Hot, Humid, Sweaty, Sticky

Raised in Cleveland, Ohio means I grew up on speaking terms with numerous and varied weather conditions, including humidity. 

Then I moved to California and learned a different weather language and forgot all about humidity and how to comprehend it. 

Now it’s North Carolina for the retirement years, and I’ve recently been re-introduced to the magic of elevated temperatures that include fat dollops of oily sweat. Nice to be here, mostly. 

California heat is simple. It’s a flat, harsh, baking heat that hits 108 without even breaking a sweat, he lied. You’ll sweat all right. Try to resist and the heat just laughs and jacks itself up another 10 degrees. 

But it’s a dry heat, as the skeleton told the mummy. Early evening takes the edge off, with Northern California temperatures dropping about 15 degrees every five minutes. By 10:30 you’ll be wearing a parka.

Overnight can trim 50 degrees off midday highs, and it takes until afternoon for them to climb back up to cactus-wilting levels. This means you have a fighting chance to make it to noon before cracking open your first icy cold can of Coors. By 3 o’clock you’ll be pouring cold beer over your head to soak your shirt and prevent heat stroke.

Temperatures above 100. Droughts. Wildfires. Power blackouts.

About the only benefit to a California summer is the guarantee no one will be hiding in your car, waiting to kill you.

The weather in North Carolina is a bit more civilized, if a shade more moist. They have ceiling fans down south, quaint leftovers from an era recalling elegant porches with rocking chairs and sweet old ladies fanning themselves while sipping lemonade, chatting about church socials, NASCAR and flower gardens while waiting patiently for someone to get around to inventing air conditioning.

A couple days ago I went out to my front porch which has an overhang so it was shady, but it was also humid. Where isn’t it? It’s so humid here I won’t know when it starts to rain. I went back inside, got a beer and turned all five ceiling fans on around the house.

Ceiling fans are perfect for stirring a room’s warm muggy air into hot sludgy air like a wooden spoon in a Crockpot but with lots more humidity. 

And ceiling fans do a fine job of whisking hot steam into small, humid typhoons and blowing them down over your naked, overheated body clutching a room temp (108 degree) Coors while begging to be buried at the North Pole.

Can we all agree that Cleveland has the fairest weather of them all?

Emperor Joe’s Got New Clothes 

We watch him during a rare moment when he’s given permission to address the public without wearing a muzzle and we say “Yup, he’s clicking long just fine, lookin’ good and making perfect sense. He’s our man.”

There’s a Youtube video of Joe trying to describe “America in just one word.” So he swallows a hiccup into the microphone while sneezing and then coughs up a hairball and looks around to see if maybe he said anything. 

Yup. Got it. 

Friends, we’d be alarmed at degeneration of this magnitude in a grandparent or elderly neighbor. In a President it ought to scare even corrupt politicians into action. But the man is so obviously a mere puppet that no one cares if he wets the bed, can’t count backward from 20 and doesn’t know Kamala Harris from Joe Camel.

Instead the media tell us the Emperor is sharply attired, looks great and is leading the parade in grand and magnificent style. But the media is liars and Joe is incompetent. 

Well, at least he doesn’t tweet too much.