Thursday, June 19, 2014

Precious city

I stepped out of my small, lovely house this morning to find a beautiful day. Or, at least, it was a beautiful day for half a mile of walking, so, I am saying, there was ten minutes worth of beautiful day. Then it was hot and I was reduced once again to being Gollum. "Ach! The sun! She burns, she burns us. We hates it!" Then I'd walk under a tree and it would be a beautiful day again for the seven seconds it took to walk through that shadow. "Oh beauteous irises, glinting graceful in the dappled shade. Your purple, sunshine song of summer...AAAAH! IT BITES! CRUEL SUN SHE BITES, SHE BURRRNNS US!" By the time I got to my bike station I was a damp, hot, weeping cloud of misery.

And it was fine.

I live in the Twin Cities. Our sensible quality of life is widely considered to be attributable to the fierceness of our climate. Whether that fierceness be ascribed, as it commonly is, to winters full of minus 20 and minus 30 degree temperatures, or whether it is, perhaps more unusually, ascribed instead to all the cruel, cruel times in June, July, and August where it grows humid and the temperature climbs above a beastly 82 degrees, is immaterial. The key thing is that most of the hoi polloi stay away, and the sociopathic impulses so common in places like Arizona and Mississippi tend to freeze to death. And so our cities, thus protected, can get so very nice that it's practically like Western Europe here; exotic architecture, the best parks and bike paths in the country, and coffee shops not, perhaps, to rival Rome, but better than Venice, London, Lisbon, and L.A., not that anyone from there would have any idea.

Their loss.

And if I have to endure yearly ice and fire purges for this paradise, well, so be it. Anything for my cities, for they are precious to me, yes precious, preeecccioouusss!

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