• by Jack Feuer , September 5, 2007

Midnight and muggy in Hollywood. My media agency friend stalks into the SkyBar and heads for our couch behind the giant potted plant, sidestepping hip-hoppers with gold-plated teeth, dark-haired girls in short shorts nattering away in Farsi, and a matching set of blondes sipping Cosmos by the pool, surrounded by young men with glittering eyes.

She is a good girl from the Bronx and hates this hotel. She is convinced her room is a bacterial death trap. She is aghast when she discovers an "intimacy kit" in her minibar consisting of condoms, jelly and other helpful objects.

M friend's discomfort perfectly distills the nasty new essence of American summers, the last edition of which mercifully came to an end last weekend. I understood her pain because I share it -- discomfort and disgust is pretty much the default position for all of us in the summer.

The new marketing world takes a vacation in the heat, when our consumer behavior massifies. In warm-weather months, we find ourselves once again mashed together in the marketplace, young with old, conservative with liberal, Bronx with Sunset Boulevard.

In the summer, we are forced into cultural intimacy, which, like humidity, is icky.

The media that so soothingly separate us during the rest of the year are weak or dormant in the dog days. TV is reduced to meaningless midseason baseball, failed broadcast pilots and cable dramas hailed as breakthrough because every now and then someone says "bullshit." We can't lose ourselves in television. Even the Internet seems slower in the summer, less interesting, more communal. We can't get away there, either. And that totally sucks.

Look, I'm a modern consumer. I don't want to be touched or talked to or contacted in any way unless I ask for it, and even then, only for very brief periods. I don't want to share my media. I mean, what good is an empowering, user-enabled, fragmented, digital universe if you can't hide in it?

But I have no choice in the summer. I have to spend time with the kid. Visit with relatives. Watch what they watch. Converse together. Shop together. Talk together. Sweet Mother of God, I have to talk to them.

Ah, but now, mercifully, Labor Day is over, and football is back. Which means I can turn on the tube on Friday night, watch games nonstop until Sunday night, and not talk to anybody. People are back on the job, where interactions are limited and formal and temporary. I have my media back, and you have yours. We don't need to share anymore. At least until Memorial Day. And you can have the intimacy kit we liberated from the hotel. I don't need it. Now that summer is over, the only person I want to be intimate with is myself.