It is a bright and sunny day here in The Plains, Virginia, and that is a pleasant thing. The forests shine gracefully with a vivacious glow, and flora and fauna of all kinds teem with life in search of some rays to photosynthesise and revitalise with Vitamin D. Indeed, just this morning I found a small spider bumbling right behind my head as I lay in bed, probably in search of a few droplets of some sweet young blood with which the bastard might use to live yet another day after the last, surviving week after week until it finally conserves enough energy to replace itself with a host of hatchlings that will inject me with a terrible poison and lift my body away to a long-forgotten lair to be digested. After all, that is the goal: to replace one’s self; to perfect the code. My father before me knew this, and so too did his father, so I’ll be damned if I allow an inferior arachnid like this one to interrupt that process... Yes, that would be completely unacceptable, and quite frankly an embarrassing way to go out...
I spent no time imagining the obituary, though, and instead reached onto my bedside table for a book, and selected with some brief consideration Sun Tzu’s The Art of War-- it was only proper to use a good militant book as a means to this particular end, and the spider seemed to understand this, because he made no effort to stand honorably in the face of intense goring. Oh well, I thought. No use killing a defenceless foe. I used the book to shove him against the wall, and carefully swept him aside to fall between the table and my bed such that he might scurry off and go enjoy the lovely afternoon like I knew I was about to.
Of course, when I looked down, the eight-legged ninja was sitting motionless on the ground. Had Sun Tzu taught me nothing? I had ignored his teachings, pressed a desperate foe too hard, and now it seemed as though I had to reap the horrible moral consequences of my actions leading to the death of this surrendering creature. But why sweat it? There’s a timeless Southern maxim along the lines of “It’s not the heat that gets you, it’s the humidity”, and if this small beast thought that he could interrupt the R&R of a Good Ol’ Boy like myself, he had another goddamn thing coming, I’ll tell you what... In this moment, on this fine day, I’m reminded of the song Lake Time by the Oklahoma City band Chat Pile:
Well, it’s time at last to go to Heaven on Earth,
Any Okie knows, well, they’ve known it since birth!
Coleman full of Busch, pontoon full of friends,
Rodan in the sky, hope the fun never ends!
Pissin’ me off sure would be a crime...
Kiss my ass, I’m livin’ on lake time!
The heat and the humidity are both key elements of a bright and sunny day like this. Virginia summers are infamously long and humid, and in their heat the air takes on this sickly quality of sapping all energy around it, nearly drowning you in moisture and turning every body of water in the Commonwealth into a Forward Operating Swamp; a new oppressive front in the Great Pest War authorised by General Aphid and Colonel Mosquito, who I believe may in fact be the first Mexican-American in the armed forces to resort outright to sucking the blood of his own countrymen. The physiological sap on your basic bodily functions gets so bad around July that the average Virginian starts to act like they’re actively succumbing to rabies, compulsively stripping and running in sheer terror at the sight of still water. That doesn’t apply to Appalachian mutants and pure-bred Southerners free from a drop of Carpetbagger blood (they’ve checked), of course: something about their genetic makeup renders them immune to this scalding state of affairs. Grandmas with flabby arms and curly bob haircuts will sit on rocking chairs along the back roads with a plastic jug of lemon sweet tea and a shotgun in their lap, commenting about the ‘nice breeze’ while I curse John Smith for ever thinking Jamestown would be a good idea. A dry heat would almost be preferred.
Today is the start of the so-called meteorological summer, a titbit of information I only discovered after a cursory web search for “beginning of summer”, and that is a terrible thing. I never could make sense of technical dates like those ones-- something about them always seemed arbitrary and arcane. My own metric has always been that the Summer begins when the Spring has failed to keep the tide of heat at by for more than a week; the Spring of course begins when the ground-hog sees fit to inform us. Who are these nameless and faceless scientists, sitting in their ivory tower, thinking they can control the weather and tell us lowly commoners where and when Summer begins? Why must everything be so clear-cut and presentable for children and trivia freaks to memorise in science classes? That German/continental notion of compulsive categorisation never rubbed off on an American like me, and that’s good, because there’s something dark and nefarious about its implications. Hell, it isn’t even enough to them to be simply “German”-- there are North Germans, South Germans, East Germans, West Germans, Volga Germans, Bavarians, Austrians, Swiss, Liechtensteiners... all needless categories to describe the same people with the same language, same customs, and the same self-righteousness, supposedly backed up by ‘rationality’. Hell, it got so bad that after the war that we Americans were forced to come in and help define the word “German” for them so they’d stop conquering their neighbours. It was extensive categorisation that allowed Hitler and his Nazis to assert their fascist race laws on Europe, and that same extensive categorisation continues to dominate the mindset of many people to this day. “Well, I’m two fifths German, a quarter Scottish, another fifth Irish, and, oh, maybe a few sixteenths Native American…”-- these are the words of someone (maybe a small business owner) who has a fascism ingrained in their most basic patterns of thinking; they are the most irrational of all, and I will have no part in that, even if it means resenting anyone who only starts telling me to “enjoy my summer” after the 1st of June. And enjoy my summer I shall: in a few weeks time I’ll be back in Finland.
It was the Germans who influenced the Finns during their formative years, and some of this categorization seems to have rubbed on off them. Many prominent Finnish politicians are raving lunatics who stand on pulpits and shout about the apparently crucial differences between the thoughtful and well-adjusted True Finns and, well, other people.
Some time ago in the early 90s my father went with a friend of his to Helsinki. It was an era of overpowering change and uncertainty about the future: no more Soviet Union to keep us from giving anything but our *all*. We Americans ran the world now, but what were we going to do with it? How would we prove that we were the best World Police? What new Art Knowledge and Culture would spring up under this new Pax Americana? Cell phones were the new big thing, and the Finns seemed to have them figured out. It was perfect: Free Enterprise. The American Dream spontaneously revived and restored, good as new… Going straight to Nokia and finding out just what the hell it is that makes them so damn good at Cell Phones; it was the K-hole dream of a coked-out venture capitalist. EuroGonzo at the twilight of cyberspace: do it now. The world was on Lake Time now, and the heat was on to keep it going as long as possible. There didn’t even need to be a reason.
The first thing you must do as soon as you arrive in Finland is go to a bar. My father understood this maxim, and so mere hours after landing he and his friend, a director who only a few years later would go on to direct what is considered to be one of the worst films of all time, arrived at a local pub called Bar Colorado in search of Knowledge, Wisdom, and Truth.
The scene was packed. Waitresses scrambled to deliver drinks to tables across the room, and big hulking hockey players occupied the back, coming in and out of exclusive party rooms with icy champagne buckets where they presumably held wild orgies and made out with foreign women; if you spent enough time looking, you probably could have found someone famous. At the front of the bar stood alongside deft bartenders beneath a huge cow skull was the owner, a man named Mato, or, in English, The Worm. It was a madhouse, and the air was so thick you probably could have drowned in it. My dad’s friend, the director, evidently could not properly explain himself in these conditions and immediately got the Fear. “Hang on, I need to make a call”, he said. “I’ll be back.”
He pulled out his flip phone, but before he could even make the call, it disappeared. Mato had snatched it out of his hand, produced a hammer from behind the bar, and grabbed one long nail from a massive bucket held by an apparently very strong waitress. With one slam, the phone screen shattered and joined several other American phones nailed into a cork board on the wall. Business immediately returned to usual. “That’s what I think of your stinking American cell phone!” (or something of equal thought and consequence), roared Mato. “Now, get the fuck out of here…”
Steam was practically pouring out of the director’s ears. He was furious; his face was crimson red like the victim of some pathological disease from a turn-of-the-century gothic tale. My dad took him to the side and consoled him, pledging to get back at these assholes for what they did to the American telecommunications industry… By then, the Worm had inched his way to a backroom to handle some behind-the-scenes business, and so my father waltzed up to one of the waitresses: “Hey, yeah… Mato, uh, needs the bucket. Oh yeah, the hammer too. Someone brought in another American cell phone. Needs to get rid of it. Yeah, thanks.”, he said, and somehow it actually worked.
He and the director went outside with the bucket and hammer, and, already a bit drunk, decided the best course of action to get back at the Worm would be to shut the whole bar down. They got to work nailing the door and all of the windows shut (maybe a fire hazard, but some situations call for things like this), and called it a night. The next morning, they woke up to incessant slamming on their hotel door, so loud that it threatened to destroy the very foundation of the building. “Hey, you American asshole! You owe me 5000 markka for the door!”, Mato was screaming. He slipped a newspaper under the door, and “AMERICAN TOURIST NAILS BAR DOOR SHUT” was one of the top stories. “But… You are welcome at my bar any day. You have balls, American.”
What’s the main takeaway from this story? What can we learn from this today, that we might not repeat the mistakes of the past in the now-upcoming future? Well, in Mato’s own words: “What did we learn from this? Nothing!– The Journey of the Worm.” There is no profound moral to this tale. Of course, I still maintain that everything has meaning, but the meaning in this case is that not everything really needs to have meaning. Ho, ho! How very meta-- putting that philosophy degree to good use yet again. Where was I? Hot damn, it’s a nice day out! I cannot believe I’ve let this pretentious sludge distract me from the *real* takeaway, which, once again, is that it is Summer, and that means Lake Time. I’m sitting here right now in the Year of Our Lord 2024, lucky to be alive and not flattened in a refugee camp, typing away with a Hawaiian shirt on and Beating The Heat with a Cold Beverage. Few could have dreamed of this hundreds of years ago, and in a couple hundred years they will fail to dream of it again.