Powerful Warm
I have not written or done anything at all, and I blame this heat.
You know this heat, don’t you? Sure you do. We’ve been bathing in it for weeks. We’ve contemplated it for hours at night, in the nude, on our sweat-soaked bedclothes while staring vaguely at the alarm clock. Walking in the noxious marsh that has become of our city, we find no reprieve in shade, no joy in window shopping or ogling, even though clothing is scant. We have found ourselves driven to air-conditioned purgatories as refuge: movie theatres, libraries, the office, even grocery stores—the summer equivalent of bomb shelters. We are losing this war.
It pleases me to know that I am not alone in sloth. The blogs I read haven’t been updated in weeks. Nobody has any “projects” on the go. Times are decidedly stagnant, like the mellow air. This heat has permeated everything. There is an aspect to heat and humidity that affects the spirit above all. This heat does more than sap strength; it entombs and enslaves, and overcoming it is akin to a religious awakening. At times, I’m even taken to believe that the air conditioner represents the great spiritual breakthrough of our time—usually at times when I am spread-eagled across a cool surface so that no sweat can form from incidental contact between two regions of my own skin, like in the folds of the closed knee or elbow joint.
Fuck a heat.
I have been shambling around the city like a junkie in search of my next hit. I crave the blast. You know the blast. The blast is right and it is good. When you have spent hours in the fetid stench of heat death, groping for an exit, finding it in the form of a Starbucks with the A/C cranked to max, I implore you to open that door. Let the blast wash over you like some sacramental rite, replenishing with vitality your frayed, beaten, downtrodden soul, conferring its essence in a frigid wisp, aligning you with the cosmos for a brief second, before you realize that they’ve only jacked up the cold in the entrance to get customers in. No matter. Look to the blast for salvation, and salvation you shall find.
My apartment building has chosen to air-condition the lobby, an area no bigger than my living room, in order to tantalize and ultimately taunt us for a second as we return to our sun-soaked apartments, dull from a day’s work and wanting nothing more than to close the curtains on the world for a few hours. Comforted by the lobby’s chilly embrace, I falsely assume this luxury every time I come home, forgetful of what lies upstairs, waiting. I check my mail at the boxes and feel a slight temperature change, the embrace loosening. I ring the elevator. On entering, there is marked change in the air, a moist gust, thin and palpable, like opening the lid on a pot of steaming vegetables. My reverie is shattered. There are no delusions as to my immediate fate, only a premonition that is augmented with each lit ring of the rising elevator buttons. I throw a blank gaze at the placard of ads on the elevator wall, one of them promoting an air conditioner rental service. How prescient. It sits next to a tiny mirror embedded behind the glass case. I stare and see the lines forming, the early stages of a glisten. The chilled lobby that brought me from the stifling outdoors to a sense of normalcy is now a distant memory. It will soon serve as a harbinger once the mental association is made. The door grumbles open, and I walk headlong into a belch of hot, gooey, unctuous breath from the phlegmy gut of Beelzebub himself. This morbid, malignant aura follows me down the hall, around the corner. Stalking. Into my pocket, through the keyhole. And when I open that apartment door, the wave breaks over me, and as I enter this sopping residential rental hell, I curse. In the religious sense. I cast aspersions and poxes. I even utter tabernack. Shoulda bought a unit back in May. Shoulda stayed at the office forever. Maudit. Shoulda never been born in a country that could produce abominable weather patterns such as these. Shoulda given up on the atheism thing and handed myself over, here I am, yours, to be sculpted in the image of Christ and willing to do His work, and by the way what’s the temperature like in the church?
If you have watched with perverse fascination as a glinty film of sweat moves slowly up your forehead, positioning itself for maximum light refraction and specular highlight, before coagulating unprovoked into drops, all while you stand motionless before the bathroom mirror, you are one of us. If you have unbuttoned, and then removed, everything you are wearing, and longed for the ability to unbutton your own skin, you have my empathy. My good God in Heaven, if you have voluntarily stayed late at the office because it’s cool and crisp, not like your stinking, festering apartment, and thought nothing of it—the office for chrissakes!—well, we as a people are in the throes of defeat. This heat is not fucking around.
OK I’m done, my breath is leaving me. Time to soak a T-shirt in cold water and wear it to bed. You think that’s a joke but it’s not. Think of me while you’re in the dark on your back staring at the ceiling tonight, turning the pillow over a few more times, and contemplating religion.
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Like Wheelin’ a Bike
Everyone’s biking nowadays. Summer, fall, winter, doesn’t seem to matter to these people, people out there on their hybrids, their mountains, their recumbents, with the doofy triangular orange flags and bells, having a grand ol’ time. They say biking is the best way to see a city. The vantage point of the cyclist is not one preoccupied with storefronts and shiny things, like the pedestrian, or with road signage and rising levels of ire, like the driver. You can gaze upon the city at your leisure, looking left and right, watching people spill out of nightclubs and into Metro stations, or sitting on city benches. Bikers have entrenched themselves in recent years as a group not to be fucked with, commanding their fair share of the road, some might say sanctimoniously, but rightly, too. Watch how parking spots in big cities are crumbling off and being replaced with bike lanes, and how talk of “sedentary lifestyle” floods us with guilt. Cyclists and drivers now share the road like siblings—tense and petulant at times, but ultimately accepting.
Thinking about biking gets me thinking about big-city traffic, that tumultuous trench of wooshing machinery. Invariably, I grope back in time to when I visited New York City in high school and saw a shaven-headed guy in frayed jean shorts and rollerblades, holding a handle and being pulled along by a delivery truck on 116th Street. He would ride the truck until it had to turn, and then he’d grab onto something else. He did not seem to be giving it much thought, being carried along in a current of traffic and grasping at the nearest moving vehicle he could reach for a burst of propulsion. To treat your unprotected self as a car’s equal is, at least in urban terms, to live totally without fear. And not even a helmet! To me, that is crazy in the clinical sense, and to see a chasm separating his nonchalance with my round-cornered world is where I begin to see my problem, and that’s that I’m terrified of being a small body in a sea of hurtling machines.
Only once have I braved the cacophony of cars and arm-signals, and that was in polite Ontario, with a cute little bike path carved into the side of the road. Never in Quebec, where road signage is wholly perfunctory, and rules of the road take more the shape of a communal ethos of mutual aggression. You have not felt fear until you have watched a car with a Quebec license plate attempting to merge into your lane without entertaining the pretense that you might already occupying that space. I don’t wish to spread a bit of folklore; that’s really how the French drive. And the English, even. When they change lanes here they simply drive into the next lane with an innate understanding that those cars in the vicinity will react accordingly, and for the most part, they do. A cab driver once took me clear across the city in seven minutes, changing lanes every few seconds without once looking in his mirrors. It works, somehow. There are double- and even triple-parked cars everywhere, and all moving objects are assumed to be hazardous and unpredictable. You must be God-fearing and ready to die.
Cyclists occupy a different stratum in the natural order of the road. As a driver, I’ve had a few close calls with cyclists. Face it, they are hard to see sometimes, especially since many cyclists are prone to taking liberties to which drivers are not privy. Sure, I know the dangers of the door prize. I’ve heard of broken arms and worse. The defining characteristic among cyclists I know, though, is that even if they have gone sailing over their handlebars a few times in the past, they’re not about to give up cycling. Hell no. That would be surrender, even treason. I admire that. I admire the quality that allows cyclists to say “I could break my neck biking to work, but I’m going to do it anyway” when in fact, they hadn’t even considered the risk until you asked them about it.
So I’m going to buy a bike and start cycling in the city. I’ll keep the bike in my apartment—where, exactly, I haven’t figured out yet, since there’s nowhere between the couch, the wall, and the hall table for this thing to go, so perhaps I’ll just lay it on its side in the middle of my living room—and I’ll drag it out every morning into the elevator, with a helmet and a man-bag containing a spare inner tube, pump, tire, and tool kit. Rounded corners for this guy. I’ve got nothing to hide, no shame. I’ll ding my bell every few seconds just in case someone in a parked car was thinking of opening his door. Goofy-ass arm signals? Hell, yes. But most importantly, I’ll get to see the city for the first time, the way it was intended, and for the cost of a few door prizes, I’m getting a pretty good deal.
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