“Summer is neon: buzzing, pulsing, solar-powered and high on its own supply”

In this edition of the Weekender: Margaritaville, aging, and becoming a summer person

Art by Tala Rae Schlossberg

This week, we’re summering in Sweden, disappointing waiters, and wasting away again in Margaritaville.

SUMMERING

“Summer is neon”

Lisa Kholostenko on each season’s allure, and how she finally overcame her summer skepticism.

Every Summer I Forget I’m Not A Water Sign

—Lisa Kholostenko in Empty Calories

I’ve never been a summer person.

Well, maybe, like most of us, when I was a child and the pinnacle of human experience was no school and a public swimming pool. I used to think summer was about pleasure: bare feet, dripping fruit, the vague possibility of making out with someone in a band.

In high school, the movies told us it was Jeeps with no tops and volleyball games at the beach (later you learn this is for people who lived in, I don’t know, Malibu, with last names like Hadid or Foster). Bonfire parties, too. We actually had those in Colorado. Though ours featured fewer surfers and more Cool Ranch Doritos ground into the upholstery of a Subaru Outback with a Kerry-Edwards sticker.

But somewhere along the line, it became a season of forced whimsy and synthetic joy.

I’m handed a cocktail that tastes like Barbie’s bathwater and told to “just vibe.” I am vibing! I am vibing so hard I’ve dissociated into a nearby citronella candle. My thighs have fused together into a single, sentient ham. A man in Tevas suggests I try cold plunging. I suggest he try walking into the sea and staying there. Is this not vibing?

In other words: once I became an adult, the inconveniences of summer began to outweigh the perks. The pleasure shrank in proportion to the forcedness of what summer is supposed to represent versus what it actually feels like.

At some point, the dregs of adulthood make things like “watching the leaves turn” (please do not get me started on identifying birds! Bird interest comes for us all; it should be studied) and drinking a nice red in chic stemware by a fire infinitely more appealing than, say, lugging your perspiring body across midtown in Express businesswear for an unpaid internship, or later, dealing with a power outage in Los Feliz because the entire grid collapsed under the psychic weight of air conditioning. You lie in bed, unable to sleep, listening to your dog pant and wondering if maybe you’ve lived too long.

Suddenly, the other seasons begin to represent peace.

Summer is neon: buzzing, pulsing, solar-powered and high on its own supply. It demands performance. The days are longer, yes, but also more judgmental. It’s about productivity in leisure: what did you do today and have you posted about it alongside a voluptuous tomato?

Autumn, by contrast, is summer with a Xanax, a flattering cashmere knit, crisp air and that vague smoky aroma that your lungs actually enjoy. People buy candles to experience this for $95 off-season. There’s a generosity to it, a return to sanity.

Winter arrives like a stern Ukrainian grandmother with practical shoes and an emotional support soup. There is something ancient and soothing in the rituals of blankets and broth, of watching films in the dark while the world crystallizes outside. Suddenly the desire to pickle and ferment everything emerges from some anthropological cave: your lizard brain tells you that you must walk into a basement and line the shelves with labeled glass receptacles or you will die.

Spring is zest. It’s everything in herbs and lemon with a cold pink wine. It smells like honeysuckle and patio furniture. It asks nothing of you except to want more, to look forward to things again. Spring is the real New Year’s.

Maybe it’s my stubborn Taurus placements, maybe it’s the quiet rot of late-capitalism burnout where even rest must be photogenic enough to monetize, but I began to over-identify with the gentle, receptive rhythm of literally any other season. Summer, in its insistent optimism, started to feel almost adversarial, like a hostile force slathered in SPF, scream-singing “Espresso.” A test of whether I could survive four months without napping, while being slowly basted in my own sweat and expected to maintain sparkling conversation over a melting Aperol spritz with a 45-year-old man in a tank top.

“Too much and not in the mood,” was my spiritual posture thinking about summer.

But then Stockholm happened.

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PHOTOGRAPHY

Photo by Roman Fox

POETRY

tonight’s special

—Sudana Krasniqi in my so-called life

you move slow
like honey 
sweet
angel-faced waiter 
sharing a smile 
with every table
you cater
working the room 
’til midnight
sometimes later

you sing tonight’s special
turn it
into a ballad
sorry to disappoint 
sweet 
angel-faced waiter
I’ve come all this way 
for the salad 

“and for signorina
maybe the saffron risotto
tossed with mascarpone cheese?” 
you wink when 
you ask her
then me 
“sounds delicious Mateo, 
but just another Diet Coke
with ice, 
please.”

well, anyway
here’s a 30% tip
and my number
for the world’s best waiter
from the girl in the corner
dreaming on paper 

call me 
when you’re done 
I’ll pick you up later

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ROTATING COLLAGE

Artwork by Dominique Paris

ON AGING

Getting older

Ian Leslie on the vagaries of aging.

“Rembrandt made about a hundred self-portraits; together they’re perhaps the greatest visual meditation on ageing we have.”

27 Notes On Growing Old(er)

—Ian Leslie in The Ruffian

1. Will Storr, author and fellow Substacker, recently wrote about his “midlife identity crisis.” I was struck, while reading it, at how rare it is for people—men in particular—to admit that growing older can be tough. In the second half of life, we’re all expected to say how much happier we are than in our insecure twenties, how we wouldn’t swap places with our younger self, oh no, not even if you paid us. Hmm. Sometimes I feel that way, but not always. Some days, ageing feels like a curse, only lightly mitigated by the knowledge that the curse is universal.

2. Let’s be honest: after a certain point—35? 40?—growing older is psychologically punishing. How could it not be? It involves getting a little bit weaker, stupider and uglier every year.

3. Let me summarise the science of how ageing affects physical and mental capability: all the lines on the graph point down. We can slow this multi-dimensional descent but not stop it. The miracle is that most of us are not driven mad by this knowledge. We ought to congratulate ourselves on the depth of our resilience, on our heroic fortitude in the face of adversity—while quietly acknowledging that we rely on a modicum of self-deception to get by.

4. The American poet George Oppen said my favourite thing about growing old: “What a strange thing to happen to a little boy.” I love how this evokes the subjectivity of a bewildered child trapped inside an aged body; a boy staring at his wizened hands and wondering what on earth is going on.

5. One of the weirdest things about the midlife ageing process, as those of you who have passed 40 will know, is that it is discontinuous. It doesn’t happen at a gradual and consistent rate, allowing you time to adjust. After lulling you into a false sense of security, it rushes forward, catching you unawares. It’s like finding yourself dropped into a different world. You may ask yourself, how did I get here?

6. The physicist Michael Nielsen tells us that the Polish-American mathematician Stanislaw Ulam perceived his life as sharply divided into two halves: “In the first half, he was always the youngest person in the group. In the second half, he was always the oldest. There was no transitional period.” There was no transitional period.

7. I think people who had a lot of success early in their careers (not an affliction from which I suffered) feel this more acutely than most. When you’re always the youngest guy in the room, it’s natural to build a whole identity around your precocity. Then suddenly—and it is sudden—you’re not the youngest anymore. You’re one of those anonymous older guys. So now who the hell even are you?

8. There’s a kernel of truth, by the way, in that Rat Pack-era Frank Sinatra line about how he pities teetotallers because when they wake up in the morning, they know that’s the best they’re going to feel all day. In terms of pacing your life, it might be a good idea not to optimise too early. If you’re in your twenties, perhaps you shouldn’t exercise too much or eat too healthily, since if you’re hyper-fit at 30, all you’ll experience is decline, pure decline. Whereas if you only start getting healthy later on you can, at least for a while, experience the feeling of water running uphill.

9. In your twenties, you say “about three years ago” of memories you can only hazily locate on the timeline. Then at some point you suddenly hear yourself say “about twenty years ago.” And you hear yourself saying it again and again. About things that feel like three years ago.

10. The short story I think about most is “The Swimmer,” by John Cheever (later a film). It’s a golden Sunday afternoon in upstate New York in the 1960s. The well-to-do residents of Westchester are out in their gardens sipping cocktails. Neddy, a fit man in early middle age, decides to swim home from the party he’s at by way of his neighbours’ pools, just for a laugh. As he progresses from one pool to another, being made drinks as he goes, the weather and the mood start to get colder and darker. He finds himself being treated with inexplicable hostility and pity by once-friendly neighbours. Bewildered, he finally arrives at his own house, only to find it empty and abandoned. We sense that in the time it took Neddy to swim through a few pools in a mildly drunken haze, whole years, even decades, have passed. We also sense that Neddy is ruined in some way—that he has ruined himself. I’m not ruined, not yet, but Neddy’s bewilderment speaks to me. I only set off a few minutes ago. The sun was still high in the sky.

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OUTDOORS IN

TRAVEL

Manhattan Margaritaville

In which John Paul Brammer gets a taste of the Jimmy Buffett lifestyle.

Margaritaville Times Square

—John Paul Brammer in John Paul Brammer

Is there a secret island oasis smack-dab in the middle of Times Square, a hidden, coconut-scented haven replete with attentive staff, tropical cocktails, surprisingly decent food, and beachy cabanas mere feet from a rooftop pool, all presented with delightfully campy decor? Is there an undiscovered chamber in the palpitating heart of New York City where urban woes take flight like so many spooked seagulls, leaving you to a private, blissful slice of the Caribbean just a short subway ride from your apartment?

No.

That’s not to say that Margaritaville Resort Times Square is without its delights, delights that are more poetic in nature than they are edible. I’ll get to them. The poetic, inedible delights. But first, consider the word “resort”: a chlorinated melange of lodging, spa treatments, and fluffy white bathrobes begging to be stolen, the word evolved from the more dire “resortir” of Old French, defined as a place that is turned to for solace, aid, refuge. It implies a desperation in the individual. “It was his last resort,” one might say of someone who recently hanged himself.

A resort’s value, then, ought to be judged by its restorative powers. A trip to Margaritaville Resort should give me the strength to soldier on. This it can accomplish without satisfying the brief of transporting me to the Bahamas, which is good news both for me and for Margaritaville Resort Times Square, because for all its nautical aesthetic efforts, a nesting pigeon would nonetheless find it indistinguishable from any one of the surrounding high-rises, and the ambulances remain audible over Benson Boone (I didn’t hear any Jimmy Buffett songs).

There are some 30 Margaritaville resorts on earth. One of them is in Manhattan, which, Margaritaville is keen to remind you, is an island. Margaritaville TSqNYC is no doubt the tallest of its siblings, occupying a series of 32 floors, many of which I became acquainted with shortly after arriving and, somehow, getting lost in the stairwell, resulting in me being escorted by staff (less in a stern “Excuse me, sir, this area is for hotel guests and employees only” way and more in an avuncular “Let’s go find your mama, big guy” way) to the pool deck where I was supposed to be.

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PAINTING

Art by Kim Druker Stockwell

FAULTY MEMORY

Fictions

—Posted in a Note by Virginia Weaver

Reading about AI “hallucinations” always reminds me of ways that organic people’s preconceptions or other memories blend into their memories of literary or sacred works they’ve read. A few examples that come to mind:

In Frankenstein, Victor never says how he brought the creature to life (he mentions repeatedly that he won’t tell the secret of life), nor does he say that he assembled the creature from parts of the corpses he’d been stealing. There’s no grandiose lightning sequence. And he just says he experimented on the corpses to reverse engineer life by studying decay. How could the creature have giant bones and organs if it were solely built from normal bodies? These ideas are from movies, even if they’re reasonable interpretations of hints. But commonly, people who’ve read the novel will remember electricity as the secret of life and corpse-patching as featuring in it, when neither is stated.

Similarly: Dracula doesn’t catch fire in the sun in Dracula, nor does Carmilla in Carmilla. They’re just not at their peak strength in the day. Death by sunlight is a later development in vampire pop culture. Strength from moonlight, though, is a much older idea in vampire literature, and often forgotten even when we read works that contain it.

One midrash on Genesis—in which Abraham destroys pagan idols before being called on by G-d—is so famous and so often taught along with the text itself that learned adults sometimes misremember it as being in Genesis itself rather than Genesis Rabbah. I’ve even heard of this happening from a singularly bright rabbi who had made the mistake herself, earlier in adulthood.

I’ve heard of some Christians misremembering common sayings—like “teach a man to fish. . .”—as sayings of Jesus. The fish one in particular makes sense associatively because of the “fishers of men” saying, but it’s an error.

Sometimes we add content to what we’ve read firsthand, and sometimes we subtract content (the ending of Esther comes to mind as often forgotten). I’m curious if there are any explanations of this or other major examples.

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FOOD

Substackers featured in this edition

Art & Photography: Roman Fox, Composition, Kim Druker Stockwell

Video & Audio: Tala Rae Schlossberg, Dominique Paris, Jesse Jenkins

Writing: Lisa Kholostenko, Sudana Krasniqi, Ian Leslie, John Paul Brammer, Virginia Weaver

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