Suddenly This Summer

Summer arrived in Northern Illinois on Friday night.  It was transported in on the back of a giant thunderstorm that lasted for hours, complete with gully washing rain, continuous lightning and almost, but not-quite-there tornadoes.  The last two days and the week yet to come promise to be stifling ... real "scorchers" as we old-timers call it during our more lucid moments.

Such is the way in Northern Illinois, land of two seasons ... Winter and Summer.  But it is fitting for a land so devoid of personality.  It's taken years for me to realize it, but I hate this whole fucking area.  I hate it's predictability and it's blandness.  I suppose you would have to have been born here to appreciate it, but sometimes I suspect that even natives feel trapped here, in the butt crack of America.  As you can guess, I can't wait to get the hell out of Dodge.

Anyway, it's hot.  And no one is more aggrieved than the anchors on the local television stations.  Two days in, they are already pissing and moaning about how hot it is.  If you're interested enough to follow anchor people's moods, you know that they don't like the weather in any form.  It's either too cold, or too hot, or too rainy, or not rainy enough.  And they all, to a man and a woman, take it out on the poor weather person ... excuse me, "meteorologist".  Not to say that I feel sorry for the weather people, who are usually just as sad as the anchors, only they have a little more trained seal in their make-up and can crack bad jokes and show up at supermarket openings without committing suicide on-air.  They usually have "hooks"; such as cuteness, or funnyness, or fatness, or handicappedness.

If I were going to be a weather person, I think my "hook" would be a bad attitude.  When one of the anchor persons would try to pin the lousy weather on me, I'd simply stare at them for one beat and then say "Fuck you asshole".   I'd follow this up by throwing something sharp and heavy in their general direction.  I'd do this for every weather cast, even after they became too afraid to speak to me.  When this got to be old, I'd change it up, let's say by screaming at them like a chimp and then throwing handfuls of my own feces at them.  Trust me, this would be ratings gold.

Anyway, it's hot.  Sean came up on Father's Day Eve for a visit. Father's Day Eve is much more exciting than Father's Day, much as Christmas Eve is more loved than Christmas itself.  Sean needed a room air conditioner for the apartment that he shares with Jessica. And it was important that he get one because hot weather makes them both crabby and they tend to get in knife fights when that happens.  So he bought one that not only worked, but had a remote control!  How cool is that?  However, he found out later that his Tivo didn't like it's electronic turf invaded by a Chinese remote control and would switch the AC off, so he had to get rid of it.  Sad.

When we got back from our shopping trip, Jan was complaining that our house was too hot, and that is bad because we get crabby when we're hot too.  Only we choose flintlock pistols at 10 paces rather than knives.  So, I turned the central AC on and it wasn't too long before it started it's seasonal dickery.  For three years now, it will run just ducky for a while, then it will begin shutting it's various components off in no particular order.  It will do this until I get aggravated enough to call the repair man out, at which time the AC will run perfectly.  It will wait until I hand a check in the amount of 200 dollars to said repairman (who has done nothing because everything checks out), and is 10 miles away until it decides to start being a dick again.  But this year, I've got its number.  I'm not doing anything.  Fuck you air conditioner.  Maybe when it sees I'm not paying any attention to it, it will just decide to do it's job.

Anyway, it's hot.