too fuckin hot

I have considered documenting some of my own personal drama over a three day heat wave, but its like this: its only a heat wave if you don't have A/C. So yeah, I miss my air conditioner.  I have spent the past many years moving from one air-conditioned space to an other: home to truck to office and back. I've avoided heat. Now, I am attempting to embrace it. Sweat as part of life. I take diuretics to accomplish what the past three days have done for me, one drip at a time. Last night I sat in the basement on our newly acquired futon (there's one at every yard sale) and deliberately experienced the changes my body goes through when self-cooling. It is, like so much of my life these days, an adjustment. I used to spend the summer baking on a river bank, any river bank, but mostly the Applegate. Mostly McKee Bridge. And I remember endless days of 105 degrees, seeking shade, sleeping near a window or out in the back yard, and the heat was unavoidable. Until I started making money. Then, I could avoid weather. And I suppose that is an advantage. Ask any homeless person. Weather is a real equalizer. Ask an Alaskan. I'm going to digress now, I can feel it coming on, but hopefully I'll get back to my point, because, like Ellen, I do have one.

I went to Alaska a few years ago. Fairbanks. It was lawless and absent any apparent social heirarchy. I loved it. People wear pajamas to the store; houses, and most stuff, are purely utilitarian. Very little decoration (read: cheesy yard art) survives the elements with the notable exception of roadside altars. I wish I could find a link to show you, but I don't know what they are. They can be wooden planks, or telephone poles, covered with small stuffed animals nailed to them. I don't know that they are altars, I impose my own interpretation here. But you can imagine what these tiny sanctuaries look like after an Alaskan winter. The animals-- the kind you win at carnivals: cheesy, colorful, not the super soft yuppie variety -- what are they called? the ones with a tag in their ear...? Dakin? Something like that. Anyway, after a year of weather, the colors are muted at best and they hang there, ragged and rotting, like fuzzy little crucifixes all in a row.

What the fuck was I talking about? Oh yeah. Sweating. So I am feeling weather now, not just viewing it from my ivory window. I'm in it, body and soul. I sweat therefore I am.