Down and Out in Hell

Descending to Lower Depths
I made it through the second day of 100-degree temps in the Big Apple; the weather birds on teevee say we have to endure this until at least 5 pm tomorrow afternoon.

Yes, again yesterday I had to bail out of my Tiger cage apartment and go down to my local pub and cool down, plus I downed a "cowboy" steak (a T-bone) and 5 or 6 Heinekens while I was cooling off.

It's hard to think through this shit; my brain is fried into a place where all it can deal with is coping with the heat; F music; F poetry; F F-ing even. I did get to listen to some music late yesterday afternoon but that was it; and then it merely took my mind off the heat long enough I got some letters ready to mail.

One weather babe as I'm typing this is chirping sweetly about how today it will feel like 115 though it will only be 98. Hey, 98 is hot enough; these weather turkeys want it even hotter; they love worst-case scenarios--makes you stay tuned through the silly, boring commericals, I would assume; plus it allows them to go into their handjive warnings about how this heat can KILL you. Finally, here's our billionaire little man mayor, looking cool as a well-cared-for cucumber, babbling about how this heat can kill. He wishes it would kill all poor people, especially all the old farts and worthless welfare and homeless people that are sprawled out all over his bailiwick. The unsuccessful are hated by billionaires, though this droopy little prick wasn't born a billionaire. Can you imagine how powerful you'd be if you controlled investments worth several billion dollars? Here's a little irony: in the big dead middle of Queens, New York, where they've been without electricity in some parts for 2 weeks now, in the big middle of this horrendous heat wave [by the way, Christian science says there's no such thing as global warming!], some lucky slob hit a megabucks lotto ticket for 30 million. Why, go look, luck may be in there boiling on your dresser top.

Right now, if I sit directly in front of one of my fans it's cool [the outside temp is 84 right now] though hovering around you, just outside the realm of the coolness sits that suffocating heat; you never lose the heat, not even while directly in the cool. Today, I'll try and condition my mind to cool ideas and try and shed the heat off my back like a duck sheds water off its back, then again around 4 pm, the most brutal time of the day during all of this, I'll slip-slide my way back down to my pub--MY KINGDOM FOR A PUB. At four pm, my southern exposed bay window has sat absorbing the sun's direct most fierce rays for two or more hours. This puts my apartment in the Twilight Zone until around 7 or 8 when you can at least get a little relaxation in before you have to struggle with trying to sleep through another night of this shit.

I can endure it; I was born in heat, in the middle of August on a bald prairie out on a Devil's anvil of a place in West Texas where temps of 100 in the summer are fairly normal. Hell, they went 11 years in my hometown without rain back in the nineties. That air is dry air and that's the difference in struggling against it there and struggling against it here: this frying is done in humid heat, the kind that sticks to you and tries to suck the cool totally out of your already naturally 98.8 body. It's a depressing heat, and, yes, as our little billionaire mayor says, it's a killing heat. New Yorkers are out on the killing floor. Right now if I take a deep breath, I can feel the heat sliding down my windpipe and stinging into my lungs. It is so hot, I'm typing in the dark; my lamp's heat would add 5 degrees to my already hot loft bed space; I'd bet it's in the 90s in my loft bed already, probably already 100 in certain corners of my room.

I'm excited. I love these kind of challenges. I'm tough but even toughness can wither under this heat barrage. Don't tell my landlord, but I'm gonna cave in next year and get an air-conditioner. Why? Because I think these are going to become normal summers here in NYC from now on and since most fools leading us don't believe in global warming, our geese are cooked, don't ya think?

Well, here I go...off into the perpetual sunset.

thebakedgrowlingwolf [down around the Fourth Level of Hades]
for The Daily Growler