chilling no longer

The official swampy nut heat wave advisory has been lifted, but I'm still sweating my sack off down here. I can actually sleep again, but that doesn't mean I'm comfortable. I'm still a sticky mess. I still smell unsavory for large segments of the day. It's gotten to where I can't honestly say I'm chilling when I'm not up to anything because I'm not chilling. I'm sweating. So until the heat becomes reasonable again -- and I mean reasonable by my unreasonable Northern standards - I'm gonna say sweating whenever I would normally say chilling.

"What are you up to tonight, Herb?" I will be asked.

"Just sweating," I will respond.

And that's that.

I can't tell you how much heat like this affects me. I've been mindless for the past 10 days. I'm thinking some important portion of my brain evaporated out one of my ears during one of those 43C days. I haven't been sharp. I've been melted-cheese dull. There have been things I've wanted to write, but when I sat down to write them, they'd vanished. My wit is not quick right now. It's slow. I want to see a doctor about this. Ask him why my wit is not where is should be. Maybe he can hit me on my knee with that comedic little triangular-rubber stick thing and see how long it takes me to come with a joke about it.

I truly feel like there is some sort of relationship between my personality and this stifling heat that a scientiest would be able to chart on the graph.

He would point to a powerpoint slide: "...and when it reaches 38C, there is a 0.03 percent chance Herb will have sex with a woman."

I'm very worried about this.

I'm slowly going blank. My mind is eroding. It's being vacated. Clear-cut. Mined out.

I had a jar of mustard laying in the middle of my room for seven straight days. The middle of the floor. Seven days. That's longer than the G8 and G20 summits. That's longer than summer in Iqaluit. I may have covered the jar with clothes or kicked it zombie-rushing to work but I didn't once think of putting it back in the fridge. It escapes me as to how it got there in the first place.

My brain is being eaten away from the inside. It's imploding like an office tower.

At night, I lay on top of my blankets, coaxing in a breeze. I try to think off all the glorious times I'd been frozen. I dream longingly of numb toes and frostbite. In the morning, I wake up defeated, thoughtless with a plugged nose, a crusty mouth. I get up and see a sweat outline where my sad body had been. I shower. I dress. I sweat, negating the shower.

We've had a few neato thunderstorms the last few days. It's cooled things down outside a bit, but for some reason, the air in the apartment stays muggy. It's trapped. I think it's stuck to the walls. And this wet, heavy, clingy, clammy air seems to attract and trap odours and so garbage and musk and dump smells are circulated and preserved and everything just starts to develop this generic-icky stink to it. Windows are cracked, doors stay open all day and the warm, humid indoor air mass just stays inside. It's the first thing that greets me when I get home to kick it and sweat.