You’ve Got a Friend by Carole King (also James Taylor, if you’re into that)
When it’s summer, it’s impossible for many to remember what it was like in the winter. When it’s winter, people continuously fail to remember several of the banalities and annoyances that occur during the summer. For people living in the midst of a tough winter, summer weather is a utopian paradise. For everyone living in season-less territories (Los Angeles, Los Angeles, Los Angeles) there’s no opposite horror or paradise to juxtapose your life against, no ideal of a better time-period when due to the natural change in climate, life will become more promising. A declarative generalization—this makes people in seasonal cities like New York very hurried and eager to bask in available pleasures of the day-to-day. It makes people in Los Angeles somewhat apathetic and unimpressed by life; when there’s no greater fantasy that exists outside of one’s control, better weather being the best example, god and the afterlife another, life tends to have a sucky quality.
Fall and spring, for those that can experience them, are purgatorial periods where the weather says to us: look, I made everything perfect, what’s your problem now? Our actions during the more extreme seasons can now be analyzed with a certain clarity. (Statistically, more violence occurs in the summer, depression increases during the winter. Do people become depressed when they’re not able to go out and be violent? This stat doesn’t count for the United States. In the United States, people are violent and depressed every month of the calendar year). Anyway, in the fall and spring, during this lovely, liminal phase of life that collectively occurs really only for about a month or so per year, most are faced with an extraordinarily existential question—now that you’ve gotten what you’ve been longing for, do you have the ability to be happy, or at least content? Overwhelmingly, the answer is no. I applaud the few in life who find some sense of pleasure when they get what they’ve been looking for. That’s one of my goals. It isn’t not to have any desires; in the Western world, that’s fucking impossible. It’s to try and feel fulfilled when my desires are met.