Mid-day, Orlando. I have not gone outside yet. I can tell from the saturated bright behind the window that it's really fucking hot. Also, it's mid-summer, and yesterday was hot. I was outside, briefly. A single bead of sweat formed on my rib.
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“Excessive heat” warnings in Dallas. High of 103. To avoid rolling black outs, our energy company sends an email asking all customers to set their thermostats to 78 degrees. Texas is the only state on its own power grid. Held together with rubber bands and blind Evangelical faith. Last winter it crapped out and people froze to death in their living rooms. Yesterday J went to Tom Thumb and bought popsicles shaped like ballistic missiles. Red, white and blue. “For emergencies only,” she said.
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The deep freeze in my garage is stuffed with Costco-sized boxes of those pops. Amy and I give them to the boys in exchange for eating dinner, using the toilet, cleaning up, and generally existing. Often, they'll take down the first half, no biting, and together scream BRAIN FREEZE! before taking a few laps around the table. I'd pay them in popsicle to stop if they didn't already have them. When they decide to sit again, the primary colors drip down their forearms, and they crunch them down to nothing. One day I'll have to sit them down at the same table (clean) and break the news about Santa Claus and Florida. "There are fifty states," I'll tell them. "And we live in this one, with the brain-eating amoebas in the ocean, an old law that allows people to shoot others on their bank-owned property, and a new law that tells teachers they can't teach things that make the Governor uncomfortable." God bless the kids, I guess. And the men surrounded by guns in Dallas, pushing the AC down to 72, saying a little prayer for the grid.
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We’ve packed up and gone north, to Oklahoma, where it’s ten degrees cooler and 5% more enlightened. On the way up we passed a legal marijuana dispensary, something we only have in Dallas under the guise of CBD shops and the recent Delta-8 loophole. Last year, not fully understanding the loophole – not fully understanding, that is, that Delta-8 is the exact same thing as Delta-9, i.e. just plain old weed – I took 5x the recommended dose and launched myself into outer-fucking-space. Full on psychoactive dissociation. Freaky shit. Since then I haven’t touched the stuff, except one more time when I touched the stuff a little, but never again after that, having sworn off space travel for now, doing my best to just stay grounded, to just keep my head on. I drink Topo Chicos and eat light lunches. I go for walks. Even here in the mild Oklahoma summer (overcast, high of 92) it’s easy to get overheated. Dizzy and light-headed. After six months with no substances, I almost welcome it. I used to pay big bucks to feel light-headed. Now I just sit outside for twenty minutes and my head floats off like a hot air balloon.
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Still here in my peninsula, for eternity, where I’ll stay on hold with my son’s ENT office as I have been the past ten minutes. He keeps getting strep—in this constant heat, no less. On Friday, after the antibiotics from last week didn't work, his pediatrician told us to take him to the ER. There was a white spot on his tonsil. His enlarged adenoids were blocking his nasal passage. His lymphnode stuck out of his neck so much it looked like a Frankenstein bolt, or a tumor. A scan revealed it was a lymphnode. A human revealed the white spot wasn’t an abscess. Now I'm listening to this looping major chord synth progression on my speaker phone. A robot comes on every few minutes to thank me for my patience. But it is not my patience. It belongs to this good old-fashioned illegal weed I smoked. To be honest, a mild overheating isn't enough for me these days. I'm trying to live in outer space, but life on earth keeps intruding.
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I never had my tonsils out. Always wanted them out. It seemed common knowledge that you could eat as much ice cream as you wanted. Then it seemed common knowledge that the whole ice cream thing was a myth. I don’t know where common knowledge falls on it now. Maybe you can fill me in. I had chickenpox though (my mom sent my brothers and me to play with a neighborhood kid who’d just gotten it; a total set up; I wonder now if this would be illegal). Wisdom teeth. Croup. I broke five bones before puberty. My parents made me drink milk with every meal to harden my bones. Now I can’t stand the stuff. Latest common knowledge suggests it doesn’t do shit for you. If I’m remembering right, the U.S. consumes more dairy and has more cases of osteoporosis than any other country in the world. I’ve heard we all smell like sour milk. I’ve heard. Anyway I’m back from Oklahoma. Back to 100-degree days. 90-degree nights. Yesterday I found a dead bluebird in the backyard. A victim of heat stroke and dehydration, I assumed. The latest casualty of global warming. I put out an old Tupperware container filled with tap water and declared myself the Interim Minister of Wildlife Hydration. My predecessor, it seems, is taking some time off. “Just as the Lord cares for the birds of the air,” the Bible tells us, “so will he care for you.” “I know,” I say. “That's what I was afraid of."
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Rain, finally. Thick droplets, no thunder or lightning, a couple hours now. Pleasant rhythm, nice tone. I prefer rain to announce itself as vengeance. Loud rumbles and distant cracks. Water has great PR. A little too good. People always talk about hydration, but no one often talks about all the ways water can kill you. Oh, the rain, so soothing. Not if it doesn’t stop! I guess I'm a little paranoid. What if everything simple goes wrong? The ENT indeed says surgery. Deep freeze filled now with Publix brand ice cream BOGO’s and more popsicles. I don’t know if it really helps, but I think of ice cream and popsicles the way I think of thoughts and prayers: it's not like you're giving your kids chickenpox. Plus it’s a convenient way to cover my ass in the event of a fracture. Well, doctor. I pumped him full of liquid meant to fatten an entirely different mammal’s babies. As a parent, I did all that I could. Don’t believe me? Smell him!
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A few hours after your note about the rain, it started raining here. Rain's PR rep, in this case, was you. Just a quick and torrential downpour. Fifteen minutes max. But it had been so long since we'd seen any rain, J and I both dropped what we were doing and stood on the porch. The same droplets you described. Big boys. Globs. I guess that's what we mean when we say it rained "hard." It's not possible for droplets to fall any faster or slower. They're all coming down at maximum speed. Terminal velocity. It's a matter of size. Size and volume, I guess. I still don't really know how rain works. J knows. She's an expert at rain. She was afraid of storms as a kid and her method of coping was to learn everything about them. It's the exact opposite of my method of dealing with the things I'm afraid of, which is to pretend that they don't exist. And now, three days after your note, it's raining again, what I would call a light rain. A sprinkling. Still big drops though, so what do I know? Always less than I think. My de-education continues. I hope to one day look around in complete bewilderment, having no clue what's going on here.
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We lost power for a while today. Thunder, lightning, vengeance. I regret tempting fate before by saying I preferred it. As if my son is not afraid enough to get his tonsils out, doing his best to distract himself with television and video games in between crying and questioning, now he must deal once again with nature. I made an announcement: Nobody open the deep freeze! I thought about your grid. But sun’s out again, swampy air, electricity. I swear two different people have since knocked on my door to sell me solar.
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And I have no clue what’s going on here.
