Post 131 - July 20, 2020

Day 131…

It is hot in New York City these days.

We are going to get temperatures up into the mid-90’s today (mid C30’s). The heat on its own would be fine but the humidity levels we usually get here in the city makes everything feel that much worse.

Despite that, I took a walk downtown yesterday. It wasn’t quite as bad as I’d feared. People were out. Restaurants with shaded outdoor areas seemed to be doing well, those without were completely and totally deserted.

I’ve never been a committed fan of summer in general.  My mother loves the heat. I prefer the cold. My mother would be thrilled each year as the weather started to warm up. I looked forward to the freedom of summer, but the heat - not so much.

We never had air conditioning when I was a kid. In South Africa, you really didn’t need to air condition your house. It would get hot in the day, but really cool down at night. In New Jersey, however, you really did need to have air conditioning. And we didn’t have it.

Instead, we had a huge attic exhaust fan.  You’d turn it on, and it would suck air in through the house’s windows and pull the hot air up and out, creating a breeze. In theory.

If you were up and walking through the house, you could definitely feel the air moving. The windows in my bedroom, however, were high up and narrow. The lovely breeze that was created, happened about three feet above where I was sleeping on the bed.

Mother Cat, our slightly insane Siamese cat, liked to sleep curled up around my neck. She and the other cats were all indoor/outdoor cats, so they often picked up fleas.

Why didn’t I just lock my door and not let her in, you ask? Well, she was a Siamese cat and, true to her breed, she was LOUD. If I didn’t let her in, she would just sit outside my door and yowl. I spent endless summer days waking up sweating and wearing a collar of cat fur and fleabites. On top of everything else, she had truly terrible breath. Mother Cat would yawn, cough and stretch right along with me as I woke up. As I write this, I am fully experiencing that little morning cat-cough that aimed itself right into the center of my face all over again.

To this day, those first beautifully warm days in May that follow the endless dreary months of gray, freezing New York winter days can trigger feelings of dread in the pit of my stomach.

In my adult life, as soon as it gets above 70 degrees outside, the air conditioner gets switched on. We don’t really need it during the day, but we really do need it at night to be able to sleep. Michael’s like his own little heating unit in the bed beside me.

While not a fan of the heat, I am, however, even less of a fan of feeling trapped at home. So, yesterday, against all reason, I headed out.

Somebody vandalized the Black Lives Matter painting on 5th Avenue. It actually looks like several somebodies did it at several different times. Some of the letters have had black paint spread over them. Some have had white paint splattered on them.

It’s interesting that that happened given that there is a group of policemen on 24/7 duty right there, guarding Trump Tower. They stand about 10 feet away from the street. It is one of the most, if not the most, protected places in Manhattan.

We, the taxpayers, are paying millions of dollars each year for those guys to stand there. It’s not as if the Black Lives Matter street painting is graffiti. The Mayor of New York City, himself, authorized those words to be painted there.

A couple of blocks across town at Columbus Circle, barricades have been set up around the perimeter of the statue in the center of it. Police vehicles guard the statue from vandals around the clock - one on either side of the circle. Inside Central Park there is a second statue of Christopher Columbus. That, too, has barricades around it, as well as a portable generator and light array and around the clock police protection.

Neither of those statues have suffered any vandalism and yet the Black Lives Matter painting on Fifth Avenue has been allowed to be attacked and disfigured. That’s a pretty clear message that’s being sent by the government of our city. Either the mayor is OK with the destruction or he doesn’t have control over his police force. Neither option instills much confidence.

I headed back out into the heat this morning. The movers are finally coming tomorrow morning to pack up my friend’s stuff and ship it down to Australia. I’m getting the last of the stuff sorted out and the refrigerator cleared out.

There’s something about helping my friend with this that is driving the truth of what we are all facing home yet again. International travel to and from Australia is unlikely to resume until next spring.

Australia is one of the places, in the past, that I have escaped to work during the summer months back here in New York. While we are now in the middle of our summer, Australia is in the middle of their winter.

Like New York, Australia has managed to flatten their curve, but that doesn’t mean that we will be able to go there. Australia, like much of the rest of the world, wants nothing whatsoever to do with us.

Apparently, the continental US is experiencing a weather phenomenon called a heat dome. A heat dome is a strong and persistent high-pressure system. The high-pressure air descends from above and heats up as it gets to the surface. The system is called a dome because it is shaped like one. The high-pressure air keeps a kind of lid on the heat that gets trapped on the surface. Like a boiling pot, that causes the heat to build up. It’s pretty much as unpleasant as it sounds. As climate change progresses, we are likely to see many more of these.

We are also basically trapped under a dome created by our government. We are all stuck here. Neither Canada nor Mexico want us crossing their borders. The coronavirus is raging all but unchecked through several large areas of our country. The President refuses, REFUSES, to do anything about it.

Cases are rising and people are dying. Under this dome of inaction, the heat is rising.

“I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take this anymore.” Howard Beale, the newscaster in the film Network, rants, and starts a movement. “I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take this anymore.”

When do we hit that point? How hot do things need to get?

I’m sitting in my friend’s apartment now, in the cool. I’ve just untangled all of the cable TV stuff. I know that I have to leave and get on with my day, but it is so blissfully not hot in here. Out of the tens of thousands of windows that I can see from this apartment, exactly one has its windows open.

Con Edison sent out an alert yesterday warning of possible service interruptions because the grid may become over-taxed from everybody turning on their air-conditioners. I have this one on low.

My discomfort in this heat is nothing compared to what many others are experiencing. It’s laughable. There are plenty of people out there who are about to be unable to pay their utility bills at all. People who are going to have no choice but to send their kids back to school so that they will be able to go back to work. If they even have work to go back to.

The heat is rising everywhere, and we are going to need to deal with it.

This particular heat dome will dissipate eventually. But if we don’t start to try and combat climate change, then we will only see more of them occur as time passes.

If our Governments don’t start taking the issue of social justice seriously then the heat from that will continue to rise as well.

If our Government doesn’t start actively working on flattening the curve of this virus, then the resulting heat is going to engulf us all.

The way to combat fire is to take away the things that feed it. We need to change how we do things.

We need change in our government.

We need to be responsible to each other by wearing a mask and keeping our distance.

It’s so much less difficult to do that than to suffer the consequences of what happens when we don’t.

OK. AC is off. I’m going back out into the heat now.

There’s work to be done.