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.

a little note on heat

I think the purpose of this post here will be to demonstrate that I really can complain about damn near anything.

It's hot out. Humid hot. Skin becomes flypaper sticky hot. As Sean Kingston would say in auto-tone, it's "cool as fire" outside. It hit 33C today, but 41C or 42C with the humidity, and I'm like a mangy dog, panting and hacking and praying for cool breeze.

I walked to work this morning and five minutes out, I looked like I'd run a marathon or through a sprinkler or just finished filming a sexy car wash commercial. I was Dame Judy Drenched. I got to the office and I was embarrassed to take off my bookbag, because I was sure it was going to look like I'd been ambushed by a platoon of Navy Seals armed with super soakers and water balloons. My ball-ometre reading was at record-levels: I believe it hit 'wetter than an actual tea bag' at one point.

So I refused to venture outdoors until the end of my shift, when I chugged back a glass of water, said a few Hail Flying Spaghetti Monster's Mothers and then got assaulted again by a wall of heat so thick it felt like water. You know when someone farts and you pull your shirt over your nose? You know how you start breathing and after maybe 30 seconds or so, the air becomes heavy and hot and musky and almost unbearable and so you tug your shirt back down and the air is fresh and cool again? Well the city is hide-from-fart humid all day.

I got home, crashed onto the couch and checked my emails on my macbook. I was dripping like I'd been playing hoops in the sun for two hours. Five minutes later, I lifted it up and there were two giant wet spots on my lap, where the computer had sat, and it looked like I'd just gotten a lap dance from a thoroughly oily, hardworking stripper. I scratch behind my knees with my fingers now but they just slide away with the sweat. I stick to the leather couch like a suction cup and the sound I make peeling from it - sort of like someone squeezing a fart out from a wet, rubber ass - makes me sort of sick. My brain feels like it's operating on safe mode and I would really shower every 30 minutes if it was possible.

I've never dealt with anything like this. I'm told it's like this all the time in Lebanon or Vietnam or wherever, but that doesn't help. I love when people tell you things like that. "It'll go months on end like this in Vietnam? Oh, I can't believe it. Suddenly my ass isn't dripping beads of sweat like it's maple syrup from a maple tree. Thanks a billion!"

It's only going to get worse. The forecast is calling for 35C on Wednesday. Might be time to break out the speedo. Would that count as summer casual?