*The views expressed in Truesday are those of the author and do not represent Austinist as a whole. Thank heavens.* -The Editors

I cry about it every year. What can I say? I’m Nordic. My peoples battled chill and rain-brought illness. Snow drifts and day long nights. Christmas trees and rowing to Greenland to fish. Various doings in the cold.

They never sweat to death.

So this current variety of heat, though delayed this season by the two-month long June Monsoon of 2007, beats me with unbridled brutality. I am constantly searching for respite in the face of the sun’s relentless hostility toward my person. Its obvious murderous desires to devour my soul. By way of over-broiling.

There are many ways for a person of my sensitivities to avoid dealing with crippling temperatures. Quick list with appending explanations for why they don’t really work for me:

Air conditioner on full blast, everywhere, all the time. This would be great if my truck, Red Rocket, had any sort of ability to condition any air beyond the bounds of its two settings: “hotter” and “dirtier”.

Mandana/neckerchief/chinskirt. I truly enjoy this trend, and am very pleased to see that it has finally made it here from the pages of 2006 fashion magazines and the wardrobe of Kanye West. But I’m just more of a headband kind of guy. Nothing personal.

Mister fan. Nope. And that Evian mister stuff is pure sorcery. Is that really just water? Methinks there’s some cfcs involved. Something not right about that kind of wizardry in a pressurized spray bottle.

Move back to northern-ish European homeland(s) where sweat is as foreign and scary to them as Islam is to the state of Utah. (I have no idea what that means.) I can’t afford the plane ticket(s), and I fear that they might only eat raw fish (off the bone) for sustenance.

The way in which I’d prefer to deal with it most: sleeveless t-shirts. That’s right. I’d prefer to let my pit-hamsters breathe openly, wantonly, unrestricted. And I’m not talking about the classic a-shirt here. Oh no, not the wife-beater. I’m not quite ready to try and spearhead the return of the ‘beater for non-biker/inmate types, regardless of my affinity for their comfort and shape-defining quality.

Oh no, not that.

I’m talking about simply hacking off the sleeves of an otherwise normal tee, and then rocking that shit like your guns were on display at The Tate. Don’t have sculpted hand canons? So fucking what. They may look like two pathetically limp turds, dripping carelessly down from your neck, but whatever. They’re cooled and aerated. Plus, everyone knows a guy who is straight with a sleeveless tee and no chiseled specimens for arms HAS to be crazy. Not a tough-guy or some posturing asshole with daddy issues. The sleeveless guy simply doesn’t care about whatever YOU care about. He obviously has no sense of right and wrong, or the line which clearly divides achievement between actual ability, and the ferocious tenacity of rogue will. He’s the dark horse running. The wild card. The creepy guy at the far end of the bar who you’ll never be sure whether he’s a stalking serial killer on the hunt, or just some victim of an undiagnosed disassociative disorder who lives in a perpetual state of 1985-ness. Either way, it isn’t wise to challenge him. He’s likely a loon with pleasantly chilled guns at the ready.

And as a total added benefit: you can’t get all pitted-out if there’s no fabric there to highlight it. No more of those awkward moments! Shit yeah.

Knowing me + going sleeveless, I’ll probably get shit-canned one night, lose my etiquette compass, and just delicately place my sweaty, hairy armpit on some random stranger’s (guy, girl, yeti, whatever) shoulder while waiting in line at the bar. Their first reaction will be to wonder whether or not someone had just unclogged a bathtub drain and placed the remains on their skin, real evil like. In slow disgust, they'll turn toward the offensive feeling, and upon seeing my pasty ham of an arm provocatively scissoring theirs (with me passive-aggressively staring at the bartender instead of my pit-recipient), they will grab the nearest beer bottle, raise it over their head, and SLAM it aggressively into my open, waiting hand. And they'll do it with a deeply wanting smile. Because I’d look so awesome in my sleeveless tee. The HOTness. Then we’d make out for an hour, in between shots of chilled Knob Creek (their tab of course) and discussions of our shared amazement with monotremes, because no one can reasonably resist a man with curiously cadaverous-toned skin spackled over their exposed shoulder region, and what appears to be a third nipple in his right armpit. The opportunity would be too ripe to pass.

Even for the cagey southern yeti.

Yes. Ripe, indeed.