Words by

Eiríkur Norðdahl

It’s summer. Time to pick up your acoustic guitar, pop the beer bottle, twist the cap and march towards nature’s most secluded locations for serenades, misogyny, and punk rock fairytales. Time to stop all this incessant hanging around and get down to serious vagrancy.
But seriously. Summer is better than blueberries. I don’t like to be positive, or optimistic, in fact I think it’s a particularly pathetic point of view, but goddamnit sometimes I can’t help it. Summers have kept getting better since I can remember, each summer exceeding my insanely demanding expectations. It’s not that I think my optimism is less pathetic than others, it’s simply that I’ve made a conscious decision to embrace this impossible point of view.
When I was a kid summer meant playing around in the junkyard, the shipyard and chasing games on the docks, jumping between boats. There was a ship in the shipyard that had keeled over, so the mast reached over the sea and we tied a rope to the end of it so we could swing off the boat and back.
Later it meant it was easier to get pissed, since the need for a roof to get pissed under was eliminated. I don’t know how many teenage winter days I spent rolling around in the storms bundled up in a snowsuit with a bottle of Smirnoff and Fanta Lemon. For a long time summer meant a free reign from such idiotic pursuits of cheap happiness.
When drinking at home in the midnight sun became habitual, time had come to break out and head for modern Sodom – the soap drenched discotheques of Benidorm, Costa del Sol, Mallorca, Ibiza and Albufeira became the ordered destination of the day. These are the places where even the most courteous on-their-way-to-becoming-engineers-and-doctors sort of people lose their grip on reality, do drugs and get fucked up. It doesn’t always pan out for people, though. I remember walking down a street in Albufeira and witnessing a ball of fire flying into the road disintegrating into embers. As I closed in I realized that these were acquaintances of mine, engineers-to-be, that had gotten the crazy idea to buy drugs, and lacking rolling paper they rolled their dope up in toilet paper, with the aforementioned consequences.
As I said, summers have been getting better, so naturally the last one was the most fantastic one so far, its excellence only to be exceeded by coming summers. Oh the sunshine, oh the music, oh the pathetic crawling after royally breasted females in the wee hours on Lækjartorg. Sitting on the docks in Ísafjörður drinking beer till morning with my cousin Skúli, wrestling popstars and poets to the ground in Flateyri, reading in the rain on the harbour in Bolungarvik, trying to talk down the inescapable industrial noise from fishermen’s guts.
It’s inconceivable what it will be that’ll make this summer better than the 27 summer’s I’ve experienced so far. It’s not something that happens automatically, a massive group effort is needed, paired with a personal effort of great magnitudes. I’m a firm believer.