The world is a rock that’s spinning so fast it will give you the jimjams
A dead squirrel on the side of the road while walking McBeans today and yesterday. The first day it was pristine, newly dead, lying there on the roadside. I stare down at it contemplatively, trying to figure out what brought this squirrel to its sad demise. Did it get caught in a period of spasmodic vacillation, as squirrels are prone to doing, not knowing which side of the road to go to, frantically running back and forth as your quickly approaching vehicle strikes it down. Or, looking up, I think, did it fall from a tree? The possibilities are limited. Today it looks horrific, the bone of its tail protruding from where a bushy tail once was, and cloudy black eyes staring up at me. In three more days it will be mashed into the pavement totally, and its existence will be noted by no one but me, as I walk by the spot. It seems like a bad sign.

The summer’s heat stultifies. Its moisture and intensity producing a lethargy heretofore unknown to man, and bad hair like you would not believe. The days are getting shorter, now. The change is minute, and you will not notice until a drive home from work 6 weeks from now reveals that the sum total of all these minutes have added up, and there you are, with a now-altered daylight. In Norway, where my uncle lives, it occurs to way less fanfare. The summer months reveal an all-encompassing daylight, in some parts of the country amounting to nearly a full 24 hours of sunlight. The inverse is true in the winter, of course, and it’s then that you tend to get the depressing phone calls from your weird Norwegian relatives, telling you how horrible it is. They must really feel like someone is pulling the wool over their eyes, a fact which is relatively true on all levels, as you tend to need a scarf on leave the house at all during the winter months.

I don’t know if it’s the manic weather which holds some kind of strange allure, but I would like to live in Norway someday. I feel a little embarrassed to be an American, although I’ve never really identified with much that has to do with living on this continent outside of the easy access to totally confounding the other inhabitants of this particular country, with statements precisely like these. But I like the Norwegian ethic, the hedonistic way of living, which states that it’s pretty much right and natural to appropriate Go-Gos’ song lyrics like, vacation’s all I ever wanted, and not feel like too much of a dork about it. Because, let’s face it, that's a pretty great song.

Summer aesthetic, while once grounded in minimalism and all around simplicity, has forayed, inexplicably, into looking more like a 1970’s tennis player. For whatever reason, the idea to forgo shaving for a few days has revealed a staggeringly new look, while the moisture-infused weather has to an entirely new plateau of faux-pas induced hilarity, my hair taking on an entirely new dimension of the afro. I catch myself in a mirror today and can do nothing but laugh. Winter, clearly, is my thing.