July Prompts for Keeping Your Cool

When I was a kid in Texas there was a snow cone stand near the local pool, set up in a converted single-wide parked in front of a T-shirt store. Outside, it would be hot as hell, but when you ordered your snow cone you’d get hit with a frigid blast of A/C when the employee slid open a little glass window to take your order. I loved that they always had what seemed like a hundred flavors, in a color palette ranging from artificial to radioactive.

One time when I was about 13, an older high school girl was ahead of me in line. I was in my Speedo one-piece and jelly sandals, she had Judy Funnie energy and double pierced ears, and the teen working the window was flirting with her. He gave her a snow cone for free, in a flavor inexplicably named “Dragon’s Blood.” When it was my turn, I naturally pivoted: one Dragon’s Blood, please. As advertised, it was the color of a lab sample drawn from a vein. I never ordered it again; I’ll always be more of an Orange Dreamsicle girl.

Cool works in mysterious ways. Getting close to it, especially when you're young, has the power to make you question everything. It's a specific contagion, infectious but not transmissible. I mostly associate that yearning with being a teenager, though a pang can still catch me off guard now, this sense that someone else is carrying the keys to some mysterious something. The object is rarely the point: if I think hard about it, I don't think we're actually chasing the same things, even when we're reaching for the exact same object.

This month's list lingers in that word: coolness. It means two different things depending on what's actually burning. Sometimes the reach is literal - it’s water, shade, air conditioning. Sometimes it’s got nothing to do with temperature. Below, prompts for refreshment as a route back to yourself, to pair with the dog days ahead.

1. ANCIENT SNOW CONES

Around 400 BC, Persians built massive domed ice houses (called yakhchāls) to keep mountain snow frozen through the summer. One use of these XXL freezers was to make what was essentially the original snow cone: ice, honey, rosewater, saffron, and fruit. It was also consumed for the herbs’ medicinal properties; a little sweet treat, doctor’s orders!

What’s the ice-cold refreshment that cures all your ails, the thing you’d build an underground palace for?

Examples: A perfectly swirled soft serve cone dunked in rainbow sprinkles. A crisp Diet Dr. Pepper on crushed ice after swimming in the ocean. A couple ice cubes in your Sancerre. A frozen Snickers bar that hurts your teeth and gives you a brain freeze.

2. PROOF OF LIFE

What's your specific trick for feeling like yourself again? Your exact formula for clicking back into consciousness when you've gone flat, checked out, and/or forgotten what you actually like? Examples: putting on perfume at home, just for yourself. Going to therapy. Reading a specific paragraph in a book you love. Letting your freak flag fly. Going to look at a very old building.

3. COOL JAZZ

Lester Young played tenor sax in the Count Basie Orchestra in the 1930s. In a moment when most players favored heavier, aggressive sounds, he intentionally played unhurried, mellow, almost behind the beat. He was also the first person on record to use the expression “I’m cool” as a state of mind; I’m keeping it together. “Cool jazz,” the genre named after his style and popularized by Miles Davis, actually came a decade later.

What did you do before it was cool?

4. “I DON’T DIG BEING DUG”

Later in life, Lester Young started slipping out of the jazz club near his hotel the moment fans recognized him. Asked why, he said it best himself: he didn’t like being watched while he was watching.

What do you only fully enjoy when no one knows you’re enjoying it?

5. REFRESHING CRINGE