Or is it just me

Okay, I give. Uncle! You win. I surrender. I willingly yield to the stronger opponent. Capitulation is what I am doing. Can somebody call off the heat hounds and cool this joint down? I’ve lived in Kansas the majority of my life so I have experienced high temperatures before, but this is ridiculous.

I worked at the Airport Drive-In Theater the summers of my high school years (give yourself thirty bonus points if you remember going there to see a movie – but deduct fifty points if you went to any of the four show marathons featuring movies with women in scarcely any clothing and storylines with scarcely any plot). One of the tasks given to me and one or two of my lucky co-workers was painting the poles the speakers rested upon. There is not much in the world more pleasurable than using a wire brush to scrap the old paint off of and add a couple new coats of paint to several dozen three and a half foot tall metal posts. Then add the fact we did this in the dead of summer and you have found an existence approaching unremitting nirvana, or was that just because of the hallucinations. Still that was more pleasant than the last several days.

There are lots of things we have lived through in summers past that were uncomfortable. All of us have put our hands on a steering wheel in August only to remove our hands from the steering wheel faster than Charlie Sheen can think of something else stupid to say. We do that because if we don’t let go all ten of our fingers will spot weld in place and the only destination we’ll be driving to is the nearest hospital. Those of us in too much of a hurry to wait for the air conditioner to cool the car sufficiently in order to genuinely take hold of the wheel have been known to steer using a combination of alternating index fingers and thumbs in conjunction with our knees.

Here is an advantage of driving a crummy 1989 two door Ford Escort with nothing of value inside it. I can leave the windows open no matter where I park it (goodness knows the interior isn’t going to get wet when it rains because rain in the foreseeable future is as likely as Michele Bachmann inviting that Kurt kid from Glee to perform at her next campaign event). As hot as it has been my eldest daughter, who drives a black car with a black interior and who rolls up the windows whenever it is parked, characterizes getting into her car as getting into an oven full of soup. Not a tepid chicken broth but rather a piping hot serving of full bodied cream of mushroom cloud soup because it is nuclear explosion hot in here.

This heat wave has been epic. When I get up in the morning it is already warm. I walked to work the other day. It was before eight o’clock so I thought I’d be safe. By the time I got there my face looked like the bad guy from Captain America and my deodorant had mailed in its letter of resignation. It also stays downright hot well into the night. When the temperature at ten o’clock at night is equal to the latitude of the Geographic North Pole it is too darned hot.

Some people covet money. Some people covet power. Some people covet the ability to be invisible and sneak into places to overhear what other people say about them. (Some “covets” are more realistic than others.) This kind of weather just makes it crystal clear to me that I covet comfort. I am addicted to Freon. If I had been born 200 years ago and a summer day rolled around with a temperature above 93 degrees you wouldn’t find me showing great stamina and perseverance working in the field. I’d be hiding under a shade tree in nothing but my skivvies valiantly holding on to the feet of an owl as he furiously flapped his wings thus functioning as an improvised high powered fan. He would even kind of oscillate….nifty.

I have been trying all sorts of tricks to beat the heat. My internet radio is tuned to Christmas songs. I covered my office with pictures of Samuel L. Jackson and Dean Martin. My doctor even gave me a prescription for an intravenous drip of Ben and Jerry’s Chunky Monkey.