The Sun as The Red Chief DevilI just survived the hottest day I've ever experienced since coming to New York City--though it did get 100 in the 1980s and I remember when it used to get so hot in my apartment that you could see heat waves dancing like minimirages across the griddled air of my sweltering-as-a-sailing-ship-caught-in-a-calm room--but I was extremely younger then--ultrasevere stuff didn't bother me so much--so it could have been 100 no doubt but I don't remember it effecting me like the heat did yesterday. Officially the high was only 95, not the record, but it felt like Dante's description of Hell's lowest floor, with the Devil stuck headfirst in this Paved-Over Lake of Fire, his giant legs sticking straight up.
Now it is 3 o'clock in the morning; sleeping any more tonight is out of the question. The fans are blowing still stale but "cooler" air than just a few hours ago when there was no coolness whatsoever in their blowing. The Luciferian weathercreatures on teevee (our Window on Hell) are saying today will top yesterday for suffocating, downpressed, human-degrading hotness with the hotass numerals sizzling upwards towards the supreme 100, definitely, they guess, going to 97-98, which will be a new record for June 10 in NYC. Did you know if your body temperature rises to 106 you are pretty near DEAD? The patriarch of my father's family died of heat stroke when he went out on his Gawjah farm without his old strawhat.
I held out yesterday until 4 pm--by then it was so hot and uninhabitable in my room I had to flee the joint, leave it to drift afire in its heat wavelets, and head down to my favorite Irish Pub--and there I sat for hours drinking cold Heinekens and flirting with this unbelievably cool Ukrainian chick who is the hostess there now--plus the Irish girl that I would marry were I 20 years younger was there, too, first really cool and hot at the same time in her street clothes--cool, right? And I was cool, though the Irish Pub air-conditioner was gasping a bit though it was keeping the joint cool enough for survival and the backbar refrigerators were staying icy cold enough to make the Heinekens colder that that proverbial witch's teat. Then one of my gal pals found me, joined me, paid the tab, then took me back to this apartment. She said, as we entered this hellhole, "Why it's not so hot in here." Jesus, woman, how cool thou art. It was steaming in here; but she knew why she was here so that was that. After she left I was able to cop some Zs--a steamy sleep, though sleep still--and I slept from 8 or so until 10--and I've been up since.
The Luciferian weatherbeasts are saying this heat is due to "the Bermuda High." Now, folks, I've been suffering through various weathers in New York City for 30 years or more (make that "more") and never have I heard mention before of a Bermuda High. That's like "the Heat Index," a device these weatherbirds like to use to make it seem hotter than it is--they'll say, "It's 95 in Central Park but when factoring in the Heat Index it's more like 105!" Hey, that keeps you watching for their weather bulletins--the Luciferian weatherbeasts's crowning moment in the sun. They do it in the winter, too, with the "Wind Chill Factor," you know, "It's 25 degrees in Central Park, though with the wind-chill factor it's more like Zero out there."
Cold winters don't bother me. My landlord has to give me heat. Why he doesn't have to give me coolness, I don't know. If I get an air-conditioner, which I may be forced to do before this Globally Warmed Summer is over, my landlord, a foreigner with Egyptian money behind him, will double my rent from May to September. Now the real estate hijackers are currently before the city council, actually pets they carry around in their backpockets--the real estate people rule New York City by buying politicians--you know, paying for the campaigns, sending them on junkets and shit, big bucks for these piddlers, saying they need to raise rents 10 to 30% due to the high cost of fuel oil, though they had so mild a winter I don't think fuel oil expenses were a major problem for these corrupt assholes, most of them foreigners with foreign money backing them, oil money in the case of my landlord--ironically his family owns a New England fuel oil company. Just think, if I hadn't lived in my apartment for 25 years, I'd be paying $2,000 a month for this stifling hellhole room--yes, he would have remodeled it, but he wouldn't have put air-conditioning in it; no that's up to the tenant, so that means with an air-conditioner during the summer months, I'd have to come up with $4000 a month. I think my landlord will let you stretch your payments out over twelve months but still--what a way to steal money from We the People who I think deserve affordable housing, housing prices based on individual abilities to pay and not real estate market bases.
And we've had power outages all over as expected, especially over in Boerham Hill Brooklyn--3,000 people have been without power for a day and a half now over there. Then Con-Ed had a transformer blow up on the Upper East Side, a hoity-toity neighborhood of hi-rise luxury buildings, and it was downright heartwarming to see these New Yuppy whites having to walk up 42 floors to their apartments--the elevators don't work when the power goes down--why buildings aren't mandated to have emergency power supplies I don't know--takes away from the profits I assume--Profits being the motive behind the outrageous real estate development going on in this city as I type this.
So here we go again--100-degree heat in the Concrete Jungle--and it is jungle heat, too.
If I don't survive, it's been nice knowin' you.
"Up jumped the Devil in a brand new Cadillac!"
thesultrygrowlingwolf
for The Daily Growler (hot off the press)
EXtra Addition:
The 7:35 Jump
A commenter wrote "Ye complain too much"--a little voice in my head said I thought you craved Chaos--entropy--and isn't this heat just a simulated Chaotic experience--a sort of street theater production of "Things to Come"?--end of question: question answered: Amen and Selah, brother or sister or never the Twain shall meet, 'tis true, I did whine like a silly dog with one of my hind legs caught in a Komodo dragon's mouth--and he's fixin' to GULP! So, hey, I got out my survival manual, looked up "What to do when one of your hind legs is caught in a Komodo dragon's mouth--and he's fixin' to GULP!"--and here's what I found: "There's power in underground piped water, piped down from the Catskill Mountains in an underground aquaduct, coming straight down fresh from the winter-filled springs of those old mountains--that Washington Irving made famous..."--oh NO, a "Who?" for Washington Irving?--and, yes, Washington Irving might be a forgotten man, a writer, though he does have a high school named for him here in New York City--back to the survival manual: "...with his Sleepy Hollow Tales--a water though it be 97 degrees on top the world, stays rather cold closed-to-melting-snow-cold as it brook-tumbles down from those still chilly Catskills...." That's all I needed to read. I immediately went into the bathroom and turned on the cold water and sure enough, and I had really known it all along--I mean I was constantly going in there and pitching some of that cold water on my face--yet, dumbass that I am sometimes, slow to draw, as they'd call me in Texas, this time I was cool thinkin' and that led to cool action, and I took this Ernest Hemingway 100% cotton teeshirt, a nice heavyweight one, it has a picture of young Ernest the Warrior in his WWI Italian Army uniform on the front and on the back has this quote from Papa: "There are some things which cannot be learned quickly, and time, which is all we have, must be paid heavily for their acquiring." And after that cooled my heels, I dipped Papa in a lavatory bowl of that cold Catskill Mountain water, wrung him out pretty good, then slung him up over my shoulders and SHA-ZAAAAAM, son of a bitch, I was cool as a cucumber, yes, that I suddenly became, that cold Catskill Mountain water saturating that Hemingway teeshirt and so cold against my naked chest and shoulders and back--HOT DAMN, I shouted with glee--No, I did not add the literarily correct "Bring on the Jew Girls" after this HOT DAMN--though this HOT DAMN is based on the HOT DAMN, Bring on the Jew Girls! shouted by De Lawd as all the Chillin' were filled with de firmament--and yes the play, Green Pastures, was probably racist, written by a white man, Marc Connelly, from a book by a white man, Roark Bradford (his son later wrote the novel Red Sky at Morning)--I suppose there is like an Amos 'n Andy curse on this play, though they used black actors in the play--and then in the movie, too; Eddie Anderson was in the movie and Oscar Polk--here's a recent comment on the movie by a black dude:
I've never seen a movie like this. It's probably one of the most interesting Biblical movies I've ever seen. I'm black and I didn't think it was too offensive, considering the time period that it came from. In fact, my whole family liked it. This is one movie you really have to give a chance before you watch it. Unfortunatelly, movies like this and Disney's "Song of The South" are thrown among the wayside so they won't "corrupt" our "politically correct" society.
So, here I sit wearing my Hemingway teeshirt soaked to the gills with cool Catskill Mountain water fresh out of my lavatory's cold water faucet--and not Fawcett like Fawcett Books, once an easy place to get a job, down on West 44th across from the Algonquin Hotel, Fawcett Publications--a joke book being the start of Fawcett Publications, a joke book written by Cap'n Billy Fawcett and printed by Cap'n Billy himself out of Minneapolis, Minnehaha! Minnesota is a jerky kind'a interestingly odd very Swedish-attitude kind of state that elects very weird natives to political office, like Jesse "the Body" Ventura, a fake rassler, to their governorship and now giving not-funny former comedian Al Franken their Dumbocratic nomination to run for the Senate against incumbent Norm Coleman, who, I think, is an old chum friend of Franken's--strange place that Minnesota--strange that they're also building a totally-open-park baseball stadium to replace the oddball H.H. Humphrey Dome--where high fly balls can get caught in the light structures in the ceiling--considered a foul ball! or if it falls out of the lights and you catch it it's an out--anyway, that's Minnesota.
So, Yippee! I'm cool as a basking sea lion as I dwaddle away the morning here in my blessed and turning Chaotic home, Gotham, good ole New York City--come on, Chaos! And there's Chaos out at Yankee Stadium--where two nights in a row Mariano Rivera has given up home runs to blow saves, one not saving a game for lousy-so-far starter Jabo Chamberlain; and also there's Chaos reigning supreme over in 100-degree Shea Stadium where the withering Mets are taking on the also withering Arizona Diamondbacks, who'll be right at home in this heat. My first time driving into Phoenix way back when, as I was driving into downtown Phoenix to look for a hotel room, I saw a bank sign that had the temperature on it: it said "118." My car started turning into the parking lot of the New Yorker Bar before I started turning the steering wheel--once inside the New Yorker, I cooled off with a Tom Collins (I was a poet in those days), while the bartender said, "Wait until after the sun goes down; it'll be cold as hell--freezes way out in the desert on nights like this one's gonna be."
They are predicting tonight's NYC temp will fall down below 70 to 68 after Big Sol goes sailing off toward the Pacific Rim. That will be the finale of this whole big heat wave production. A lot of exaggeration during these traumatic times.
Did you know our mayor and state government are so crooked and bribetaking here in NY State, that most of the New York City public schools are not air-conditioned? Can you imagine that? Our little billionaire mayor put a stock broker in charge of New York City schools--that's how devastatingly bright that dumb bastard is. 'Scuse me, but I'm back to normal. Ready for a HUMP, Rex?
acoolergrowlingwolf
for The Daily Growler EXtra
Mr Ed Sez: I trashed a poem sent in by a commenter yesterday--it was reflecting on the Emily Dickinson poem we ran yesterday during the heat--it was just not a very good poem, so I trashed it, me an editing horse. No apologies, challenged friend, and you're certainly still welcomed to be a Growler--and keep working on yur po'ems though some of your metaphors are already Internet cliches, and that's true even in the horse world.
Equine o'er
Aurora's
Borealis o'er
jumping o'er
an old boring
poet's pack of
lyrical lies.
A horse,
my King Dome, for:
jumping
junipers
with aboard
jaunty
horsey
jodhpurs
perched
tight 'n
high in
anticipation
as Equine o'er
Aurora's
Borealis
flashes 'cross
the sky;
for here comes
another pack
of an
old boring poet's
pack of
lyrical lies.
Written by Mr. Ed, the editing horse.
From moderndrunkardmagazine.com "The Good, the Bad, and the Thirsty," the heartiest drunkards in the Old West--"Hi Yo, Whiskey!"
www.moderndrunkardmagazine.com/issues/54/54_good_bad.html
No comments:
Post a Comment