WINDS OF SUMMER

Yesterday I sat at one of the cafés on the main pedestrian street in the centre of Aalborg. It is a board game café with which I’ve developed a love-hate relationship – loving the coffee, hating the 45 Danish kroner per person price for playing board games. Until coming here, I’d never heard of a café bar charging you for taking one of the games from the shelves. “It’s not about money, but principle,” I complained to everybody. My Balkan mentality is set in a contrasting yet simple co-existence of two conditions: first, not having a lot of purchasing power, and second, due to cultural customs, still having a lot, as luckily many things are still free and remain so because that’s how it is.

I sat at the café after finishing my shift around 3 o’clock in the afternoon, as the painfully stubborn winds of June finally calmed down – on the 30th of June. I sat and read a book, and inspired by it, decided to give in to prolonging my bohemian afternoon by postponing the scheduled workout indefinitely.

“Few understand that procrastination is our natural defence, letting things take care of themselves and exercise their antifragility,” Nassim Taleb argues in his wildly fascinating book that makes many people angry, titled Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder.
“Since procrastination is a message from our natural willpower via low motivation, the cure is changing the environment, or one’s profession, by selecting one in which one does not have to fight one’s impulses.”

Inspired by Taleb’s words, I gave in to the strong resistance to getting up and dragging myself to the gym, which also includes interacting with at least 30 people. So, having rebelled against the tyranny of my own schedule (heretically, on a Monday), I got up and ordered a post-coffee beer to calm my caffeine-powered heartbeat, and acclimate to my newly established ritual of not doing much.

At a table next to me, some guy was writing in his diary, as hectically as I’m doing it now, but with clear and readable handwriting. He wrote without stopping, and I couldn’t help but take a look at his diary, seeing he’d been writing consistently for several pages. After about one hour, his friend sat down. The writer started reading the text to the friend; my left ear leaned towards them, and attention slowly slipped away from the Kindle in front of my eyes. Both the writer and the writer’s friend were laughing, but with the former laughing much more; and laughing at your own text (just as with your own jokes) is a good sign.

“Hey, I enjoyed your reading. What is it you’re writing?” I asked.

“Oh, it’s just a stream of thoughts about what I’m seeing around me. Want me to read it again?” he asked.

“Please.”

The sentences were long collections of beautifully wild ideas inspired by the reality around him – the happenings of a Danish summer afternoon and associated descriptions of passersby, dissociated with an army of incoming thoughts. A few seconds of observation of the people around, their fashion choices, and ways of walking, was enough to catalyse a myriad of complex contemplations about them not as a mass of humans, but as individuals.

“You can tell a lot about people from the way they walk,” he wrote. “At one moment, you can see a carefully chosen outfit for a beginning-of-summer Monday afternoon, executed with a passionate precision signalling a hobby taken seriously. At the next, another guy passing by probably just exited the house in the same outfit he had spent the whole day in, screaming not-giving-zero-fucks attitude.”

“A guy is sitting next to me reading something on a Kindle,” he said, referring to me. “I’m not sure what it is, but the chapter is titled ‘How to Kill People Legally.’ I can probably ask ChatGPT to find the book through the exact title of the chapter.”

I joined them for a game of Cards Against Humanity, getting another beer, and further cementing my Monday afternoon rebellion against the structures of the modern world.

“So what did ChatGPT tell you the book is?” I asked.

“Oh, some kind of a twisted manual,” he said.

Cards Against Humanity is a beautifully disgusting game. It’s like a safe zone for the most ridiculous, dirtiest, and stupidest ideas to shine. It is a purge-like brain dump after which we are free to get back to being decent human beings. It reminds me of Slavoj Žižek’s analogy of the social rituals in the Balkans. Dripping with saliva and wiping his nose with a 1 wipe–3 seconds of talking ratio, Žižek explains: (not perfectly cited, rather reconstructed from memory of watching the video about 50 times)

“When I meet my friends, first we engage in an utterly disgusting ritual of insulting each other, mentioning each other’s moms, Gods, relatives, and so on and so on. After that, we are rid of our dirty hidden shadows and perverted minds and can come back to being decent humans.”

I have wandered a bit too far off from the topic of June in Aalborg. It is always hard to create a coherent essay-ish text, with the imagined structure on one hand, and the constant ad-like popping thoughts wanting to find their place on the paper and bask in the Danish sunshine on the other.

There are 30 days in June, apparently, and I only realised today that the 30th was yesterday, on that procrastinating afternoon in the board game café. After spending about 5 hours procrastinating with my new friends, we said goodbye to each other, and each went his own way. My way was towards the fjord to find a nice spot to see the sunset and eat a poke bowl from work, luckily refrigerated in the board game café (for free).

Then I craved ice cream, and not just any ice cream, but McDonald’s McSundae – plain and simple creamy diabetes. It took 4 minutes for the ice cream to vanish out of my hand into my belly as I walked along the fjord, and then sat down to watch another late sunset of June. I had no peace, took out my phone and, inspired by recent contemplations and fuelled by anger, started writing a raging note in my phone about LinkedIn – a text which, for the sake of not starting beef with every user of LinkedIn, and not expelling myself from Aalborg University, will remain unpublished, and forever only a note on my phone.

“LinkedIn is like a place for high-status people to gather and engage in common ass-licking, believing that they’re doing it for the sake of success (a twisted perception of it), while not knowing that they’re just satisfying the enjoyment of licking and being licked.“
I wrote, feeling a rush of just anger pumping through my blood, into my brain, and out into words.

“No matter how you put it, and no matter how righteous and brave and socially just your posts are, and no matter how many times you take a virtual stand against injustice – your LinkedIn is about your credentials and self-masturbation, with so little effort put into hiding it that it’s as clear as a windy day in Aalborg.”

Once everything there was to be said was written into this little anger-filled note, I raised my head and realised the sun was long gone. It was 11 p.m., and the cold wind came quickly. I got up, my legs numb from sitting on them, feeling the disproportion between my war-waging mental space and the physical reality. Carrying the Kindle under my arm, I walked all the way home, a shadow figure cloaked in a black hoodie, reading Taleb’s Antifragile along the way as a holy text guarding me from the dangers of modernity — except for McDonald’s ice cream, e-readers, and iPhone notes.

If not blowing outrageously, the wind in Aalborg is hiding in plain sight, just around the corner, like the devil waiting for the sun to go down and darkness to come. Luckily, the nights are short, and the light never really abandons the sky anymore, pressing the darkness from both sides of midnight.

Today, on the first of July, summer has finally come to the city, with 27 degrees Celsius in the almost completely wind-absent air. I rode my bike and followed the stream of people slowly clapping their way in Birkenstock sandals towards Vestre Fjordpark, a spacious park with many swimming facilities and volleyball courts. Drawn by the common summer frenzy in the air, I decided to follow the stream to its end, right to the heart of the swimming area, where half the city’s population came to enjoy a one-day summer.

Beautiful and otherwise shy Danish girls were showing their carefully crafted bodies in a not-so-shy manner. Guys from age 15 to age 50 were moving in packs, flexing their gym bodies, crafted with equal care over the long winter months, having spent hundreds of hours in depressing fitness centres with earbuds in their ears. This was the moment they were preparing for; the summer they were so desperately waiting for. The girls they’ve been seeing in the gym for the whole year and avoiding due to social anxiety were now here in front of them. However, nobody was approaching anybody, and both girls and guys moved separately in smaller and bigger packs.

Alone in that half-naked mass of hundreds of bodies, and equally anxious as the next guy in the park, I got up, found my bike among the sun-baked metal mass of hundreds of bikes, and went to the other side of the park, towards the fjord. Only a handful of people were resting along the waterfront, and the indistinguishable noise of the half-naked crowd was replaced with a peace evaporating from the river-like presence of the fjord, and the immovable tall grass reached towards the sky.

A girl sat on a bench overlooking the water. Except for the earbuds in her ears, her style screamed 60s, with a straw hat and a light white dress giving me a nostalgia for summers of those decades I’ve never lived through.

I rode my bike back to the city centre and the board game café. I ordered a coffee, sat on the terrace overlooking the street, opened my diary, and started to write.

It is the 1st of July, and the summer has finally arrived in Aalborg.