat and beat your head up and down on the cold cement floor of the cafeteria until being called ‘coma victim’ was just your friend’s way of trying to be nice.  And then she makes you shovel four feet of ice off the plow line and gives you the flu.

And while I’m not sure, I’d guess April was the month that Andrew Lloyd Webber crawled out of his burrow long enough to perform acts of necrophyllic obscenity upon one of Elliot’s distinctly lesser works resulting in the unnatural conception of ‘Cats’.

The only good thing about April in New England is the distinct possibility that it could be followed by May.  Don’t get your hopes up, though.  That only about happens once every decade.  Mostly we like to go right from April into an early July so revoltingly hot and humid it’s
like being hugged by your morbidly obese Aunt Irene from about 4:00 AM to 3:45 AM the next day.  And she wearing that polyester sundress?  You know.  The one that fits... just... wrong.  And she brought a bag of mosquitoes with her, one of which has been genetically engineered to hover next to your ear until when you sleep finally arrives you have nightmares about being brainwashed into a cult by Stevie Nicks.

Okay, so maybe April isn’t the cruelest month.  Now that I think on it, July is pretty damn Cruel as well.  Also, December and June don’t exactly live up to their hype.  But I suppose if the poem had started “You know, the only tolerable months is September” I’m not sure it would have ended up in Bartlett’s to begin with.

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