Friday, July 22, 2016

Heat advisory







While my Winter blog posts are full of accounts of astonishing cold snaps, deep snow, and a city fallen under the brittle silence of the far north as it turns from the sun, I have a tendency to let Summer weather slide. Partly I do not feel that hot weather is our signature weather up here, and so does not warrant much special comment. Unlike the cold, I have encountered heat everywhere I've been. And it has only become the more inescapable as we have begun the great human experiment of choking to death on our own gasses. But the deep arctic chills of the Upper Midwest are more and more unique to us, a point of pride. Furthermore I enjoy and am interested in frigid weather, whereas I despise the heat, and, because I keep myself on a strictly limited diet of bitterness here, I try not to throw that precious allowance away on weather. Whenever I can I try to exult over weather instead. Such a thing is a feasible, interesting exercise with extreme cold, but a disaster with Summer.

But a smashing heat wave is bearing down on us with such force I am compelled in terror to respond. The blasted air has just begun to cook. Humidity boils the prairie grasses and the fetid remains of thunderstorms. Mosquitoes hatch and burst into flames. The black streets sizzle and ooze and all the normally placid northern people grow strange and dangerous. Death on the streets, flags at half mast, a city losing itself.

The Heat Advisory has begun. Or is it a Heat Warning? A Heat Alarm? A Heat Hysteria? In an unprecedented move my library will be staying open til midnight over the next two days so that people without air conditioning can come here and be bad tempered and try not to die. Good luck to them. Though I have long advocated for a 24 hour library I can't pitch in on this one. I have to go home at my usual nine o'clock time.

I have to ice my blog.







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