Hot Hot Heat

Despite what the calendar may say about summer officially beginning in June, it didn't really arrive in Boston before this week. Up until now we have had a gloriously temperate summer, marked by warm days cooled by sweet sea breezes and perfect 65 degree nights. It rains every third day, but this is Boston after all. But now, at last, the chickens have come home to roost, the hot sweaty summer chicken anyway.

I arrived in Boston from the Inland Empire in Southern California, which is, between the months of May and September, quite possibly the hottest place on earth save for, maybe, Baghdad. When I call my loved ones back in the good ol’ I.E. to bitch about the oppressive heat, they’re not exactly sympathetic. Nor do they understand why I think that a paltry 96 degrees is anything to phone home about. I’ll tell you what they do not – nay, can not – understand. It’s starts with an “H” and ends with an “umidity”.

The dripping wetness of the hot summer air in Boston turns a temperature that might otherwise be “uncomfortably warm” into “potent misery from which there is no escape”. With one hand on the Bible I swear to you that I would rather be in 110 degrees of dry heat than in 95 with a 60% humidity index (as it was today). A humid heat is something that the desert-dwellers in SoCal have no concept of, but even if they did it wouldn’t matter. Because they are keeping a whopper of a secret from the East Coasters ...

Boston, listen up, it is called “air conditioning” -- learn it, live it, and dry the sweat that permeates to your nether-regions.

Back in California, it is practically (if not actually) against the law not to have AC. I am serious. Everyone has it. In their homes. In their cars. In their work-place. On a boat and with a goat – you get the idea. It's the oppposite story for each coast when it comes to heat in the winter. No one has it in California, everyone has it in Boston, in every nook and cranny of your life or you die.

Since I am blissfully unemployed with no where to go and nothing to do (except be freeee!) for the next month, it has occurred to me how royally screwed I am in the coming weeks of swampy hellfire. I have no air-conditioned office or classroom to sit in. It is summertime and my sunny little apartment with no AC has turned on me.

Everyday I must devise a new plan to beat the heat. So far that has mostly included wandering aimlessly around shopping malls even though that last thing I need is any more crap. The best, albeit more expensive, form of sure-fire air-conditioning moochery is to hit up the local multiplex. I’m never going to see more movies in my life, I suspect, than in the coming weeks if this heat doesn't let up. I will also never again be so clean, as survival in my apartment dictates cold showers every hour on the hour.

There is no real moral to this story, except the obvious: it is summer and it is hot as hell. So inciteful, I know. This entire diatribe on (oy vei!) the weather is all thanks to an air conditioned coffee shop with free wi-fi. And I will spend 20 minutes writing to all the internets about something this incredibly banal if I must to spare myself a few more precious moments without my flesh melting off my bones. It might be the only way to truly share my suffering.