Heat Wave
So roughly two months have passed without anything compelling for me to write about. My birthday passed without too much fanfare; my cousin came downtown to get me drunk, making it the most exciting birthday I've had in four years, when I went out with Jason Beckwith and he got laid and I didn't. This time, Cousin Bill found some woman who remembered him from the Board of Trade and hung at his elbow all night. Speaking of elbows, I hit mine on something and was in pain for days.
But the defining pattern around here for the last month has been the heat. Oppressive, stifling heat. So powerful you can't think straight or sleep at night. For whatever reason, it has sapped my mental powers so coming up with witty, insightful, or poignant commentary was out of the question. It was all I could do to stay up til 4AM playing Age Of Empires. What's more, I sit in front of the computer on this shitty, twenty-year-old Samsonite chair. The seat has this plastic/naugahyde covering such that, if I'm sitting in my boxers, I have to change shorts every forty-five minutes or so because my ass gets soaked with sweat. For reasons I won't go into, I've been given to understand that that can lead to a fungus problem. So now I cover the seat with a towel and apply liberal doses of talcum powder.
This week the heat has broken somewhat, however, my air conditioning is broken so my place is consistently fifteen degrees hotter than outside. Before there was nowhere for me to escape the heat, now I can at least go outside. So tonight I took advantage of the lakefront. I went out to Lake Shore and walked up to the boathouse at North. I spent entirely too long fucking around at my place so there wasn't much daylight left for me to read the book I brought with (a biography of Nikita Khrushchev. Y'know, beach reading) but I sat under a lamppost and enjoyed the skyline with my reading.
Day or night, the skyline is so amazing from that part of the waterfront. Somehow it manages to look both imposing with its size and delicate compared to the water and sky. I see the Hancock building dominate that part of the view and it frankly scares the shit out of me to think it could be attacked. I didn't have much time to ruminate on worst-case scenarios for too long. The bugs got thicker and I had to walk home.
In half an hour I have to call a guy who probably doesn't want to be bothered to talk to me, in order to send a resume to a firm that has a very low opinion of my former employer. I'll also have to re-edit my resume so that it doesn't contain the name of the guy who's been my best reference up til now. He's on the head of the firm's bad side so I'll have that complicating matters as well. O Lord, How Long?
So roughly two months have passed without anything compelling for me to write about. My birthday passed without too much fanfare; my cousin came downtown to get me drunk, making it the most exciting birthday I've had in four years, when I went out with Jason Beckwith and he got laid and I didn't. This time, Cousin Bill found some woman who remembered him from the Board of Trade and hung at his elbow all night. Speaking of elbows, I hit mine on something and was in pain for days.
But the defining pattern around here for the last month has been the heat. Oppressive, stifling heat. So powerful you can't think straight or sleep at night. For whatever reason, it has sapped my mental powers so coming up with witty, insightful, or poignant commentary was out of the question. It was all I could do to stay up til 4AM playing Age Of Empires. What's more, I sit in front of the computer on this shitty, twenty-year-old Samsonite chair. The seat has this plastic/naugahyde covering such that, if I'm sitting in my boxers, I have to change shorts every forty-five minutes or so because my ass gets soaked with sweat. For reasons I won't go into, I've been given to understand that that can lead to a fungus problem. So now I cover the seat with a towel and apply liberal doses of talcum powder.
This week the heat has broken somewhat, however, my air conditioning is broken so my place is consistently fifteen degrees hotter than outside. Before there was nowhere for me to escape the heat, now I can at least go outside. So tonight I took advantage of the lakefront. I went out to Lake Shore and walked up to the boathouse at North. I spent entirely too long fucking around at my place so there wasn't much daylight left for me to read the book I brought with (a biography of Nikita Khrushchev. Y'know, beach reading) but I sat under a lamppost and enjoyed the skyline with my reading.
Day or night, the skyline is so amazing from that part of the waterfront. Somehow it manages to look both imposing with its size and delicate compared to the water and sky. I see the Hancock building dominate that part of the view and it frankly scares the shit out of me to think it could be attacked. I didn't have much time to ruminate on worst-case scenarios for too long. The bugs got thicker and I had to walk home.
In half an hour I have to call a guy who probably doesn't want to be bothered to talk to me, in order to send a resume to a firm that has a very low opinion of my former employer. I'll also have to re-edit my resume so that it doesn't contain the name of the guy who's been my best reference up til now. He's on the head of the firm's bad side so I'll have that complicating matters as well. O Lord, How Long?