Heat.
Not just heat, but something akin to fire that is airborne and transparent, a heat that you can almost feel on your skin, the kind of heat that can drain you of the will to do any sort of outdoor activity, lest you either start to sweat buckets or begin to melt into the ground beneath you.
These are not the days of Summer where one celebrates with a hot dog and a ‘cold one’ of their choice but rather the days when you cannot fathom adding to the heat by running the oven inside with the air conditioning on, let alone firing up the grill.
Sometimes this part of the season is referred to as the ‘dog days of Summer,’ although any pedigreed doggo who has lived through one will tell you that they reject the implication that they ever wanted their good name to ever be associated with such an unpleasant event at all.
It’s the kind of heat that makes you want to put up a shrine to Dr. John Gorrie and Willis Carrier, both of whom we can thank for the earliest attempts to fight back at this overwhelming weather with artificial cooling devices that eventually became air conditioning, weather Gorrie at one time described as: “…the evils of high temperatures.”
I got a taste of this particular brand of evil last month when the relays in my central air unit decided that this was the optimum temperature to break down in and left the temps inside my home wavering between eighty-seven and ninety-one degrees.
The immediate solution of course is to call an HVAC repairman, but considering I had awoken to this ‘burning’ dilemma, the solution would probably start with a wild chase, hopefully not with a goose (it would be way too hot to chase a goose anyway) because to try and find an HVAC guy at such short notice is one of those certainties in life, that even if you found one, it was going to cost you.
After making a few calls it was clear that even though the clock still said it was in the AM, the task of getting someone out here before the walls literally started to warp was slim, but then again, as always, money is the not only the inherent problem, but also the solution. In other words, if I wanted to sleep without feeling like I was sleeping in the Sahara Desert, there would have to be a large payment made, and one was, to the 24-hour HVAC service which made me cough up nearly seven Ben Franklins to get my own revolution going against heat exhaustion.
Funnily enough, sitting on the porch in my semi-wooded area of Tennessee I am currently residing in, I found a lot of quiet time as I awaited the repair man (who arrived after dark but still with a pleasant ‘Southern charm’ demeanor, one which might be chalked up to the fact that he was earning double overtime for the service call), sipping on Clamato and beer in the computer chair I had rolled out onto the porch for comfort.
Hours later, the temperature in the house slowly decreasing along with the slight buzz from the beer, it was too easy to forget the way the day had started, for every fire does indeed eventually cool…especially if you pay it nearly seven hundred dollars.
