The heat wave has lifted slightly, which is a relief, but the scare hasn’t left me, like the heat of the sun stored in the asphalt and the grass, the buildings and the trees, radiating out for long after the sun has left the sky. It gets hotter and hotter, and every year the demands increase for more electricity to power our air conditioners, for more water for our yellowing and thirsty lawns, for more ice to put into dog dishes and pitchers of lemonade, for more and more and more, and it worries me, like we are going to run out, like we are running out of fossil fuels, like we are running out of space on the earth, like we are running into the arms of extinction.
I suppose I am a worrier by nature. I have always had the tendency. I remember as a young child, when tampered bottles of Tylenol were claiming innocent victims in the 80s, striking down people in their parachute pant prime, I would lie awake at night, thinking about the red and white bottle in our bathroom cabinet, wondering if its contents were a killer just waiting to be unleashed, like a genie, dispensing death instead of wishes. As an adult, my fearful fantasies haven’t abated, and as I see the weather reports for my beloved Valley delivered in hyperbole, records set daily, lightning without thunder, storms without rain, sun without shade, the highest, the worst, the most – I wonder if I will wake from this nightmare into another one, like in the Twilight Zone, when the hottest summer revealed itself to be the coldest winter.
I like driving, because the air conditioner in my car works better than any other anywhere, and although I burn up precious gasoline doing so, I can block out the horror of my own copious consumption in the blitzkrieg of Freon and maximum fan. I listen to songs on my iPod through my outdated Monster, which struggles for dominance over 107.9 fm, interrupting TLC’s “Waterfalls” with the odious call in talk show on the Christian station, whose listeners proclaim loudly that theories of global warming don’t take the Scripture into account, and that the panic is only the heathen ramblings of abortionists and homosexuals. Which is worse: the polar ice caps melting or the ignorance that permeates our land with its dull, rotten stink that will not be washed away by any flood or floating catastrophe?