burning the sun

We've been without air conditioning for a couple of weeks now. Maybe for longer, but if so it was something we only became aware of a couple of weeks ago. This is Texas, and as such the late spring is more of an early summer. Sticky heat of humid May days that make the outdoors feel like a sauna, but without the relief of cleanliness. Compact this with seasonal allergies, and I find myself this time of year feeling like I'm breathing through a straw.

But with the AC broken, indoors is a swelter. If outdoors it's a sauna, inside is the rush of heat that comes from opening an oven. But prolonged. Unending, even in the night when the temperatures drop from the nineties into the seventies.

Living on the third floor of a three-story building, there's nowhere for the heat to go but where I am. I find myself sleeping on the floor lately because the bed's too hot. The floor is too hot too but less hot than the bed which is too too hot. Either way I go to sleep and wake up with a film of sweat across my body. A cold shower can bring relief for an hour or so, but eventually the hot, stale air overtakes again. Perhaps that's the most unbearable part: not being able to feel clean.

If I were a bit more well-read, or if my brain weren't baking, or if the hard surface of the floor weren't preventing me from getting a good night's sleep for once, maybe I could come up with a more poetic way of talking about this. But I can't. It's hot as hell.

I find myself wondering if this was even worth writing. I have a whole collection of once-were drafts of essays, poems, stories, novels, etc. Better at starting than finishing, ambition without determination. The problem lies with thoughts. What seems perfect in the head becomes crude on paper (or screen technically). The mind sings songs of experience, but when it comes to putting these ideas into words, there seems a misfire. Maybe the issue lies in the fact that writing itself is a relatively new invention. Before the Sumerians etched Gilgamesh into eternity the best stories were word-of-mouth. Podcasts are incredibly popular now, an entirely oral artform.

If I take any small comfort in all this inadequacy, it would be from the fact that I am not alone in this feeling.

Getting off topic, though. The heat. The heat is mind-melting.

Escape has been the motif throughout this, both from the inside and, if I can manage it, the out. The car is my saving-grace. Sure it's cramped, but at least it's cool.

The other day to beat the heat I made a somewhat aimless drive from Austin to San Marcos, taking about three hours total to get there and back (this includes the time spent looking around in stores). My car has mediocre mileage, and so the decision was a somewhat regrettable one. But at least I was cool.

It was night by the time I got back home. Inside the heat was miserable as ever, and the multiple box fans we’d bought seemed to generate more noise than they did relief. I took a shower, relishing it as much as I could before stepping back into the stagnant bake. I tried reading but couldn’t focus, nor could I focus enough to write. There wasn't much I could do but lay there and cook.

A breeze blew in from the open window. Cool night air. Not enough to bring relief, but enough to make me realize the temperature outside had fallen some. I grabbed a couple of books and my phone and a bottle of water and went out to sit on the balcony. The wind persisted, faint but steady. It lulled me into a comfort that left me too drowsy to read. So instead I sat there and looked out into the blank black of the trees before me. Time stopped as bliss unfolded, the whole being a calm exhilaration that reminded me of Beauty. I remembered then how it was that the Transcendentalists, and their exaltation of Nature, had captivated me years ago. How, after reading Emerson, I'd started to spend more and more time outside, more time at parks and more time in seclusion, trying to latch myself onto that feeling he and many others had talked about feeling. All the drugs I'd done, books I'd read, and mindfulness practices I'd adopted in pursuit of that feeling. In the silent noise of the night, then and there, in my efforts to escape the heat, I felt it. A moment that could endure for all of eternity.

A mosquito bit me on the thigh, and I was brought back into myself. The moment gone as soon as it had arrived.

Therein lies poetry, even if not poetically conveyed.

Shortly after writing this (and certainly before posting it), the AC was restored to our apartment. A problem of parts that had frozen during the big freeze. In what is almost certainly a perfect expression of some supreme something, the pendulum has swung from an overabundance of severity toward an overabundance of mercy. My roommates like to keep the ambient temperature in the mid-sixties, and so it's now too cold. I find myself hanging out outside in an effort to stay warm.

The weather's been cool and cloudy lately, but as the rainclouds dump their cargo, the sun’s heat is beginning to reveal itself. Mildly though. Walking its own middle path. For now.

If it gets too intense, I'll move into the shade.