Truesday: Cool Breeze
*The views expressed in Truesday are those of the author and do not represent Austinist as a whole. Thank heavens.* -The Editors
For the past two months I’ve been slaving and slaving and slaving in a manner of slavitude so profoundly positive that I’m not sure there’s a way to cobble mere words together such that a proper portrayal of the sheer magnitude of positivity would be modeled. I’m talking sweet positivity here. Crème de la motherfucking crème. What level of crème? Well, it’s like that time back in middle school when you were in gym class and the coach barked about how you had five more laps to go but you went so slow that by the time the rest of the class did those five laps you had only done one, but you went back to the locker room when everyone else did and when the coach stepped to you seething with begging conflict, saying shit like “you run like a one-legged chemo patient. So did you run the whole mile?” you stern-eyed-bold-faced him and said “totally, bro. I Bruce Jenner'd that bitch.”
That’s how crème: tip motherfuckin’ top crème.
Like, attending a Glenlivet sponsored whisky tasting at Opal Divine’s next Wednesday night crème. BOOM!
Like another Yellow Tape Production Company production crème. POW!
Like the bitchin’-ass Texas Book Festival crème. BAM!
Okay, so maybe those are limited crèmes. Limited to me and mine. So be it.
Hey, we can’t all be rabid fans of Band of Horses, public girl fights, and designer drugs ALL the time. Sometimes a dude just needs three fingers of decent scotch, some culture, and some fine Lone Star literature.
Such is the product of a long absence from the local ‘scene’, as it were.
In my general absence there’ve been homes thoughtlessly built, ruthlessly loaned on, and viciously foreclosed. Fortunes mauled. Politicians have made obscene asses of themselves (and us as a country). Hurricanes have caned and gone. So it’s been quite a time for all involved.
But as usual, I’m only interested in the heat. Or, rather, the lack thereof at the moment. Let me explain by way of recent examples.
I took one of the most wretched shits of my life inside a Chinese toilet in the Forbidden City in the center of Beijing, where the only toilet paper to be found within four square miles was in my treacherous memory and the air was thick with the scent of dodged death and heavy with a Marlboro Reds haze. The toilet in question was little more than a porcelain representation of what a westerner might refer to as “the hole in the floor that you would probably want to put a toilet on.” To which they would likely add, “and what are those foot-hold-looking thingies for?”. As I feverishly made use of the facilities, all varieties of sweat, sound, and processed food items poured from my unnaturally vibrating body in a fashion best left described as staccato bursts of muted satisfaction, laced with a sense of immense wonder at how beautifully odd the world really is. And how the sting of sweat in your eye can help you forget most anything, including the mystery surrounding how some people have managed to “miss” the porcelain hole in much the same way a person might manage to “miss” dropping a brick into a wheelbarrow from one foot up. One must learn to mind the bricks dropped by others, even when sweat blurs the vision.
Stiffling heat.
I found myself playing scrabble in the tippy southeast corner-tip of Central Park where there were two dudes who had brought a drum kit and saxophone with them to play some Brubeck and Monk classics. It was almost noon and the sun had successfully hoisted itself up above the scraper tops and was beating down on the golden surface of that ‘phone. The playfully worn skin of that snare. And when I wandered over to tip them the drummer actually said “man, what the fuck? It’s like the sun got tired of hearing us and is chasing us off his lawn like some angry old man.” They both had sweat rings in their pits. The saxophone guy had pushed up his pantlegs like he was pulling crabnets off a beach or some shit. They stopped playing immediately after I tipped and likely spent their earnings on a Mr. Softie ice cream cone. They might have even rubbed said cone of ice cream on their bodies to reduce the overall swelling.
Searing heat.
Last month, after spending five hours with a gas-powered floor grinder that I rented from Home Depot, in a sickeningly confined space, my body ceased to remind me that I needed to cool down by sending sheets of salty water down the pasty obstacle course of hair and elbows which I casually refer to as my body. I dried up to salty basins like the sun-murdered surface of Utah. And even though my floors look more badder-asser from my labor efforts, it may have cost me a couple of vital organs which are now rendered useless due to being completely dried up. Spleen jerky.
Hot. Humid. Heat.
But the weather here recently? RECENTLY? Sweet baby jesus it’s been fabulous. With all my jet lag, I’ve been up before the garbage men come by to dump trash all over the curb in front of my house and it’s actually been COLD on some mornings! I’d totally forgotten what it’s like to not sweat when outdoors. To not emit the scent of a rotting elephant seal carcass before noon.
Slaving is one thing, but slaving under a boiling tidal wave is a thing far, far, far another. May your day be blessed with cool breezes. COOL BREEZE FOREVER!
