Your Mom’s Potato Salad: Five Awful Things I Miss Most About a Normal Early Summer

Unless you’re a huge fan of back sweat, sticking to things, and mayonnaise in the sun, early June can be a hot compounding mess of life’s irritations. By early June, the gradually warming pleasant days of Spring have given way to those hot and humid days where you can feel your life being baked out of you by the sun’s rays. Early June usually means summer and all the things that come with it; beach traffic, ballgames, barbecues, and things that don’t begin with b. But not this year, this year we come into early June still mostly locked down, bored, isolated and looking like an unwashed caveman. It left me hankering for even the annoying things about summer.

Five Awful Things I Miss Most About a Normal Early Summer

Whatever You Brought to the Barbecue

I’m not sure why, but no one in your family knows how to prepare things just right. Every summer barbecue you bring weird facsimiles of dishes we all know and love, but you make them all wrong. The bizarre decisions that render the dish inedible are almost inexplicable.

It’s always the sides and desserts too, we’ve got meat plus fire down pretty well as a species, but somehow we still struggle with not adding craisins to potato salad. Cream cheese doesn’t belong in Jello. Cottage and Blue cheese are not interchangeable.

It also doesn’t help that we’ve collectively decided that the best place to leave these concoctions of mayo and the screams of the innocent is in the sun, where the mayo can get to that just perfect stage of curdling, right before it turns to poison, but after it’s passed through the Big Mac secret sauce phase. There are seriously Reddit threads dedicated to whether potato salad is meant to be served warm or cold.

SNL nailed the potato salad issue during a “Black Jeopardy” sketch. Take it, T’Challa…

“Let’s go to ‘White People’ for 400.”#BlackJeopardy #SNL @chadwickboseman pic.twitter.com/rkMmTOVShH

— Saturday Night Live – SNL (@nbcsnl) April 8, 2018

Warm Zima or Whatever Else is Last in the Cooler

We’ve all got that one friend who buys the worst cheapest beer possible, drops it in the community cooler, and grabs one of your pricey IPAs. Crafty of them, but that can’t last all night, at some point the good stuff runs out and you just have to bite the bullet and dive in. You plunge your hand into the still ice-cold water, fish around and pull out the nastiness. Your entire arm is now frozen up to the shoulder, ready to be smashed to smithereens like that guy in Timecop, but the goddamn beer is somehow warmer than the potato salad.

The Sweaty Smelly Sardine Can Elevators at Yankee Stadium

I wonder what this is going to look like when we’re all the way back. If you’ve never been, Yankee Stadium has a bank of fairly fast moving elevators in addition to ramps, that access the upper decks. On the way out of the Stadium during the summer these become a human Petri dish, as 47 people pack into an elevator designed for 20. Everyone is sweaty, half of them are drunk, most of them are obnoxious and pushy, and I miss every single one. There’s just something, win or lose, when you’re packed so close that you can taste the sweat evaporating off your fellow fans, that’s community.

With the possible exception of the man who sits behind me who is so large and overflowing the seat space that I wear his knees as earmuffs most of the game.

Related

• Minneapolis Dude Missed The Gym So Much That He Hopped On A Planet Fitness Elliptical During Their Looting
• Next Stop WWE For UFC’s Cormier & McGregor?
• Want Quads Like Saquon Barkley? All It Takes Is 585 Pound Squats (And Probably Many Other Things You’d Die Doing)

Shoes Sticking to the Floor at the Movies

Man, I miss going to the movies. Sitting there in the dark mashing fistfuls of popcorn into my face as giant robots or aliens or super-powered Israeli supermodels save the world again and again. Nothing beats a good movie to escape a hot summer day. Of course, sometimes it’s hard to escape the movies when they end. And I don’t just mean because of those baiting Marvel post-credits scenes. Basically every movie theater going has an army of tiny gremlins who super-glue your feet to the theater floor during the course of the movie. That or they just don’t clean and it’s sticky spilled soda… but that couldn’t be the case, right?

At some point we’re going to get a deluge of delayed flicks while Hollywood catches up to the gap created by global lock-downs. All of our favorite franchises have been delayed. New installments of the post-Endgame Marvel Universe, the latest DC films, a new James Bond movie and many others were delayed until at least this fall. The first major return to the theater should be Christopher Nolan’s Tenet, which the director is still pushing hard for a theatrical release in early July. The other major film so far holding fast to their original release date is, delightfully, Bill and Ted Face the Music, the long awaited final chapter in the epic saga of William S. Preston and Ted Theodore Logan and their adventures through time. Two aging burnouts messing with the spacetime continuum in their phone booth time machine would both explain a lot about 2020 and still only be like the sixth strangest story on our list.

Apparently we’re also going to get Michael Bay’s take on the pandemic, how Bay plans to make a gigantic explosion from a microscopic virus is anyone’s guess, but if there’s one person who can pull it off he’s our guy. As long as he doesn’t give it testicles this time.

Summer Traffic

Living in a state known for its beaches is great. Dealing with the fallout of the millions of people coming to and through your state every weekend and all summer long is a different story. In Jersey it’s so bad there’s even a term for it. Every weekend an endless stream of “Bennys” clogs the Garden State Parkway, heading to the beach from Bayonne, Elizabeth, Newark, and New York City (B-E-N-N-y for the less acronym-inclined). An alternate theory on that name is that the term came from “Benefits” as in job perks that people would get allowing them to vacation, but I never heard that one growing up and I reject it on principle.

Regardless of which beach state you live in, you know how annoying it can be to want to get to literally anywhere else, and have to deal with baking in the sun in beach traffic for an extra two hours. What it is about summer traffic that makes the sun twice as hot and the air conditioning half as effective is for a better scientist than me to explain, but we all know you do not touch the metal part of the seat-belt buckle between Memorial Day and Labor Day.

Just don’t pull one of these…

Check us out on TWITTER, where we talk sports, share articles, and have lots of giveaways!