Burn, Baby, Burn
Alas, there was a tad of coolness coming through the spinning blades of my four Malaysian-made fans just after midnight, finally, after, I swear, I had lived through one of the hottest days of Holy Hell I have ever suffered through in my life, and I was born in Texas under one of the sun's baddest and meanest eyes. And, I've been in Phoenix, Arizona, when it was 118, at least that's what it said on a bank thermometer right across the main drag from a hotel Bing Crosby owned and operated and next to the New Yorker Bar, where my travelling companion and I settled down in and lived in for the three days we had to be there in July, and then we travelled on over to Vegas, where it was cooler, it was only 112 the day we got there, and still, I don't remember suffering those times like I just suffered yesterday here in old Gotham. On that trip to Vegas from Phoenix, my Chevvie had a flat tire right in the middle of the Mojave Desert or whatever that desert is and I changed that tire right out there in that desert heat and damned if I didn't even sweat. It could have well been over 120 where I changed that flat tire. Yet, New York City yesterday beat the hell out of all those past heats of my experience. Holy fifty-arm Vishnus, all I could do in that heat was anticipate the end to it. I couldn't write; though I did manage to get my growling out and on screen bright and early that morning before the sun came up, but yesterday afternoon, hell, I could not write, play the piano, compose, learn the guitar, sell my trinkets--nope; I was frozen to slouthful thinking and acting by the heat.
How "Spoiled" We Amuricans Are
The people in Queens, New York, especially Astoria up to Woodside, went without power for two weeks. Think about that. During those two weeks businesses went without being able to do business; a lot of them had their products ruined, their inventories ruined, their equipment ruined...and ConEd, the big power God in NYC, kind'a told them "too F-ing bad"--I believe they offered these poor slobs 7 grand or some insulting amount like that--hell, they're a god, you worship ConEd as you worship a god and the same as with any god, it's services are expensive and you have to keep paying their ever-increasing bills right on time, too, man, or they will cut your power off, they don't give a crap if you're on a respirator or if you depend on you're life-saving medicines being kept cold--you make a mistake they ax your ass; they make a mistake, our billionaire mayor defends them and says we shouldn't be impolite to ConEd workers 'cause they're doing the best they can and he knows Good Ole Bruce or whatever his name is who is CEO over there and wonderful ConEd and he's doin' a heck of a job...BLAH, BLAH, BLAH...and more and more baloney. And the people in Queens are frozen in their tracks by the heat--their only rescue from the heat is luck, like lucky having a job that is air-conditioned or having relatives in another part of Queens where they have power or there is God...you see the complications, so many complications they really are angry but they can't express it because they are too hot and anticipatory of salvation from it, some of them on their knees with their rosaries out, Astoria and Woodside being mostly Eastern Ortho Greeks and Irish Catholics, so definitely there were rosaries out and there was chant-babbling nonsense to a nonexistent Big Daddy asking him, not ConEd, to please turn the power back on. That's why I say ConEd is the god here. It's ConEd those rosary prayers should have been aimed at; you know, jamming their phone lines, jamming good old Bruce's phone lines, jamming the billionaire mayor's phone line and jamming the phone lines of those fat-ass well-taken-cared-of politicians sitting in their air-conditioned-with-taxpayers's-money offices or riding around in one of those big nice air-conditioned limos we buy for them. [I haven't been down into the subway during all of this but I can imagine what it was like in one of those unair-conditioned subway stations (all of them) during this bad-ass punishing heat--all of these Midtown Hadean-breathed stations with huge buildings over them with huge air-conditioning systems and why can't the city tap that excess of cool air, you know, force those big-shot corporations to pipe some of that cooled air down onto those subway platforms--oh, god, I forgot, that would benefit the people and son of a bitch I forgot, that's not what politicians have on their greedy worthless minds at all. It's me, me, me, in the halls of any congress of politicians. Cut their power off until all the people of this city have power. Come on...hear me growling against a hoodooed full moon, which is like spitting into the wind for a sailor--it's gonna come back and haunt you...it's too hot to growl, though...one little spew of a growl and the heat leaves me sapped, fallen, subjected.
Now take it one step further. Let's go to the Sudan. Hey, man; check it out, there are men, women, and children over in that Holy Hell of a hot desert land, those refugees, who are living in tents or make-do constructions out in the flat middle of a treeless, totally mangey land, this land of dust devils and mirages, this desert of where only human compassion can save them--yeah sure. And these people deserve aid; they are willing to walk up to 10 miles in order to get as huge a container as they can carry on their heads full of water--and some of them are given supernatural strength by their urge to continue living and can carry absolutely breathtakingly large water cans those many miles...just think if we Amuricans had to do that everyday to get water, a necessity in life? Do you realize Bill and Melinda Gates, who are now worried about the American education system--I guess they've stopped disease already, wasn't that Bill's, Melinda's, and Warren "Junk Bond" Buffett's commitment just a few lousy billion dollars back--or was that just a photo-op excuse for those noveau riche jack-offs to hide a little more of their world-shattering wealth--God-dammit, I get off on these tangents and lose my place.
IT'S THE HEAT. It cooks your brain and causes you to do stupid things, like suddenly rip your clothes off in a frustrated rage and sing praises to Diana the Huntress or some such foolish B.S. Yowlllllllllll! But those petty bastards, you know, Bill, Melinda, and Warren, could pay to dig a branch of the Nile over to these people, or put a Poland Spring Bottling Plant in their desert tent city--bring them generators and give them all air-conditioners and fully stocked free grocery stores...they could take it off their taxes and really not lose a damn cent of their hidden away [off-shore-- or don't you think Bill Gates keeps his money in his own banking system? The Microsoft Bank of the World.] Of course, I can't prove all of this...NOT IN THIS HEAT.
I can't imagine Amuricans going through what MOST people in this world have to endure to get through life. The world is being cooked alive and we greedy Amuricans are still looking forward to the Chinese catching up with us in draining the planet of all it's fossil energies, leaving its old joints unoiled, leaving it to simply fall in upon itself, into the pits of its internal heat. Amuricans are overindulgers. Thank Zeus the rest of the world can get along on nothing.
It's now 11 am and I'm cooled down. The day will go fast today; relief tonight, at least that's what the weather babes are all chirping and the bad-wigged weather dudes are word-bulleting out at us, though they then update their forecasts and Hell it's gonna be 90 tomorrow, too, and Saturday, so the relief is really only in that the evening temps dropping farther down toward the seventies than they have in the past three days. It's still gonna be hot, but it's gonna break enough that you can regain some normalcy and exercising your normal energetic drives again.
The temp in my room must have shot up near 120 yesterday; it was so hot I was breathing in and breathing out fire, pure fire, no smoke. My old Ford Motor Company thermometer cut out at 93; it simply gave up the ghost; no smoke, just boiling cinnabar juice. Some information on cinnabar:
http://www.galleries.com/minerals/sulfides/cinnabar/cinnabar.htm
Yesterday morning started off different than the last two beastly mornings; those mornings had been rather comfortable because the temperature those mornings went down into the lower eighties, deep enough down there that it exposed some cool airs that relaxed you enough you could coast into the furnace of the afternoon rather confidently--and day-before-yesterday was pretty brutal, but yesterday started out already in the nineties and it cooked worst than an out-of-control Bessemer converter and cooked and cooked and cooked and its air assumed its hottest taste and when breathed it cooked your insides, and outside the sun kept cooking, and cooking, and cooking, and broiling, and baking, and looking out my large bay window facing directly at the half-southern sailing sun all I saw was an opaqueness covering Lower Manhattan.
Here's a little information about a Bessemer converter:
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/streamliners/sfeature/sf_steel_iron.html
I held out bravely until 4:30 when I literally melted; my brain started running out my ears and some of it out of my nose; my bravado sizzled to zip under the sun's harsh burning-at-the-stake punishment. Punishment for what? you ask. Punishment for allowing it into our atmosphere; you know, we opted to keep driving gas-guzzlers; we opted to keep depending on fossil fuels for our energy; we opted to lower our environmental standards and allow poluting corporations to literally get away with the murdering of our planet. But that's humans; we love killing. That's progress, folks. Yep, progress kills.
Bessemer, Alabama, "the Marvel City," by the way, is named after the Bessemer converter.
Hotchas! from
thegrowlingwolf
for The Daily Growler
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