it's hot. really really hot. with pounding sun. my fragile skin can't take it much. i stay inside. my air conditioners are weak and tired. i draw the blinds. i stop smoking and stare into the void not much knowing what to do or where to go. i watch Chung King Express and feel and imagine their sultry southeast
asian heat, and it is sexier and more natural than this is. this is just crippling. there is no small person selling noodles, there are no watch-hawkers, or gleaming hair and luscious, interesting fruits, sudden downpours, cheap, ugly gold, stray dogs, the lure of the ocean, the real ocean, fake perfume, sex, polyester clothes, seafood, taxi drivers from other hemispheres, beer, language as a currency. there is none of that in this exotic town. there is just silence in the heat.
everyone is inside in the air-conditioning like i am. solitary and commiserating. i was inside all day. peering through the blinds and sneezing. eating snacks. i took the garbage down late, about 10 pm. it was so hot, so humid, i couldn't believe it when i went out at night, thinking it would have cooled off. it was like walking into a wall, or maybe walking through a wall into an alternate space, it was so tangible, so tactile. i came back to my pod of air,
ahh! cool air. but i wanted to go back into it, like entering back into a bad dream, or a dark love affair. it was so bizarre and alive! it was its own entity! the heat and and the atmosphere has a life of its own. a secret life late at night where it can come into full bloom, it felt like an emergence, and i wanted more of it.more of its secrets and depths. cockroaches
scuttled along and the other vermin and other small lives also conducted their particular micro-
ecologies with no self-consciousness.
the heat feels bigger than me. more profound and ancient. nothing wise about it. just more of what it has always been. god, i love it. that dark, weird, infected space in the night that makes the swamp real, and makes our tiny lives just that much more. it was here before us and it will gladly swallow us again and again.
