Son of the sun

As I sit here sweltering in the thick heat of the heart of summer, I wait patiently for golf ball sized hail and maybe a tornado to come sweeping through. That will be something. Maybe it will cool the night off into the eighties. Maybe it will clear the air enough for the dew point to drop from "insufferably swampy" to "merely unpleasantly moist". A boy can dream.

It is a repeated surprise to me how tolerant I can be of February around here. The filthy ice, the stinging bitterness of the air, the endless layering of clothes, the darkness. But the root of my tolerance lies here, in mid July. Anything that is not the heat of July carries that glorious accolade of not July. Cold is just cold, bundle up, but I cannot escape the invading heat of July. 

I don't like it. 

It is not good for my health.

Why is it not good for my health?

I will tell you.

It is not so much the weird bleeding skin rashes it induces in me, or the fungal infections. It is not the way it stops me sleeping or makes me nauseous and dizzy half the time. Nor is it in the mysterious coughs that seize me late at night as I struggle to breathe. And it is not, as one might suspect, in the terrible back and neck injuries I incur by sleeping tensed up under blowing fans.

No, it is because it makes me hate the sun.

It is no good hating the sun. It is a dangerous thing to curse the sun. 

The innocent and life giving sun does not deserve it. But I cannot stop. The sun flings my consciousness wheeling angrily through the cosmos, sweating and muttering until there is an absolute darkness and the end of all time, or until of fall, whichever comes first.