Friday is Just Another Opportunity for Heatstroke

I haven’t posted about my real life lately. Probably because all I do right now is work and sweat. And take occasional breaks for drama bombs. Yesterday I got a long string of “urgent” texts from my mother about an emergency yard sale at my grandma’s house this weekend that she “desperately” needs me and Ben to come work.

This on the heels of two weeks of talking (complaining, whining) from both her and grandma over whether or not they’re going to sell grandma’s car in California and buy Chris a car in Wisconsin, or if they’re going to give Grandma’s car to mom. Who gets a free car? Such a burdensome decision! One I apparently need to be the sounding board for.

I really could tell them all to fuck right off, but I’m trying to keep my eye on the bigger picture, which is that Grandma will be gone in a matter of weeks. I want to take advantage of the time I have left and prioritize what’s really important to me, although I’m dangling at the edge of my rope already trying to work through this fucking heat.

Everybody’s complaining about a “heat wave” hitting LA. This is not a heat wave. This is summer. Southern California summer is only 2 months long. It starts in August and ends in September. Then autumn lasts until Christmas and Winter happens January through March. The rest is Spring. Nobody knows this because 80% of the people in this God-forsaken city only just arrived here from Nebraska, and 50% of them will be leaving for New York before their credit cards expire.

Since I’ve spent the last 25 summers of my life in some kind of air conditioning, I am experiencing two things: amazing good health due to not having to sit in an artificially chilled icebox all day, and the actual temperature of the air. Well, the actual temperature of the air plus fifteen degrees owing to the terrible location, and construction of my shitty ghetto apartment. Living at the beach, I get amazing ocean breezes that come in from the West… the side of my apartment that doesn’t have any windows. So instead of a cooling breeze, I get the rising sun and the heat from the apartments below, and this unsavory combination is baking me in my uninsulated box like a fat, Mexican potato.

Cold showers have become my new hobby. And I sleep wrapped in my damp towel with a giant fan blowing directly onto me from 6 inches away. My only other distraction at the moment is copious amounts of fiction, jammed into my eyeballs so fast I sometimes get characters confused with each other and I dream about them all at the same time, which proves to be stressful. I have a suspicion that there are a lot of emotions I’m just not dealing with right now. Weather out of exhaustion or a prescient sense of self preservation, I’m not entirely sure.

2 Replies to “Friday is Just Another Opportunity for Heatstroke

  1. As a native Californian, who is also 20+ years older than you, I must concur w/ your statement above regarding Souther CA “summers”. They ARE only 2-3 months long. And they ARE always late summer/early fall. I know this, because I can distinctly remember going back to school in Sept and it being Santa Ana wind season, hot as sh*t. And I remember it being hot, or at least damn sunny/warm until at least late October. Then we’d have a “heat wave” at Thanksgiving, which sucked b/c I always wanted to be porking out on turkey dinner in a sweater and jeans like the rest of the damn country. And then came January 1st, Rose Parade day, and it’d be hotter than blazes then too. But I’d never feel as bad about that one since everyone else would be buried in snow, and it was our moment as So Cal Golden People to gloat like crazy to our relatives in the midwest or E Coast about how awesome it was to live where we did. Blah, blah, blah. But few people in CA know these things, b/c there are very few native Californians left in the state.

    Speaking of which, come on up to Seattle. The weathers GREAT! 🙂

    XOXO

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