Dispatch From The Warm Front

Dateline: Tuesday, June 29

Well, it's only supposed to top out at a nippy 98 today. Yes, the tryouts for Satan's team lasted three days and we don't like to brag but we're pretty sure we're going to make the squad. The predicted high of 118 on Monday did not pan out, but the 116 obliterated the previous record of 112 set the day before, which smashed the previous record of 108 set the day before that. We made it. And Studley made it!

We made it without air conditioning. We were not especially comfortable but we most certainly survived, and during much of the time we weren't even that miserable. Contrast that with folks I saw complaining bitterly about how they weren't able to get their houses below 80 even with AC. And their swimming pools were too warm.

Of course, we're retired, and nothing was asked of us other than to sit quietly and not die. Our mailman, on the other hand, was sent out with a full load and instructions from the boss to also not die, but when he showed up in his salt-encrusted hat we gave him a tank of ice water and turned the hose on him and sat him down until his cells reinflated. As for his boss's instructions, it looked like it could have gone either way.

One friend up north reported that it had gotten up to 110 in her house when all the AC crashed the power grid. This is what I'm talking about: we've lost our skills. Hell, on our hottest day even the upstairs never got above 98. We exhaust all the air we can overnight and then button up the place tighter than Mitch McConnell's asshole. Sunday night I opened all the windows and pointed the fans out and took a cold shower and went straight to bed soaking wet with another fan on me, and I slept very much like the dead.

Part of the skills involve being able to tolerate a much wider range of temperatures than most of us have come to expect. We've become a shorts-in-the-winter and sweaters-in-the-summer kind of people, and we have nowhere to go when the system breaks down, which it is going to do.

The newspaper helpfully provided some tips for surviving extreme heat. For instance, it is suggested that you wear loose clothing to bed. Check! I've been wearing the very same suit to bed since I was fourteen (don't tell Mom), and it's gotten plenty loose. Portions of it are slouched up against other portions of it. At this point the underboobular area is my primary repository for perspiration but I have auxiliary folds in the back for off-site storage. I'm all set.

Here are my tips: sure, it's tempting to open some veins to let the heat out but be advised the relief is short-lived because the blood evaporates so quickly. So if you try this hack, you're going to want to really go for it. Similarly, you could stretch out in a kiddie pool, but remember you can drown in as little as four inches of water, so be sure to put in at least six to be on the safe side.

Better yet is to go to the source of the problem and eliminate Republicans. They've signed off on this entire debacle. As long as their preferred solution to the climate catastrophe is to make fun of Greta Thunberg, it will be crucial for us to take them out of circulation altogether. The liberal-softie way would be to vote them all out, but if they're bent on stealing an election, which seems to be their plan, stronger measures must be taken. To that end, please note that a shot through the heart is not recommended; the target is far too small and the bullet is likely to exit harmlessly straight through the spinal tapioca. Much better is to aim for the head, and possibly take out Trump's ass at the same time.

Wait! Am I inciting my followers to murder Republicans? Ha ha! Of course not! I'm kidding! Stand by.

 

In other news that should surprise no one, an enormous comet is heading our way. They're made of ice. I can't wait.

Pudding, Steak, and Cake

I've decided to devote mornings to priming the rental house. It's been close to a hundred degrees for forty-five days this month alone, and it may not pay to put off painting until it cools down, because it's possible it will remain this temperature until approximately 100,000 years after the death of Sen. Mitch McConnell (Rep--Kingdom of Coal). But it's been horribly warm in the mornings too, and that is how I discovered the precise temperature at which primer turns into pudding and slides off the house.

It's always something, with pudding. You put in all the ingredients and then you stir and stir and stir over low heat and nothing ever seems to be happening and you re-check the recipe and sure enough it does say "over low heat" but you start to lose confidence and you crank up the burner a little and start casting a longing eye toward the drawer with the cornstarch in it, and then all of a sudden, BAM, pudding. In fact, pudding that can stand up and march out of the pan. So it's all very temperature-dependent. And the primer on the rental house turned into pudding at precisely 10:38am, and when I checked the temperature graph for the day I found out that it was, at that moment, a bazillion degrees. So mark that down.

If I'd waited until afternoon, I could have stuck my paintbrush in the can and pulled out a can-shaped block of primer on a stick. It's fucking hot, is what I'm saying. Dave, as usual, went for a long walk and when he came back he was brown all the way through and his juices ran clear. I spent some time outside also, and by mid-afternoon I'd started to pull away from the sides of the pan and spring back lightly when pressed in the middle. I was a little flat, but that's because I don't have any eggs anymore. I should be presentable with a nice topping of the little crisp, crumbly bits that used to be my garden. So we're totally ready for company, if they should happen to be cannibals.

I've had some experience with this nonsense. I grew up in what would have been the shadow of Washington, D.C., if it had any shadows in the summertime. We coped. We opened up the house at night and exhausted the air out with a fan and then sealed it up tight in the morning and drew the shades, and usually we could get all the way to early afternoon before having to lie down on the linoleum in front of the little round black oscillating fan, breathing shallowly, waiting to die, and dreaming that some day someone would invent air conditioning.

And someone did, and we all love it. Even though it is helping make everything hotter, we all love it.

We Should Chill

This summer I must have heard a dozen people declare that they would die without air conditioning. We got into a little patch of warmth here in Portland, total sunblare, highs in the nineties for a few days on end, and things got critical for a lot of folks. In my opinion, you do not need air conditioning in Portland. We'll have a really hot stretch for, like, three days in a row, which you could easily live through with a wet washcloth and a fan, leaving you with 363 days of relative comfort. We can go years without having a nighttime temperature above 69. So even on your hot days, if you can exhaust the air out of your house at night with a good fan, you can make out like a bandit, compared to the rest of the nation.

And, in fact, I also believe no one needs air conditioning at all. How could we? It wasn't invented that long ago. People managed to survive long enough to poke sperm into each other for a million years before AC came on the scene.

So people are using hyperbole when they say they will die without air conditioning, which is laudable from a literary standpoint, except that they seem so sincere. Actually, I get it. I hate heat passionately. I moved across the country to--okay, I just moved to leave a boyfriend behind and shake my life up a little, but once I discovered that you could go through a summer without thinking about opening up a vein just to let some heat out, which you totally would have done if you could have summoned the energy, why, I didn't want to move back. It sucks being hot. It's mizzable.

But it's survivable. Heat is God's way of saying "you keep crying, I'll give you something to cry about." You don't like to be hot? I've got locusts. I've got floods. I've got plague and war and famine. Keep whining, and see where it gets you.

My suspicion, though, is that we've come to depend on AC so much that we don't even allow ourselves a reasonable range of comfort. We don't want to inconvenience a sweat gland or ask too much of a shivering muscle. No, we've pretty much got it down to a yearlong 70 degrees. We want to sweater up to our comfort level. We don't want to give our cells a workout. We're boxing ourselves in.

And if it didn't matter, if there was no downside, I would say bring it on. Can you make my whole house suitable for naked TV-watching all year? Lovely. I've got 2500 more square feet than I need, but all those rooms should be comfortable too, in case I need to walk through them on the way to the fridge or the clothes dryer. But air conditioning takes coal. It takes oil and gas. It takes water away from salmon. It's jamming the atmosphere with carbon. It's heating us up. We might actually die from all that, or our kids will. And we can't keep doing this.

I grew up without air conditioning, in Washington Gates-Of-Hell D.C. Not without complaining, hell no. But definitely without dying. We'd lean into the mosquitoes for the breeze from their wings. We'd lie on the floor in a personal marinade of unevaporated sweat and stick our fingers in the black oscillating fan every now and then, just to feel something different. But no one does that anymore. God, we're such pansies about our comfort.

Don't be putting a tag in the seam of my underpants, though. That's crossing a line.

The Hinges Of Hades

It's hot. It's so hot I could accessorize with pepperoni slices. It's a hundred and fifty degrees in Portland, Oregon, give or take, and that's just not fair. That would be like going to Disneyland, the happiest place on earth, and Mickey Mouse up and gives you a wedgie. It should never happen. It makes me cranky and miserable and also reminds me of asparagus beetles.

Asparagus beetles live only on asparagus plants. They don't have a Plan B. Their function is to take divots out of your fresh asparagus spears. There might be something in it for them, too, I don't know. A long time ago, we had what was probably the only asparagus patch in a couple square miles. It stood tall and proud, waving its feathery fronds, until the first asparagus beetle showed up, followed by a squadron. How did they locate our little asparagus patch? They followed a gradient of asparagus-fume molecules. They found one molecule, then happened onto a direction with a few more, and kept moving towards the areas of greater asparagus fumelet concentration until they were smack into Divot City. Same gradient concept applies to flies on poop. Don't ask me why moths find porch lights. I think that's just a lack of personal brightness.

When I was a child, I did the same thing, following a temperature gradient. I grew up in Arlington, Virginia, where Satan sends the people who are acting up. We could only play in the sprinkler for so long, and then we pitched over in the shade until the chiggers drove us out, when we slithered into the house on a slime trail of unevaporated sweat, and ultimately prostrated ourselves on the kitchen linoleum in front of a black oscillating fan, arms and legs positioned as far away from each other as possible. This would be the last time anything I did reminded anyone of Leonardo da Vinci. We lay sullen and miserable, our tissues softening like carrots in a saucepan.

Mrs. Tangerose was the first person we knew who bought an air conditioner. A whole group of the church ladies walked over to her house to see, and I tagged along. The house felt like ours except for one room, and we walked in and suddenly it was January in the Yukon, our sweat iced over, and we had never been happier in our lives. That room air conditioner did a lot to bolster my belief in God, until we had to leave.

Our plan at home was different. The house was closed up with the shades drawn all day, and then in the evening Daddy would obsessively check the thermometers until the moment when the inside temperature was 90 and the outside was only 89, and then the windows were flung open and the creaky window box fan upstairs was turned on, pointing out. Ahh! By morning we were comfortably down to 86 or so and the house was shut up again, while Daddy went off to work in an air-conditioned office.

Mom was not the complaining sort, but somewhere in the mid-sixties she expressed some interest in a new-fangled central air conditioning system. Daddy stoutly maintained that going from an air-conditioned office to an air-conditioned bus to an air-conditioned house was not good for you. At moments like that, I tended to consider mine a miracle birth.

Women's lib came along and dropped some ideas in Mom's head and one day she took her flawless grammar and spelling and 135 wpm typing skills and got herself a part-time job, and just like that we had central air, just in time for me to leave home. I grew up and headed north, then west, following a temperature gradient, and that's how I ended up in mossy Oregon with the asparagus beetles. Where global warming is fixing to give us a giant wedgie.