Every source I can find says that it’s only 64°F in Not Quite Richmond, CA, but I beg to differ. It feels like Satan’s asscrack outside, with the sun beating down in unrelenting waves of punishment for crimes against humanity that someone around here must have been planning for quite some time. I’m still a Seattle Boy at heart, and this tropical weather is something that I never will get used to. It’s funny that the main selling point of the Bay Area for me was the promise of Palm Trees, and yet I never quite got around to thinking about what type of climate that vegetation represented. It isn’t helping either that we’re in what I can only hope is the tail end of a years’ long drought. I’m just not prepared to go to war over potable water, but give me a few more days like this one, and I’ll unearth my swords and buy new tires for my bicycle, and ride around the Iron Triangle in search of something cool and refreshing that I can bring home to my wife and child. Now there’s an image: A balding man mounted upon a bicycle, wielding twin katana wildly with a look of desperation in his eyes. Surprisingly, I’m more or less okay with that.

I remember one summer when I was living on the Island, I think it was sometime around August, if the explosion of blackberry vines were any indication, and the temperature spiked into the 90’s. That in and of itself might not have been the end of the world, but the humidity seemed to add another pound of misery with every degree above the high 70’s, and there was no escaping it. We tried shutting ourselves in, with all the windows and doors closed, but wound up roasting. We then opened everything up to admit whatever breeze might come, but the only guest to heed our invitation was a second helping of excruciating warmth. We tried splashing water upon our skin to encourage evaporation, but it was sucked in quickly in an attempt to rehydrate our sorry selves. Finally, with no other option available to me, having long since passed the point where I could even consider the notion that other people might exist, I took a couple of machetes to the creek which marked the boundary of our property and began to do some landscaping. It was going swimmingly, down there in the dried-out creek, until someone decided they wanted to pick a fight with me over the property rights of said machetes.

At this point, I would like to offer up some friendly advice to anyone who may someday be in a similar position: If you see someone with a couple of bladed weapons, sweating, swearing, and taking his frustrations out in a horrifyingly useful fashion, please, for the love of all that is good and decent in the world, leave him the hell alone! There will be nothing so important to impart to him that is worth the imminent risk into which you are so valiantly thrusting your life. I’ll leave out some of the more amusing (from my perspective, with a healthy dose of retrospection) details, but I can reassure you that everyone wound up walking away from the incident with the same number of appendages with which they entered. I will say that it was about this time that I realized why there could never be peace in the Middle East, and why the South always seemed a brewing cesspool of intolerance, and why the riots erupted in Los Angeles. Hot weather, put simply, pisses people off. You know where you don’t find a lot of hatred, nor a culture of institutionalized violence? Seattle. Sure, there have been incidents, but overall, everyone is so better adjusted to the concept of not being a complete tool.

It doesn’t rain all the time there, but it is overcast for a majority of the time, and can get pretty chilly when it isn’t June, July, or August. People there seem to be better equipped to get along because they have a common enemy: Californians. No, I’m kidding (kind of). Their real enemy is the unrelenting shittiness of the weather on any given day. And on the Island, if there’s even a weak breeze, there’s a 60/40 chance the power will go out. So people band together and support one another and even the crazy hobos are generally kind. Or at least they used to be. I remember being genuinely shocked when I moved down here, that even after I’d said I had no change to spare, people would keep following me, shouting after and harassing me, like that would change my mind. Just weeks before, back in my hometown, I also couldn’t help someone out, but instead of cursing me and any future offspring, he wished me a good day, and good health. Now, as the temperature continues rising, I’m afraid that Seattle will wind up like San Francisco, and only be good for the people rich enough to avoid having to actually experience it.

And in Mexico, my next stop on the slowest world tour of all time, it just hit 110°F in a place where actual people live! I mean, I’m not planning to go out roaming the countryside, but I’ve been told that it’s kind of rainy where I’m going, and I’d like a chance to get to see that before the whole damn place erupts into either a bloody jungle, or falls away to dustbowl. I know that I’ve made jokes about finding myself a nice cave somewhere in a mountain range (I’ve always been particular to the Olympics), I was mostly joking! I don’t want to have to live in some grubby little cave just to beat the heat! I mean, maybe someday I’ll be ready to dive right into hermitage, but that probably won’t be for at least another decade or so.

I look out into the world as single tear rolls halfway down my cheek (before evaporating in the direct sunlight), thinking about what kind of place that’s been left for my son to have to face. And then I think about my grandson. And my unborn granddaughter. I’ll probably be dead before the final bowel blast, but them? What do they have to look forward to?