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.
Posted to:
(1 comment)
get off your lazy summer ass and record a chapter for me. see:
http://librivox.blogsome.com
hugh.