Relax
February 18, 2020
When I still lived in Sweden, this was always the worst time of the year. Christmas had come and gone. New Years had come and gone. It was neither winter nor spring. It would snow and then the temperature would rise and the snow would melt into a black slushy mess that would freeze-over the next evening when the temps would fall again. It was light at 10:30 and dark at 3:30. It was a fucking mess with no end in sight.
Slowly though the light would return and right when things really felt like they were at their absolute worst, a frigid spring would give way to a glorious (but usually rainy) Swedish summer, all of Stockholm’s residents would flee the city for their country houses and those of us who chose to stay behind had run of the town. It was always the most glorious time of the year and something that I find myself missing in the internal sunshine of southern California.
There’s an ease to life here that most people will never get a chance to experience. The weather’s kindness leaves you to time to fixate-on and bemoan all manners of other bullshit as a fortunate resident of the golden state. We tend to mainly focus our ire on all things automotive such as parking and routes to get from here to there but mainly focused on traffic. The small-talk isn’t limited to the 405 however… we also adore griping/discussing all manners of food-related atrocity from the cost of groceries at Erewon versus Whole-Paycheck versus Trader Joes (the latter being the best bang for buck), which nut-milk is best for whatever ailments one suffers from to where the best place to line-up is for whatever the cool-new-hip-food-of-the-minute is.
The weather is so good we don’t mind lining-up for shit, but we hate traffic. Let that cook for a few minutes.
It also allows us Cali-folk time to micro-focus our rage on that tweet or gram or bullshit that we overheard at Kreation while getting our lemon-ginger-CBD shot that proves we are SUPER-WOKE and the offending individuals are neanderthals that should just be extinct. It gives us time to bathe in how liberal we are, free of all the spirit crushing, socially-outdated modes of racism, conservative christian ideology, binary sexual orientation (and associated pronouns) and climate denial. We’re free to focus on everything that everyone else outside of our bubble in struggling to come to terms with while we, the enlightened bask in the glory of knowing everything about everything, casting sideways glances upon those who are slowly progressing down the path that we traveled years ago.
We’re so busy being progressive that we forget the most important part of being a liberal. Being a liberal means being tolerant and not just of the ideologies you personally adhere-to and live-by but also being tolerant of those people who have views and beliefs that don’t coincide with your own. That doesn’t mean we befriend the clan or something but every christian conservative isn’t a morally corrupt lost soul because they don’t see eye to eye with you on every issue you feel passionately about. It means trying to be an inclusive rather than an exclusive even when you have fundamental difference with the other party, person or thing. Right now I feel like we’re so busy being right that we don’t have time for understanding. We don’t need to accept hate but we have a moral responsibility to promote understanding and guidance and that starts with really listening to what the other person has to say–not just waiting for our turn to talk and tweet them into oblivion.
We need to fucking relax. Shot on my LeicaM7 on Kodak Tri-X and processed at the Icon.