Summer in the City

One written way back in July...

Old people don’t sweat much. Probably because they don’t drink much, either. And that’s probably why old people are just dried-up versions of their already balding and menopausing children.

My point is, old people don’t sweat much.

I suppose it’s no real advantage in the long run, what with instead of perspiration they are incontinent. But in the summer, not sweating comes in handy.

In 1724, German-Dutch physicist Gabriel Daniel Fahrenheit says the temperature of the air around me is 95°. Around 1742, Swedish astronomer Anders Celsius tells us it’s 65 degrees outside. Then in 1747, Carolus Linnaeus inverts the scale, so it’s only 35°. The numbers keep getting smaller, but it sure as hell isn’t getting colder.

Some of these old people, they might actually remember buying their first Swedish thermometer, that’s how old they are.

Searing hot concrete all around me, I’m standing in a narrow shade thrown by a lamp post. Unfortunately, the air around me doesn’t care I’m in the shade, and it’s just as warm behind the lamp as in front of it. And I’m not getting any cooler.

Old people walking down the street and up the street and across the street, they walk around me and they don’t sweat. Some old men are wearing leather shoes, some are wearing sandals, but with socks. All of them are wearing suit pants, shirts. Most of them are wearing a jacket. Some have a cool 1950s hat. One or two have sunglasses. Not one of them has a wet forehead or dark stains around their armpits. Not one of them tries to avoid direct sunlight.

That star of ours, that Sun, it’s raping the atmosphere. Penetrating the last bits of ozone, rimming the thermosphere, bitch-slapping the troposphere. I can’t help but wonder, is it just me, or did it just get warmer?

Old ladies, twice as many of them on account of WWII, well these old ladies are wearing long tweed skirts. Cardigans. Coats. Dragging five different shopping bags from five different stores, they go around town looking for the cheapest milk and freshest vegetables. It’s hot at least like hell, but you don’t see them wiping their faces with handkerchiefs. Or hiding under those Versailles silk umbrellas.

I have certified UV filter glasses, but most of these retired versions of sepia-toned photos don’t even squint.

Looking around me for a bigger lamp post, or maybe a bus stop or phone booth, just anything throwing a wider shade, I see other people my age. Short skirts and tank tops, see-through short-sleeved shirts, flip flops, bottles of cold water in everyone’s hands; they are all dying out there. More deodorant on them than the kids in China can produce. Empty cans of Adidas and Old Spice; it’s just more heat coming down on us from in-between the wider and wider spread legs of the ozone layer.

Selling body spray is the perfect business: just by selling it, you help create a bigger demand.

I take a run for it, dodging rays of light and hiding behind mailboxes and fat people. I get to the corner of the street and take a left, and I made it. Banks and publishing houses and stores, big buildings shading this half of the street. But it’s a little crowded here, with much of the same people I saw dying out there in the sun. Teens and their parents, we are all hot and thirsty and tired, and the seniors are roaming the streets free.

A regular Day of the Almost Dead.

When I see movies like Sunshine or Day After Tomorrow, I’m thinking yes please. Kill the Sun and bring on the ice age. Because ultimately, it’s much better to be cold than to be hot. You can always put on another layer of clothes, but when you’re hot, even being naked doesn’t help.

Anyway, when dusk finally comes, it’s time for the youngest offspring of Man to take over the city. Air-conditioned bars, park benches, and bus stops. The young, recovering from the heat with booze and smokes and dope and coke.

It’s our turn to live a little.

Until the big white face rises up above the horizon and calls for the old people to come out and pay. A curtain call for most of them, the seniors take their place under the stellar spotlight and do their thing. Then winter comes to claim them.

The things that are nigh...

What does a temperature drop of 20 degrees and constant rain for three days tell you? Some say ‘who cares,’ others say ‘global warming did it.’ Me, I think the Apocalypse is coming. Not out of some religious belief or based on any hard evidence. I just sort of feel it. Like when an old man feels weather changes in his old rotten joints, only I feel the imminent end.

And really, why couldn’t I? These kinds of stories always have the one person who knows destruction is nigh and no one believes him. Did anyone listen to the sheriff in Jaws or the architect in Towering Inferno or the scientist in Day After Tomorrow? I don’t think so.

It came to me as the same sense of knowing you get right before a car hits you. Or when an unlikable hockey team is about to score against your guys and win. Or when you bet on a horse and then it trips. When the shit’s right about to hit the fan, the split second when you see it and know everything’s going to hell, that’s what I feel looking out my window.

Day one, everyone just said it’s raining and carried on. More layers of clothing, a lot more umbrellas in the streets. Someone occasionally stepping in a puddle or getting showered by a passing car hitting a pot hole. People complaining but generally not caring much. Me, this is when my feeling started.

Day two, some villages got flooded a bit, but it was hardly a reason to call Noah. People, still used to all that cancerous sun light, got annoyed by all the clouds and darkness. Dark clouds and even darker darkness, to be exact. Wet twilight all day long, that can spoil anybody’s day, right?

Day three, people are depressed and cold and some are angry and jumpy. Some start saying this is typical pollution weather. Other stopped caring, knowing they can’t do anything about it. Me, I fear every new hour, because it’s always an hour less till judgment day. Day three, I begin to more than just suspect everyone will die. I’m what you call 100% sure.

Day four, it never comes. Because on the night of day three, IT came. Around seven on that fateful last night, it really started pouring down. I mean, it was Saigon. Over the top. Rain so thick I couldn’t see across the street. City infrastructure gave up and streets turned into rivers. Basements were pools, roofs were sponges, gardens were swamps. Imagine a bucket of water dumped on you every second. Well, this was worse. And by this time, I wasn’t the only one saying the Second Coming is here. Actually, there were people screaming Jesus is coming back.

Not that I particularly believe in that stuff, but the weather was really becoming biblical in proportions. Noah’s little boat would’ve been screwed in this. I mean, when whales start drowning, you know you got a problem. When mountains become islands, it’s obvious you’re fucked. When the pope has nothing to say, it’s mayhem in the Western World.

By eleven o’clock, half my neighborhood drowned and the other half was about to. The feeling I had that the end was coming, well it was mutual. From something deep inside, it turned into an inevitable certainty. A hint of what was to come became the shit that hit the fan. And then some.

At midnight, the last person on Earth drowned, and that person was me. For some reason, I had to witness it all. For some reason, I’m now flying to a planet not so different from Earth, and telling this story to the masses. Not as a soon to be forgotten warning, but as an oral history of my home.

And people listened.

And it started raining.