Truesday: The Heat Is.... ON.

There are a few issues that run against my desire to “get with” all the “summertime fun” that Old Navy incessantly pimps this time of year, every year, with the non-stop fervor of a sixth street corner preacher. As if the month of May ushered in “the season of free head for everyone! Even the homeless can enjoy it as long as they can afford some cargo shorts!” As if Summer kicks Santa’s ass all up and down the calendar. As if the heat-index rising to melt-the-glue-on-your-rearview-mirror was a thing of excitement, wonder, and sole cause of bleached-blond hair. After all, with summer comes bugs, sun burn, burn lines, sunburn lines, sunburn lines with outlines of dead bugs in them, and heat rash. Oh my word, the heat. I mention it a-lot around here, sorta-kinda harping on the subject, perhaps. But that’s only because if I mentioned it constantly, like it deserves to be mentioned, you might get tired of hearing about it, stop listening to the warnings, and come August you’d just wander out your front door one day and all the blood in your body would boil and evaporate within a few fleeting seconds. All because I cried "heat".

What would all of your un-met children, up in that compound, hidden in rural Oregon say to hearing about that, huh? So I’m doing you a favor by only mentioning it MOST of the time. The heat. Your bastard children. The hot, hot heat.

I’m not so down. Heat gets me cranky. Like: 70 - 80 can get me a bit agitated, and 80 – 90 degrees gives me more audible mumbles. But the kind of heat we push through down here during summer makes me downright hostile. My reasons are multi-dimensional, but all the repulsion I feel is directly linked to physical discomfort. Specifically, MY physical discomfort. I mean, we’re all well aware of how everyone might be discomforted by the effects of heat on each other:

1) Navigating the dripping sweat spots on the Metro bus seats.
2) That wave of eau-de-armpit we periodically walk through on the decks at Mozart’s.
3) The general smell of two-dozen heat-stankin’ bare feet that roughs-up your ol’ olfactory every time you visit that 24 News Stand around the corner from your apartment to watch those “art films” from the 70s.

Sure, those are all issues we struggle with because we periodically have to live in and amongst each others’ more foul attributes. But much to my girlfriend’s chagrin, I tend to ignore most of the heat-wrought irritations brought to me by my fellow man. Probably because mine trump well enough.

I sweat like a whore in church. Some of us just get sweaty like that. Sometimes there’s no real reason behind it. It’s not like we’re exerting ourselves. Maybe we’re just lifting a carton of milk from the fridge, and beads start forming on our foreheads. Or we dropped our keys and while picking them up our knees get moist. We just… leak. And while we are doing something as seemingly low-impact as walking six blocks to lunch through downtown, our clothing becomes a matted, sticking, salt-lined, ring-around-the-collar, pit-painted disaster. Like we’re a baboon who just finished playing squash in a turtleneck. (the imagery matches, too). Like a hippo in a sleeping bag made of hot lava. Like a grizzly in a tar trench coat standing amongst the crowd for an afternoon ACL show.

Just experimenting with unnecessary simile here. As usual.

But just like any other overly-oppressive irritant, the heat can be battled in a myriad of ways, although none of them, beyond moving to a cooler climate, is permanent. Here is a brief rundown on methods for manufacturing an internal cool-down for yourself, if you ever find the need.

Shave your crotch/balls.

This is a no brainer, really. You should have done this YEARS ago. If for no other reason, than the fact that based on some potentially super-creepy logic, the opposite sex typically prefers it this way. They’ll tell you it’s for sanitary purposes, but whatever. Humor them, possibly impress them, and keep your goods chillier in the process.

Wet rag. On neck.

Sure, it’s mad-ghetto to walk around with semi-moist rag to wipe the sweat and/or cool down the neck, but it’s much more attractive than a wet Pontiac Firebird-lookin’ pattern developing, connecting your nips across the front of your shirt. I like to call it the “Phoenix of Funk”. No one appreciates the yearly re-rising of this Phoenix. So drape a moist towel around your neck for chrissakes. Have some respect, eh?

Pant like a hound.

Attention is cool, no matter how you swing it. Remember back in third grade, where you had that crush on the teacher with the poofy sleeves, gin-breath and clownish makeup? You always promised yourself that one day, one day when you “got bigger”, that you’d find her and make her yours. She’d eventually give you the attention you so wished she would’ve throw your way back then. Well, if you wander around any outdoor public place in town, panting like a St. Bernard, attention is the first thing you’ll get. Your old flame/teacher might even be there to make all your prepubescent dreams come true. Which would be both awesome, and probably horrendously disgusting. A secondary benefit to panting is that you might hyperventilate and forget how hot you are. Hell, you might even pass out. They’ll carry you to air conditioning if you pass out. Trust me. It’s the goods.

Misting fan.

On second thought, don’t do this. Just go ahead and sweat. It has pretty much the same effectiveness/outcome of doing nothing: you’ll still be hot and pissed-off, along with being damp in uncomfortable places like your ass crack and chest. Go ahead and sweat, but use the fan to threaten/injure anyone else around you who is panting or might have a moist rag you can steal. Just like when society falls apart all Lord of the Flies style: whoever has the most bullets gets to eat. Might as well get a head-start on that action.

Pour water onto face and lap.

I only recommend this because it would look so cool and refreshing while you did it. Feel free to get all theatric with it. Flashdance and shit. I don’t recommend doing this on the job if you work in construction, elementary education, or at a paper mill. Try panting in those scenarios. Do it for the children.

Go toobing.

AHHHHHHHHHH SHIT! It’s SUMMUHTIME! Gots to get my toob on, son! Really, this is the best way to knock out two birds with one potential case of dysentery. The two main rivers, locally, which host this variety of water-bound buffoonery are the Comal and the Guadalupe. It really doesn’t matter which you pick, but if you must know the real difference between the two, it would be the level of commercial development. On the Comal, you’ll piss your way through strangers’ piss while getting too high to do arithmetic and too drunk to notice that your toob has deflated entirely… next to the Schlitterbahn Waterpark Resort/Compound and through a cement “tube shoot” that sits at the base of a restaurant which specializes in silly-expensive county-fair food. On the Guad, you’ll do everything the same except that the banks will be either raw wilderness or quasi-Deliverance-lookin’ huts, the only “shoot” you’ll come across is the one everyone else calls a “low-lying, potentially decapitating-your-drunk-sunburnt-ass dam” where your ride on the river Man-Urine ends, and the only “food” made available to toobers is “each other”. The ride on the Comal is also considerably shorter, which depending on what time you arrive, may be a godsend. Nothing quite like night-toobing whilst pants-losing drunk in a small, central Texas town, especially if done on accident. And especially if you got a purty mouth, boy.

Regardless of which river, its pH balance, or the scenery, you will not suffer from heat whilst toobing. It’s scientifically impossible. Perhaps even mathematically so. Backed by my years of empirical evidence.

Now pardon me while I go and wet-wipe my body after the muggy no-a/c-in-my-truck drive to work. And so it begins…