What Is It With These Timeless Summer Afternoons?

June 8, 2013 · Posted in Life

What is it with these sunny, silent, slow summer days, spent reading about art, science, history, anything that’s interesting, and contemplating creative pursuits. The weird feeling that something great is will happen, is happening all around, and you can jump in and take a part in it whenever you like. A switching of gears in the brain, just listening to the rustling of the trees in the wind while reading about abandoned art deco skyscrapers, optimizations to the A* algorithm, musings on the telecommunications technology as an external nervous system of the humanity cyborg, and contemplating on creating art and drafting plans for future games, books, stories and other wild things still not tried.

It has to be summer, winter won’t do. The silence of the sunny afternoon burns away the trivialities of the work week, the life management of bills and schedules and other such ephemera of leading an adult life. Suddenly there’s direct chain of summers to that 7 or 9 or 12 year old boy at the step-grandparents’ farm, sitting in the cool attic or the outbuilding on a sunny day, reading old classic sci-fi from the 60’s and 70’s, outdated science and art articles from magazines or Reader’s Digest specials, and whiling away the endless summer weeks. Alone but not lonely. Hungry to write sci-fi and text adventures on Commodore 64, or later to run role-playing sessions to his pals – ones that he never got just right, never as cool as they were in his head. The smell of dust, a fly stained little window, dead wasps on the worn floorboards where the sun projects a rectangle of light.

The time stops. The world is immediate, yet boundless and massively exciting. A wasp is trying to find its way in to the apartment. The wind makes the pea sprouts quiver in the balcony box, the tendrils of the plants trying to scrabble for purchase on the supporting lines. Seagulls are fighting against the gale high up in the sky. EME, Earth-Moon-Earth, is a technique with which you can bounce radio signals off the Moon, first proposed in 1940. You can create 2D games in Unity 3D by making them textures in one 2D plane. Two ebooks are awaiting to be checked and uploaded to a store, an interactive fiction game is begging to be coded. Dérive is an unplanned journey through usually urban landscapes where the subtle aesthetics of the surroundings control your direction. People instinctively follow each others’ gaze, even in images, which is an effective way of steering their attention.

Serenity, timelessness, an utter excitement with everything.

It has to be summer. Winter just won’t do.