Summer is a Diseased Affliction On Us All
Summer is upon us and we are poorer for it. Our world shifts to a different purview during these months, one of communal indecency and alienation. Exhibitionism runs rampant. Breasts and ridged biceps are being taken out of storage and placed in their estival display cases. In these months, we walk the streets for no reason at all. Summer is the great nomadic season, that time when our instincts become divorced from pursuit of our basic needs, and towards the upper tiers of Maslow’s great pyramid. I am talking of course about that scourge to our world, fun.
I am against fun in all its forms. Walking about the neighbourhood, among callous students who don’t know any better, I am immersed in the pungent stench of amusement, of levity and leisure. These “fun-lovers”, they cavort and shuffle, and look at things, and admire their reflections in storefront windows from the brilliant sun. Smile flash against smiles, a carnival of glazed grins. In the street atmosphere on a hot day, joy pervades and pollutes with its stridency, its everythingness. It is shrill in my ear. The sandal types sit on cedar patios and drink into a blind rage, watching me walking past.
A car horn shrieks at a passing girl, the driver a coarsely shaven twit showing his whimsy, the slatternly girl’s eyes glancing back over her shoulder through faint-tint sunglasses, a glance of acknowledgement and of dismissal. Between them a synergy of playfulness that, while amounting to nothing in physical terms, benefits and invigorates both. His car blares the latest Swiss beats. Her gait is a comely strut, meant to solicit pheromones. His apartment, a catacomb of chemical additives and product placement, is where he hopes they both end up through this meaningless transaction. She, meanwhile, is off to get her nails painted and hair done, to mask and deny her human features, her flaws, and her own mortality. She is the walking undead, and he is a jabbering, musky ape, and they are meant for each other.
This is summertime.
And old people laughing at the bus stop, under the shadow of the roofed shelter. Who can laugh when they’re so unfeignedly old? Teeth barely hanging on amidst the gales, and diapers in need of voiding, probably. Their feet itch and so do mine, I tell you what.
Fun is to be avoided this summer! The pursuit of fun is a rotten disease of youth. To live like a clam does, in a hard shell at the bottom of the river, closed to all contact with its surroundings, is the life of virtue. The clam lives in algae and stink and thinks nothing of it. A happy clam does not fear the sun, or even face it, except in the shimmer of the light breaking the water’s surface at certain hours of the day. Clams do not go to the beach except by accident. Exchanging the off-white walls of my apartment for the inner membrane of the clamshell, amity and oneness can be cultivated alongside contempt. Just hire a courier to deliver me vegetables and booze at scheduled intervals—my algae—keep your coconut-scented SPF lotions, and let me alone.
Had a little talk with Jesus just now. Tells me that fun only makes sense if you’re pulling a return. According to J.C. fun is calculated using formulae conceived with the profit motive in mind, and expressed as a function of net gain over a period of time. Say, what are you on about, Jesus? Fun is not a commodity to be traded. Fun is a prison, the whiling of one’s time in Western bounty, the hum and click of our urban leviathan, in the pursuit of waves of elevated body chemistry. To consciously seek fun is to inhabit a sagging husk of an existence, propped up by a chain of diversions, each diversion ending right as the next is set to begin. Finding meaning in the fun-seeker’s life is like swinging back and forth on the monkey bars and ending up in Lotusland. Pure illusion.
This city, Montreal, great writhing nexus of fun. I am at the sphygmic center of this hive of hedonism and moral ruin. I will bunker in my apartment and try to withstand the spill of sangria and the ensuing crash of a hangover, the slouching, the purchasing of low-cut shoes and golf shirts, long grazes in the park, the slinging of feet across a St. Sulpice chair, and the meeting of other human beings. My fortifications will be sparse—a curtain, a steely militaristic gaze through binoculars, a back alley for quick escapes. I will check for fun at the door, including in your bags. Penalties will be created and enforced. Fun shall find no sanctuary here.
Close the door and kick my clamshell a little further downstream, won’t you? Down with fun! Here’s to the summer of solitude!
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(5 comments)
Summer! Spandex weather! Time to show-off your body!!!
Last night, I walked a few kilometers in a city park without my pants, with my dick flopping about in the wind!
Such a gooood feeeling!!!
Tissdale’s moot distaste for the heathenous call of the wild is but the true reflection of the lost puppy finding his way through the woods.
You are the lost puppy and I’m Forest Hermit, Want Some Wood?
shit! meant to go to that maisonneuve thing. crap. was it fun? all those cute lit chicks cure you of your summer misanthropy??
It was decent. They had arty videos that involved peeing and licking people’s eyeballs, a naked couple sittng in a pile of fruit, and expensive drinks. The cute lit chicks were somewhat sparse, I’m afraid. It was a decidedly alpha-hipster crowd. I did see a coked-out chick do a faceplant onto a monitor while the band was playing, which made it all worthwhile.
i’ve always said if your party doesn’t have a coked-out chick doing a faceplant into a monitor, you’re insulting your guests.