Garmonbozia

It's 92 degrees out.

Ninety-two God-fucking degrees.

This is so wrong. This is Seattle. There's supposed to be rain, and clouds, and darkness, and gloom. I love rain, and clouds, and darkness, and gloom. That is why I moved here. I'm no Goth, don't get me wrong. I just hate the Sun. I thrive best in cool, dark places. I am much like a mushroom. (A magic mushroom? Eat me and see.)

If I ruled the world it would never get above 68 filthy American Fahrenheit degrees, everything would be perpetually wreathed in fog, and thunderstorms would be as common as crack.

I'm not just whining here...I find the heat seriously debilitating. I get these huge headaches...It becomes difficult to think properly. Sometimes I lose words. And I feel huge upwellings of primal despair, as if all my worst nightmares had come true: as if there was a God, and He was Rupert Murdoch, and that a little dwarf with huge teeth had come to kill me, and that Eric Roberts would play the Master, and that democratic socialism was dying, and that Tony Blair was my mum, and all my teeth were falling out...Sort of like that.

It is not so unlikely, the crippling power heat has over me. H. P. Lovecraft used to suffer the most peculiar reactions to winter cold; I was trying to look up a reference for you in his Selected Letters, but the damn'd things don't have an index. I did find, on page 403 of Selected Letters IV, a reference to his bloating to over 200 pounds in 1925. Here we are! Selected Letters III, page 110, in a letter of 14 January to James Morton:

Another accidental experience with the cold (+14°) on Nov. 30th last--when I lost breathing-power, dinner, balance, and three-fourths of my consciousness in an attempt to walk home from my younger aunt's before I learned how the mercury had dropped--has conclusively shewed me that I can never hope to buck up against temperatures much under +20°...

There is more justification for an anti-heat tirade than just my morbid oversensitivity. As Shaw Island's Zach Stroum relates, there have been brush fires along our freeways. I have, with my own eyes, seen grass that remained green(ish) and verdant(ish) all through the winter turn crispy yellow, like McDonald's French fries, lifeless, soulless, and salty. The University has been watering some of its lawns. And nothing is air conditioned here. The wrongness is palpable. And it feels sort of like a dead frog, stuffed with marbles, being beaten with twigs.

Humbug, I say. Humbug.

H. P. Lovecraft would have loved blogging. He would have been much better at it than I am.

Posted by aloysius at July 29, 2003 08:13 PM | TrackBack |