Amateur Megalomania

I hope you summer weather freaks are satisfied. You know who I’m talking about. They are usually thin, athletic, tan and bouncy. They go on and on about how they can’t get warm while layering on enough clothes to clean out a Maylasian sweatshop. While normal people hurry from shade to shade, these people lay out on baked asphalt to darken up that tan. Eventually they can blend into the asphalt like some deeply wrong chameleon.

Days like this make me want to deny you access to air conditioning. If it were up to me, I’d have a phalanx of sweaty overweight types at the doors, reminding you how much you love the summer heat and how now would be a swell time for you to get your fill.

The heat purges.

Memories are short. Tempers are short. Manners are shorter. We leave the shelter of the AC as intelligent beings, and if we are lucky, we’ll remember what we were setting out to do long enough to make it to our cars and get the AC engaged and functioning. You’ll see the unlucky, wandering the parking lot like a George Romero zombie. Poor guy was a brilliant doctor until he forgot where he parked. Now he wanders, unable to form a coherent thought as the trappings of civilized life melt from his brain. Later, you’ll find his shriveled, desiccated corpse wedged under a Ford Expedition.

Hang out just inside any decently air conditioned public space and you’ll witness the restorative effects of Freon-analogs. People cross the threshold and pause as their IQ shoots up a few dozen points. You see the befuddled expressions as people remember why they ever left their house in the first place. I imagine this is what a re-animation clinic will be like in 2150. Wake up the corpses and watch the confusion while you re-acquaint them with living.

This is what is wrong with the Middle East. Every time I see someone over there burning a flag or chanting ‘Death to whatever’, they’re wrapped in enough cloth to fashion a large tent, standing (or jumping up and down) in the blazing heat without a scrap of shade in sight.

Allah may have blessed them with Islam, but simple shade or air conditioning would have been a little more appreciated. Even the buildings over there don’t seem to cast shadows. It’s like they have this enormous hemispherical sun radiating from all points on the compass. In a normal situation, I’d expect to see the entire population of Kuwait huddled behind a tall building, slowly moving like some human Focault Pendulum.

I’m surly in this heat. Little things annoy me to no end. I’m sitting here at lunch and at the next table, some Very Important People are discussing Things Of Great Import to the company. The past ten minutes have been consumed with an intense discussion over the ‘beautification’ of the slides to be used in a presentation for an Even More Important Person. I would suggest cornflower blue but I’m afraid the reference would be lost on the lot of them.

Anger comes easily on these days. I’m inside, in the AC, but I still feel a bubbling rage connected to the conditions outside. The air is thick, and I feel like someone is pushing a warm, stale, wet towel into my face.

This past weekend we took the kids to the zoo as early as possible, before it got too hot…too hot for what I’m not sure, because even at the crack of dawn, I’m pretty sure it is ‘too hot’. Here we wandered the zoo grounds, finding most of the animals stored away in their internal, air conditioned cages. Great denizens of the African plains are avoiding this heat, yet my wife and I are walking around with two toddlers. But the irony of the situation was lost on me at the moment, since the heat had already eroded my IQ to that of a marmoset.

Monday at one of my many useless meetings, a co-worker related how her son-in-law spent six hours on Sunday roofing his house. He ended up vomiting all night and unable to reduce his core temperature, followed by hospitalization.

Go figure.

He’s one of those outdoors types.

I managed to hide my satisfaction.

Filed under: Grab Bag