Where can I find some Black-Hole-B-Gone?

Here we are a few days from the dreaded arrival of August and what do I have to show for it? New artificial lenses in both eyes, new paint on a bunch of walls, nice memories from Dad's memorial service, but the rest of the summer feels like a big black hole--not just empty but an insatiable force sucking my entire universe toward oblivion.

People keep asking how my second cataract surgery went and I tell them fine, it went fine, I feel fine. The surgery itself went even more smoothly than the first one, and this time I'll know better than to take a long sunny road trip ten days after eye surgery. They even told me not to mow the lawn lest foreign matter gets thrown toward my eyes, and I'm more than happy to oblige. No troubles. All good.

But the truth is that I feel reamed out. Maybe this is cumulative effect of this whole long complicated summer piling up on me, but truly I want to pull the covers over my head and block out the world for the foreseeable future. Here's how bad it is: my home internet has been on the blink all week and I didn't even want to drive to town to find a working connection. 

And yet here I sit in my office trying to weed through the messages that have been piling up in my inbox: Gordian knots requiring swift Faculty Council action, problems with a nonresponsive contributor to the volume I'm editing, problems with paperwork for Dad's estate--and you don't know how complicated these things can get unless you've tried to track down a notary recently. This place used to be crawling with notaries but someone came along with some Notary-B-Gone and wiped 'em out.

For an academic, summer should be a time of research and writing and calm consideration of future classes, but that's not how this summer has worked for me. August marks the end of scholarly productivity and the beginning of the scramble to prep fall classes, so whatever scholarship I could have tackled this summer simply didn't happen, and now it won't. I end the summer with nicely painted walls and a thicker bank statement and new lenses in my eyeballs, but everything else has fallen into that hungry black hole. I'd like to put it all behind me and start fresh, but the minute I turn my back, it'll come creeping up behind me, ready to start chomping up my fall.