It’s that time of year when people start going on about how the weather is nice and they can’t wait to spend time in their yards. Friends and family will be shocked when you tell them that you have no plans to spend time in your yard, despite their opinion that the weather is ideal for it. Whatever you’re planning, there is nothing you can do in your backyard or on your front porch that isn’t better inside your house. For one, the inside of your house, unlike the area surrounding it, isn’t designed to kill you.
The very existence of sunscreen indicates that going outside to do anything for more than a few minutes at a time is unnatural. The source of life for planet Earth has decided that if you spend too much time with it, it will do it’s best to end your life. Helios is the introverted final boss who says, “Hello organism, your presence is really taking a toll on my mental health. Go bug your mother.” by literally burning the skin off of our bodies.
Human children, not yet sophisticated enough to communicate effectively (i.e. – via a vanity blog), learn to not touch the stove the first time they get burned by it. By contrast, human adults will repeatedly allow the Sun to air fry them, convinced that it’s making them healthier. Despite humans being neither french fry nor chicken wing wherein air frying would be a healthy alternative, it should be noted that he skin of someone who spends too much time in the Sun on a regular basis does lend credence to the human-as-chicken-wing hypothesis.
Man, convinced that they have the right to spend as much time outdoors as they want to, has decided to wage war on the sun via technological means. Many people who ought to know better than to be outside will spend hours applying and re-applying a thin layer of UV resistant lotion. They purchase it in a variety of SPFs, and coconut-redolence, and water-resistances, and insect-repellences; a sunscreen for any occasion. Ironically, the demand for sunscreen, and it’s related manufacturing and supply chain, has helped emissions rise making the Sun, our greatest enemy, even more powerful than it had been. We could have kept the Sun slightly weaker if we just relied on all of the indoor spaces we’ve built to keep us safe from the tyranny of the centre of our universe.
If you think that I’m arguing that it’s just the mere existence of the Sun (thank you Sun for the life you have given me, please don’t start a forest fire) that makes the indoors a better place, then you have forgotten about mosquitos. As bad as the Sun is, even I can admit that it is pleasant in small doses, just like [insert the name of a barely-tolerable celebrity or foodstuff here]. The same cannot be said for the ever-present virus-riddled, parasite-carrying, blood-sucking, nightmare-inducing mosquito. Mosquitos, dosage be damned, are never pleasant.
The droning buzz of a mosquito is so unpleasant that a noise designed to keep possibly violent youths from standing around, staring at their phones in shopping mall foyers was named after it. Since we all know that staring at phones in shopping mall foyers is only for adults or people with degraded hearing, someone needed to innovate. I suspect Elon Musk, desperate to fund his eventual escape to Mars. The take-away is that the high-pitched whine of a mosquito is neither calming, nor soothing, nor relaxing unlike the low-pitched whine of a beluga whale which is all three.
If you can get past the sound and you shouldn’t, unless you’re a fan of contracting any number of flavours of encephalitis, dengue, or the zika virus, the mosquito still isn’t the kind of thing that should make you want to spend more time outside. Between spreading viruses and parasites around, these flying sacs of someone else’s blood kill 2.7 million people per year, which is more than skin cancer and all the players in the NFL combined. Also, if you really want a parasite, consider adopting a pet instead of contracting Malaria while throwing a steak on an outdoor grill, which is an objectively inferior method of steak cookery compared to anything other than boiling or microwaving.
Legally, you’re not required to wear pants in your own residence.
David J Hughes (not a lawyer)
By now it should be clear that given the comparatively small number of things inside your house actively trying to either remove your skin from your body, or implant tiny bugs into your bloodstream, even suggesting outdoor activities is irresponsible at best, and potentially exposing yourself to civil and/or criminal actions at worst. Even if you are willing to risk Rift Valley fever, or the ire of a giant ball of fire for a “good time”, there are still more land mines to be navigated. Mainly the booby trap that is other people.
I don’t know about you, but when I’m trying to enjoy a good book I like to make a drink, curl up on a soft couch, overstuffed chair, or hop into bed. It will be quiet, comfortable, and I can control the amount of light that bounces of the page or screen (heathens!) and caresses my eyeballs. I don’t have to find and apply mosquito repellent, or rub a layer of SPF what-have-you into by delicate skin to prevent both short and long term damage from the sun. I don’t have to try to find a way to effectively hold my book or device (heathens!) on a folding mid-century modern lawn torture device. Most of all, I don’t need to engage my neighbours with polite small talk as I try to hint that I’m just trying to read and, oh yeah you’re probably right that farmers could use some rain and no I don’t have a good way to get rid of fairy rings.
Maybe you’ve successfully avoided/completed small talk with the people who live around you, know that nothing is preventing them from firing up their gas mower not fifteen feet away from someone trying to enjoy the latest Danielle Steel novel they borrowed from the library. Nothing is preventing the neighbourhood kids from playing their favourite game Which one of us is the Loudest? (Patent Pending). Good luck with getting your brain firing on eight cylinders of steamy prose from Ms. Steel with all that racket going on. Democracy may die in the darkness, but romance recedes in the racket.
I am not naïve, and I know that nothing can prevent the Sun from bombarding us with UV rays, and nothing can prevent mosquitos from spreading all of the awful things that they are full of beyond just blood, and nothing can prevent neighbours from being loud. However, there is something that can mitigate all of these things: walls. So while I say to your face that I appreciate your input about where you think I should be spending my free time, I’ll stay in if it’s the same to you.
David J. Hughes