…because I am feeling lazy and self-indulgent.

It happens every year. When the weather start getting warm, my personality switches from frantic and frisky fox to languid and lazy lion, and the very idea of work begins to seem like an absurd obscenity.

So in case you were wonder, yes it IS possible for me to get lazier.

Although, given my entirely sedentary livestyle, the laziness is less a change of habits and more of a different state of mind.

It’s like my laziness changes to a longer wavelength and lower frequency and becomes more of a beach kind of laziness that makes me want to lay on hot sand near the water with the heat acting like a sauna baking the toxins out of my skin and into nice dry air in which it instantly vaprizes to keep me cool.

The proximity to the water and those lovely seaside breezes help a lot too.

Maybe this summer will be the summer when I actually go to Gary Point Park with my blanket and my mp3s and my large quantity of water and find a relatively tourist free stretch of beach and lay down to soak up some rays.

It’s funny – no matter what, I can never think of myself as a tourist. It comes from growing up in a tourist area, I guess. For all of my childhood, tourists were those other people, the ones carrying way too much gear and looking out of place and gawking around at everything. I, on the other hand, was an ever-patient and gentle local who viewed tourists as a lucrative species of idiot who need extra special care.

So I tolerated tourists and helped them when they asked. I figured that was my tiny part in Prince Edward Island’s tourist industry.

But the line was clear : they were tourists I was a local. They were one species and I was another. My becoming one of them seemed as likely as a beaver turning into a cormorant, or a moose becoming a wolf.

And this attitude runs through all Islanders. You only have to visit one of the hot tourism spots on the Island to see the difference. Any Islander in attendance will feel an overpowering compulsion to act like the attraction is no big deal and view it all with a cynical eye and in every nonverbal way possible send the message that they are not a tourist and heaven help you if you treat them like one.

We’re a friendly people but we have our quirks.

I have this attitude too, and the fact that I am thousands of miles from home doesn’t make a whit of difference. I can’t ever think of myself as a tourist. You might get mne to admit to being one if you caught be at the right moments when I am say in Victoria, but other than that, if I am in Canada, I am not a tourist.

I’m a local who hasn’t been here for long, I guess.

And there has to be something deeply bourgoisie about that, even though the means by which I acquired it were distinctly proletariat.

But there is something very middle class about being offended at the very idea of being taken for a normal common person. Like the whole idea of being mistaken for a “mere” tourist has so much inherent privilege and classism buried in it that it could not be more middle class if it drove an oversized vehicle and complained about taxes.

I am not looking forward to summer. It’s very hard on me. I am a fat dude in his mid forties who has a genetic predisposition to heat-stroke, so the deck is pretty mkuch stacked against me enjoying the heat.

And yet, I still love blue skies and sunshine, just like most other humans. I guess that kind of thing is on a different cerebral circuit board than our knowledge of whether or not blue skies and sunshine are actually good for us or not.

There is a reason why the picture most children draw is of blue skies, a yellow sun, and green grass. These things are programmed into us from a time long ago, when we walked the green grasses of the Serengeti as the yellow sun beat down on us from under bright blue African skies.

Like I have said before, every animal must contain within its mind an image of its ideal habitat, and there must be a powerful reinforcement of said habitat by having the animal be more comfortable in one place than another, along with an urge to move to the area of maximum comfort.

I think we humans have this image just like all the rest of the critters. And it shows itself in the places we like to live. We inherent want to be near green grass and trees and water. We want that place to be sunny and bright.

That’s why we think of places like Hawaii as paradise. These places check all the boxes magnificently. Sun, sky, water, grass, trees, and friendly people who at least pretend to lead lives much closer to our hunter gatherer roots than us modern folk.

And we flock to these places because our modern world environments provide so little of that environmental feedback we need. That’s why green spaces in cities are so important. They give us the right signals for us to feel comfortable.

And it’s this habitat impulse that is behind our entire relationship with nature. It explains what people used to get out of spending a few weeks in the country. And what modern day campers and hikers get out of spending time “away from it all”.

Heck, it even explains why we keep lawns. We need to be near grass!

I think if more people understood that we have this drive and that we need to meet its needs in order to be happy monkeys, our urban environments would be far more pleasant and we would overall be much happier people.

And environmentalists would not have such a hard time selling their ideas.

I will leave you tonight with a song that sums it up perfectly.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.