Silly Summer
The season of intense competition to show how happy you are.
Summer has arrived with temperatures forecast to reach a hundred degrees in the next few days. I dislike summer and spring intensely. There is no subtlety in the glaring light and way too much activity as miserable people strive to become happy during a summer vacation. Nature works overtime to make the best of the conditions, with birds raiding each other's nests to kill the young so that their fledglings might thrive. The total absence of rain for a few months leaves plants wilting and dying, apart from the hardy few who have made it through many such summers.
People become silly, working harder than usual to persuade the rest of the world that they are happy. Facebook and Instagram photos abound with smiling faces and a drink lifted to express how full of cheer they are. Of course, nothing has changed. The couples that hate each other still hate each other, and those that are okay are still okay. It becomes a matter of life and death to ensure that your holiday snaps are greater in number, show more deliriously happy friends and family, more drinking, more restaurants, more shots of people fooling around in the pool; more of everything to piss off the people and family you dislike. You are, after all, displaying your excellent survival fitness, and you want it to be more impressive than that of the people you want to pain with your Facebook and Instagram photos.
The days are way too long in summer, encouraging the easily influenced to drink all day or lie in the sun all day, either way ending up in A&E with alcohol poisoning or severe sunburn. Others go through a daily routine that goes something like this: have breakfast, go to the beach or join the tour you booked, late afternoon leave the beach or return from your tour, get a shower, get spruced up with cheap perfume and aftershave, go out for an inexpensive meal, and get drunk at the same time. Spend the rest of the night throwing up.
I want the cool, moderate days of autumn and winter when the creatures of summer hide away because conditions are not favorable for Facebook photos. Until autumn arrives, I hide away in my office, apart from a brief early morning walk before the summer zombies start to appear. Thank God for air conditioning.
I enjoyed your comments. Being in touch with one’s inner world seems to be an attribute that is key to independent mindedness and not doing as others do. Party or no party, it doesn’t matter. People are a pain. Observing people can be fascinating, boring, surprising, predictable, educational, or a waste of time.
Martin, do you observe your own cynicism and how it may perpetuate a low grade feeling of guilt or disdain or are you just role playing to shake others certainty of how things should be?
Answer or no answer,,,,
Thank you for your work.