The heat is gone and it’s time to celebrate.
For some reason, it’s everybody’s favorite season. Everyone thinks summer is the time of sun, sand, sea and sex, of gorgeous bronzed bodies windsurfing to Greek islands and back, laying out on sundecks in beach clubs with beautiful people all around, sipping mojitos and eating fresh octopus salad, before dancing the night away in clubs that overlook magnificent Crusader castles and Homer’s ‘wine-colored seas’. And it is… if you’re rich. But do you know what summer is if you’re not rich? It’s the time of sticky, sweaty, smelly suffering, of the noisome bacterial odor of un-hygiene everywhere, of flabby ash-yellow bodied herds of families carrying screaming infants with plastic toys on to public beaches where they proceed to plant little gardens of cigarette butts and semi-gnawed corn cobs around them before splashing around in the water in front of you with the grace and athleticism of drunken water buffalos – with the exception, of course, that water buffalos can actually swim.
The heat brings out the worst in everything. First of all, just because people are walking around with bikinis and speedos and skimpy clothes does not make anything sexy. Your libido is suffocated and sweltering with its tongue sticking out, unable to think straight in the meat-sauna that has become your body. Most of what your eyes see is pretty gross anyway, and when the odd hot-bodied God or Goddess comes strolling along, your libido – still suffering in the meat-sauna – is more annoyed than anything, because action is demanded of it at a time when inaction is the only action worth not-acting on. Secondly, all those microorganisms that you hate LOVE the heat and you can smell their excited little parties all around. That’s right, every time you get that bacterial whiff of semi-putrefaction around you, it means there are about a billion tiny little single-celled organisms donning party hats and sipping fecal martinis, each of them giving you the finger and loving it.
Of course, there are those who can’t spend the whole summer at the beach, who spend most of it in Istanbul, which is all the more pleasant thanks to regular water and electricity cuts, decomposing fruit and sugary soft drink oozing out on to the streets in fly-ridden rivulets from black garbage bags, packed public transport (which is really fun to ride on in 42-degree heat with your pants glued to your thighs amid the pervasive smell of armpits and feet), and last – but not least – what everyone living in Beyoğlu has come to love: the summer-long love affair we’ve all had with the municipality’s Sisyphean Istiklal Avenue granite-paving ordeal… which, at the time this was written, was STILL not finished. There’s nothing like having to tip-toe around trucks and front end loaders amidst a wall of human meat trying to cram through a half-avenue as jackhammers pound your eardrums and dust and dirt transport millions of germs up into the air and through your respiratory tract to set up mutant supercolonies in your lungs. Yep, summer doesn’t get much better than this.
Oh wait, it does get better! How about having to see men’s feet everywhere you look? In the near past it was considered unacceptable that a man would wear anything other than shoes, no matter how hot it got. But then some evil genius introduced us all to flip flops – and worse, mandals. These man-sandals used to be exclusive to two-meter tall Dutch tourists – and even then they often wore them with white socks, which, while being the fashion equivalent of wearing your underwear over your head, nevertheless shielded people from perhaps the ugliest thing the human eye could possibly perceive: man feet. But now flip flops and mandals are everywhere, and so is the sight of hairy toes. Nice. If God had intended men’s feet to be seen in public, he would have given them women’s feet.
Ok, so maybe I’m being a little harsh. I mean, what about all the good things about summer? What about all the ice-cream oozing down your arm approximately 1.8 seconds after it’s been bought? Or all the sun-bathing to harvest that perfect crop of melanomas? Or all the swimming which you have to either pay a fortune for if you want to do it anywhere decent, or the eye infections you have to brave if you can’t afford to do it anywhere decent? How about all the sand that’s probably still lodged up your nethermost orifices, a grain of which might one day turn into the perfect butt-pearl? How about those five minutes between getting in the steaming hot car and waiting for the air-conditioning to kick in – with salt water still on your skin, brushing against your shirt, as you sit in half-dried togs, working on developing a nice case of hemorrhoids that can wake you from deep sleep at 3 in the morning? And how about a nice little sailing trip, as you puke over the side every ten minutes, get screamed at and humiliated by the captain because of your poor knot-tying skills, and come to despise everyone on board who go from being your Best Friends to becoming Personal-Space-Intruding-Competition-For-Toilet-Space-Bastards within two days? As pleasant as all those lovely summer experiences sound, there’s really only one truly good and enjoyable aspect to this whole miserable season: mosquitos. If it weren’t for them lullabying me into the sweet arms of Morpheus every night, summer might actually be unbearable.
But I guess we should look on the bright side: at least summer’s better than winter. Come to think of it, spring isn’t all it’s cracked up to be either. And don’t even get me started on autumn…
