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Who Turned the Weather Up to ‘Broil’?

I think I know what it is, folks. It’s simply too damned hot to write. That must be it.

Summer in New England has all the subtlety of a ‘desperate housewife’ at a poolboys’ convention. There’s rarely a springtime to speak of in this part of the world, and this year is no different. A week ago, we were wearing parkas and mukluks, freezing our nads off and feeling like someone had been jamming a popsicle up our collective ass for the past six months. Now, it’s eighty degrees by sunrise, and I sweat when I breathe. ‘April showers’, we hardly knew ye.

(Oh, and speaking of popsicles up the ass, just a quick public service FYI to the married gents out there: If, at any time in your marriage, your wife turns to you in bed and growls,

‘Yeah, we’ll I’m not an Eskimo, got it?‘

…then you’ve made a tactical error somewhere along the way. It’s gonna cost you. Don’t argue; just buy the flowers. It’s much easier. Trust me.)

Now generally, I don’t do a lot of complaining about the weather. The way I see it, that’s what we’re keeping all those millions of old farts around for. If we wanted to sit around and watch the Weather Channel for six hours a day, and debate the meteorological implications of the latest low front moving in, then we could just euthenize the hell out of the geezers, and save ourselves the stewed prune money.

But, of course, we don’t want that. We’re not monsters — mainly — and we certainly have better things to do with our lives than read barometers and feed grandpa into the wood chipper. Plus, somebody has to eat those fucking prunes, and it’s not gonna be me. There’s ‘regular’, and then there’s ‘Vesuvial’. No, thanks.

(Kids, it’s a volcano. Vesuvius? You with me? Pompeii? Buried in ash, all that jazz? Eh, never mind. Pretend I said, ‘Mout Saint Helensian’, if that helps. Or ‘Krakatoal’, maybe — but if you didn’t get ‘Vesuvial’, then that’s probably doing you no good, either.)

Anyway, where the hell was I? Oh, right — the weather.

So, I’m not a big weather hound. But I can’t stand being hot. And, this being New England, there’s damned little air conditioning available. Oh, sure, they install it in the offices and restaurants and such. And it’s a damned good thing — right now, the only thing getting me up on a weekday to schlep into the office is the thought of a nicely chilled cubicle, where I can slouch and nap at a cozy sixty-eight degrees. It’s heavenly.

At the house, though… not so much. We’ve got a window unit in the bedroom, sure, but it’s little help. I’m pretty sure it’s older than I am, for one. I’m surprised it doesn’t have a hand-crank to start the damned thing. And the — oh, I don’t know… seven BTUs or so that it puts out are usually sucked into the hundred-year-old walls before they reach our sweaty, clammy selves. You’ve pretty much got to sit on the unit to get any relief from it.

(But then, that’s pretty much the way most ‘units’ work, eh, kids? Hiyooh!

Yeah. Never let it be said that I won’t take an easy one-liner, once in a while. All this story-telling bullshit is hard, dammit.)

Now, we’ve thought about having a system installed — but there are three problems with that. First, it’s expensive as hell. And there’s always that little voice in the back of your head, reminding you of your responsibilities and priorities, keeping you on the right track. And it’s true, I suppose — why dump a bunch of cash into air conditioning, when there’s still beer and strippers and porn to pay for? Thank you, little voice. You’ve shown me the way, once again.

Then, there’s the issue of needing someone else to install such a system. Contractors in New England generally seem to exist to tease people like us:

‘Oh, sure — we’ll come look at the job… never!‘

‘Yes sir, absolutely we’ll send along our estimate… psych!‘

‘No problem, we can stay under your budget… for about an hour!‘

Creamy onion Christ dip on a cucumber, just give me a damned wedgie and get it over with, ya bastards. Stop hazing me, and do the frigging work!

But no. It’s a game of some sort, and you’ve got to play it, or it’s no soup for you! Or, in this case, no non-sweaty ass crack for you! Which is worse than no soup, believe me. Maybe still better than soup down the ass crack, but it’s not good.

Of course, the biggest barrier to getting yummy A/C for the house is my wife. Not that she’s an unreasonable gal, or anything like that. Christ, she’s still married to me, if that tells you anything about her superhuman tolerance for bullshit. But she gets cold rather easily. So she hates the winters here. She’s constantly chilly, wrapped up in a blanket while it snows and howls and frosts outside — it’s very cute, in a sad, pitiful way.

(Yeah, I told her that once. I woke up that night with her perched over me, aiming to do god-knows-what with the business end of a popsicle. Turns out I’m not an Eskimo, either. Yowie.)

So as far as I can tell, she actually likes the miserable heat that we suffer here for… well, okay, only about six weeks a year, actually. But dammit, those are intolerable weeks! Unless your preferred temperature is eighty fricking degrees — hers is; just ask her — then it’s a humid little slice of hell.

But I’m not quite sure what she’d do to me, right on the heels of winter, if I had it my way. If it were up to me, we’d have a central A/C unit pumping sweet chilly goodness into every room in the house, twenty-four seven. We’d walk in from work, and see our breath in the foyer. We could build snowmen in the living room, break icicles off in the kitchen — maybe we’d even go sledding down the basement stairs. But she’d never go for it. Six months of winter is enough, apparently. And that’s fine — but do we have to have six months of Hades the rest of the year? Does ‘sixty degrees’ have a twenty-degree restraining order around it, or what?

Eh, fuck it. I’m too hot to bitch about this any more. I’m gonna go take a cold shower to cool off. Not that kind of a ‘cold shower’, mind you. I’m mostly too hot to think about that sort of thing, either. On the other hand, that time I mentioned, when she had the popsicle? I’ll never look at a fudge creamsicle quite the same way again. Brrrrrrrr!