Cities Beneath the Neon Dome: Reflections of the Dog Days of Summer
Ever feel like you’re looping at the same part of a song—and no one else seems to notice but you? The Dog Days of Summer have been here in full force, and this heatwave isn’t just about the sun.
In this entry I reflect on a painting I recently finished, the ancient wisdom behind the Dog Star Sirius, and how our ancestors left messages in stone… while we scroll through handheld black mirrors. Let’s talk about the dome, the storm, and the strange stillness we’re all standing in.
The Neon Divide — acrylic and oil on 12×24 canvas
Storytellers, oversharers, ramblers—we’ve always found ways to leave a trace. It’s what humans do. We scribble, sculpt, blog, post, whisper to the void. We smear paint across canvas or cave walls with the same desperate message:
We Were Here.
This month, I finished a painting I started last year. It felt like a visual echo of the world right now: a city split in storm and stillness, glowing windows, while some are no longer lit— a single silhouette of a person standing between buildings—the last light illuminating the figure…
An ominous magenta sphere, is it for shelter or entrapment? It looms over the city, watching like a second moon—or a forgotten god. And I couldn’t stop thinking about how much it resembled the mood in the air: suspended, thick, electric, a little off.. Like the sky itself is holding its breath from the heat.
And no, I’m not just talking about the heat that turns your car into an air fryer.
I’m talking about that other heat—the kind that creeps into the soul, the skin, the air between thoughts.
The kind of heat that makes time stretch like taffy and urges everything—even you—to slow down, retreat, and unravel at the seams.
Even the animals know to rest during this season, and just like the dead of winter, this too is a time to withdraw indoors.
“Another secret of the universe: Sometimes pain was like a storm that came out of nowhere. The clearest summer could end in a downpour. Could end in lightning and thunder.”
Dog Days of Summer, occurring between July 3rd and August 11th, the term typically refers to the oppressively humid and blisteringly hot time of the year, which corresponds to the rising of Sirius, the Dog Star—that is, the period of time in which the star rises at the same time as the sun.
The star's Greek name, "kyon seirios," literally means glowing or burning, and it was also believed to be the cause of midsummer's sweltering heat and droughts.
This time of year is characterized by general lethargy, listlessness and idleness due to the heat.. To the Ancient Greeks and Romans it meant plague, madness, and fever. Yet, to the Ancient Egyptians they saw the rising of Sirius—to them called Sopdet—as a crucial sign.
Because it coincided with the annual flooding of the Nile River, a vital event for their whole society. The heliacal rising of Sirius signaled the start of their new year and the arrival of the life-giving floodwaters.
I wonder what they’d all think of us now?
They didn’t have air-conditioning. They didn’t have TikTok or podcasts or back-to-back Amazon deliveries.
And yet they listened more than we do.
They noticed everything.
They noticed the cycles.
The repeats.
The looped songs and cracked skies.
They paid attention to the broken record of the cosmos.
These days, I feel like one of those haunted old record players—the kind that turns on by itself and loops at your favorite part of the song.
Except it’s not comforting anymore.
It’s disorienting.
And with the unrelenting heat… comes mirages.
Things aren’t always as they appear to be—not in the summer haze, and certainly not in the story we tell ourselves. The ancient Greeks saw the rise of Sirius as a sign of fever and war. The Romans thought it stirred madness and aggression.
Meanwhile, the Egyptians saw it as sacred, a signal of the Nile’s life-giving floodwaters—renewal, abundance, life reborn.
Who was right?
Maybe all of them.
Maybe none.
"Sometimes the truth is both—and neither—all at once.
Like a heat shimmer on pavement, it’s real… until you get close.”
In my painting, a lone figure stands between this uncertainty.
To one side: the blank silhouettes of a modern city, some windows still glowing with the last light of day, hanging on in defiance.
To the other: a great crimson dome, with its own shroud of swirling mystery.
Lightning crawls across the sky, threatening—but also promising. Because storms, as terrifying as they are, also carry rain.
Relief. Clarity. Breathable air.
They wash away the static.
They crack open the atmosphere.
They reset the rhythm.
And yet…
Most days, the signs are quieter.
“There is peace even in the storm.”
The gentle tapping at the windows of our subconscious—easy to dismiss. Just the wind, we say. Nothing more, a fluke.
Not now. We’re too busy, too plugged in, too consumed by the immeasurable weight of it all.
“No distractions today,” we mumble. “Very busy…”
Until the tapping stops.
But the quiet doesn’t last, no. Before long, it starts again—but now from somewhere deeper.
A low murmur in the drainpipes of your gut.
A thrum in your ribcage.
An ache in your jaw.
You toss your hands up in theatrical exasperation, muttering to the ceiling like some ancient oracle trapped in the modern day burnout:
“This is exactly why I can never get anything done!”
And that’s just it.
That’s the loop.
Birth, burnout, collapse, climate flare-ups, more subscriptions, more fast food spirituality, more noise dressed as meaning, shorter attention spans, less reading comprehension skills.
Whole civilizations could rise and fall in the time we spend avoiding ourselves.
And still—the gentle tapping comes. Each time from somewhere new. And still, we ignore it. There is a storm on the edge of the city. One of change. Of possibility. Of the push so many of us have quietly begged for.
But we’ve built this dome.
And whether it's here to protect us or contain us… that part's still up for debate.
Maybe it’s both.
However we may look at it, the fact of the matter is this: we are standing in the middle of many things at once—a heatwave and a mirage, a dome and a doorway, a storm and a spark.
Like the lone figure in my painting, we are all simply trying to find a direction, the light, some kind of purpose, or our footing—between collapse and clarity, between the safety of the known and the strange beauty of the unknown.
That tapping you hear—subtle, inconvenient and repetitive at times—isn’t a distraction. It could be your intuition, your higher self, God, an ancestor, or the Universe itself, asking for your attention.
Not to break everything apart, but to remind you there’s something beyond the noise, beyond the heatwaves and mirages, beyond our current circumstances.
Sometimes the storm brings destruction, but sometimes, it just brings rain. And rain, in the right season, is a miracle.
The Dog Days aren’t here to drain you, well, not entirely. They’re here to slow you down enough to listen, to focus your energy and attention on what truly matters to you.
Remember this:
You are not the machine.
You are the whisperer, the carver, the painter, the sky-watcher.
And maybe all you need to say this season is what our ancestors said:
We were here and we lived our truths.
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