The Heatwave: A Late Night Reflection

It feels like the heatwaves last longer and longer each time they come.
The air as heavy as lead, the moist smog-laden sheen that sits on your skin like Saran Wrap, sapping all your energy and making you feel like you’re too lazy to do even the most mundane chores.
The heatwave makes you sit around all day in technologically manufactured cool air and lay in bed all night tossing and turning as the noise from air conditioners and fans churn and hum and add the insult of sleep deprivation to the injury of heat and humidity.
You spend a lot of time thinking about people in climates where heatwaves are just called weather, and how they manage to survive without fleeing or committing suicide.
I have a feeling that they spend most of their time in some sort of altered state of consciousness: a cool metal place that will allow them to feel anything but the cloying relentless heat.
Or perhaps they adapt and simply don’t feel the heat and humidity in the same way that we do.
But our heatwaves come and go and don’t really last long enough for us to become accustomed to them.
This is the real torture… not having enough time to adapt.
The heatwave has lifted. Finally.
The air outside my windows is much cooler now but still laden with low pressure moisture.
Some of the cooler air is actually even coming inside. But my body and its rhythms are halfway between dead slow and high gear and I can’t seem to wind down, even with pharmaceutical assistance, to find sleep.
So here I sit at 1:30 AM in the middle of the weekend tapping away, wondering when my fatigue will set in, if at all.
I slept quite a bit last night, and so my theory is that my body is trying to regulate itself by depriving me of sleep tonight. I’m tired of reading, and have pretty much given up on TV.
It’s too late to go for a bike ride, and besides, the chances of running into some crazy ass drunk driver are pretty good at this time of night. They come squealing by sporadically, in their alcohol induced pedal to the metal machismo trance, and their blaring rap music. Angry music for pissed off drunks.
These are the lost souls of the night and I have no intention of heading out there to be victimized by one of them. Not that they would give a shit, because in a battle of bike versus car, the victor is all too predictable.
I don’t mind the idea of getting killed in an accident. I do hate the idea of serious injury. Something that would confine me to a bed or force me to wear a cast of some sort. That would drive me insane.
So here I sit, waiting for sleep, draining the last bit of energy from my brain trying to write a clever narrative about who knows what…heatwaves. 
Yeah, we get them a lot in the summer. Many more than we used to. Some say it’s global warming. I don’t get that heavy into it.
Besides, who gives a shit. In matters of us vs the earth, we have a pathetic track record.
I told myself that I would start writing shorter blog posts, so I am going to end this. Hope you’re asleep right now. Hope I will be soon.

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