I seem to lapse into a more nocturnal existence during summer, and this hits its peak in August. Activities are shifted nightward; day-trips outside are brief, and only if we must. Afternoons become air-conditioned pauses before the main event.
For as the day cools, we head to the seafront, a few minutes’ drive from the house, to walk in front of the busy playgrounds and restaurants. This is the Corinthian Gulf, ninety minutes out of Athens, where my wife grew up, and where we’ve now been staying for two weeks.
I’d always seen this place as a mediocre holiday destination, with a dirty sea (which, a few decades ago, used to be a swamp), fast food and cheesy bars. The sort of town where youths in hatchbacks with smoked windows blast Greek pop music for no coherent reason, then loop back around for another pass. But that was when I lived in Crete; now, deep into my first summer as an Athenian once again, I’m ridiculously grateful to have this place within driving distance. Context is everything.
So most mornings here I’ve been up early for a swim, with no-one around but the cafe staff opening their parasols and a few old folk eating figs and chatting on the shore. Four hours’ sleep, an aching body, a night of overthinking, hassles that could define your day in the big city…. all of it falls away with that first plunge. Yes, bells can be unrung. You can begin again.
Intellectually, I can’t say this has been the most mind-expanding summer. I had grand plans: long meditations, deep reading sessions. I ended up consuming a lot of articles and podcasts, instead: on culture, tech, politics, human relations.
It’s been worthwhile, though. I’ve been fortunate to discover the sensitive writing of Tao Lin and Sherry Ning, the humanity and incisiveness of Josh Szeps’ podcast interviews, the longform work of Sam Kriss, each piece a head trip I don’t want to end. And then there was Denis Johnson’s Train Dreams (a novella recommendation from Craig Mod), a sharp sketch of how life can be brutish and short, the cost of ‘civilisation’, the primacy of now. It lingered long in me since I read it back in June.
But what’s most important in August, I think, is space. Space enough that when a storm shows up out of nowhere and your favourite weather app says it’s sunny, you send a screenshot and a photo of the sky to the developer, and he’s grateful for the report and fixes the bug within a day (this happened, last week — the app is Weather Strip). Space to think, to work things out, to fail and try again, or to not try at all.
And space to experiment with polishing your tools, to experiment with optimising what you can before it’s back to school. Here are a few recent recommendations:
- Unread. A great way to browse your information sources and save them for later. The anti-social-media. Now updated with many new features like downloading from behind paywalls. I’ve been a beta tester for this app, and the developer is great. Using it after all this time still feels like cheating.
- ElevenReader. The free version. An app that reads articles to you, and sounds real. They even have a Burt Reynolds voice.
- New glasses. I’m really not good with this middle aged fixing-your-eyesight game. But after a year of reading fuzzy I retested my eyes and found I needed an upgrade. So I got a pair of ‘office lenses’. Wow. Being able to see clearly, at varying distances, is a marvel. Protect your senses, damn.
- Godox iT30 Pro. A new, tiny flash to replace my Fuji EFX-20, which I dropped on a rock near Samaria Gorge two years ago. Creativity comes from constraint and all that, but I’ve missed being able to create my own light.
- Control Panel for Twitter. A web browser plugin that makes Twitter how it should be: like a message board. Hide all the metrics that don’t matter (likes, followers, whatever you want), remove retweets, or eliminate interaction entirely and browse only the people you follow. Your attention is precious — this plugin gives it back, without you having to quit Twitter. It’s making me appreciate that platform again.
Tomorrow, I’ll be leaving for Athens. A new season will soon be here: of live streams, client work, writing this newsletter. I’ll be launching a new show to help organisers run smarter campaigns by showing what succeeds and what fails (first one is planned for September 11 — if there are campaigns you want covered, reply to this email). There are photos to take, systems to optimise, outrages to resist. Back to the work.
I haven’t advanced much on any of these challenges. But after the space of August, I’m more ready for them. Those are the rules.
See you soon,
Mehran