diary of a mostly offline summer weekend

Read one of Bourdain’s favorite novels! It was… weird

The concept of summer solstice was first explained to me by, lol, Rocket Power, an animated Nickelodeon show that followed the hijinks of four uber-athletic kids living in a Californian beach town. (For a shy first-grader in the midwest, this could not have been a more exotic premise.) In “The Longest Day,” (Season 2, Episode 4) the kids decide to use the solstice as a chance to compete in a kind of self-fashioned triathlon of endurance against a gang of (also-freakishly-sporty) nemeses; the hope was to achieve some local glory before sunset fell and, one assumes, bedtime was enforced. This episode aired in November 2000, which means I was seven years old and probably just starting then to awaken to that magical stretchy quality of a long summer day and its dizzying possibilities.

As an adult, of course, the desire to cram as much as possible into any given 24-hour unit comes from far less charming incentives. And without the structure of any kind of academic calendar (mine or otherwise) delineating my calendar, I typically feel at a loss for how to “properly” “spend” the season. The first summers in New York were full of “bucket lists” and ambitious, over-achieving field trips; the recent summers as a freelance writer have been dictated more so by whatever work schedule can be ascertained (as anyone working in magazines or fashion knows, summer is just a colloquialism for pre-fall) and a pervading feeling that free time should probably be turned into some kind of work time. But once in a while, a weekend does feel like it goes on and on, the hours as yielding as taffy. A few factors seem to make all the difference…