Heat

Weather Forecast: Fat Men in Tank Tops

/ cigarman501 / 7 Comments

“I hate dressing. I hate the heat. I hate sweaty people getting aggressively close to you when you’re walking down the street.” – Johnny Weir

The temperature is climbing and will touch ninety if the weather liars are to be believed. I don’t need the weather liars to tell me that the humidity is climbing toward ninety too. The air will feel like triple digits they say. The air is not mid-July or August heavy but if the air were a human it could stand to lose a few pounds. So could the guy in the pea green tank top.

Hot and humid weather brings them out like darkness draws cockroaches. Industrial sized men in cargo pants that reach below their knees, flip-flops, and tank tops they have not only grown into but have grown well beyond.

Anyone who knows me, or sees the way I dress, knows that I’m not a fashion snob but I do own a mirror. I sometimes wear cargo shorts that hit just below the knees, but I never wear flips or slides outside of the house. My toes are in too bad a shape to subject people to that. Looking at my toes the descriptor “gagger” comes to mind.

Tank tops? Never have I ever. Why? Again, I own a mirror. As the ravages of age have befallen me, I don’t even like to wear short sleeves. Since a 2006 heart attack, my weight has remained a somewhat constant one-eighty, down from two thirty-two the day of the event. I’d like to weigh my all-time low of one sixty-eight, but that all-time low may be a mirage.

While my weight has remained constant, my body has changed. I blame my abhorrence of strength training. My chest has fallen into ass and my arms have shriveled. Think of a potato with twigs for arms. I should rethink the mirror thing.

I wish Mr. Pea Green Tank Top had been a mirage that dissipated rapidly. Instead, he picked a table directly in line with my line of sight and began to scratch an underarm featuring underarm hair that reminded me of one of Star Trek’s Tribbles.

He was like watching a train wreck you could not avert your eyes from. A pie shaped, very florid face with thin hair above, sweat plastered to his forehead. His triple chin sat atop a tank top stretched to a breaking point and a chest that should have featured his wife’s bra.

For a moment I mentally applauded his fashion confidence…just not his fashion sense. This was a man comfortable with his considerable heft and was displaying it proudly. I’m sure had he known what I was thinking, he would have exclaimed, “Kiss my porcine ass cheeks, I’ll wear what I want. If you don’t like it eat somewhere else.”  

He would be correct in his thinking. It is none of my business how others dress but I found that my appetite for a fish taco had waned. For some reason, the fish didn’t taste as good. Maybe I am a fashion snob.

I was also reminded of an industrial sized friend who asked a young lady out on a date. The object of his desire asked, “Why should I go out with you?” His answer was, “I don’t sweat much for a fat guy.” She liked his sense of humor, went out with him and they have been happily married for several decades.

If I have offended anyone, let me reiterate. I am not fat or health shaming him. I am questioning his fashion choice…I am also questioning an eating establishment that doesn’t feature a tank top banning to go with “No shirt, no shoes, no service.”

Don Miller’s author’s page may be found at https://www.amazon.com/stores/Don-Miller/author/B018IT38GM?ref=ap_rdr&store_ref=ap_rdr&isDramIntegrated=true&shoppingPortalEnabled=true

“Lawd Have Mercy…I’m Gonna Melt”

/ cigarman501 / 7 Comments

“By July, a damp Southern heat had settled down on the town like warm sweet syrup.” ― Marti Healy

Lawd, it is July early, just a few days past the Fourth, and it is already hotter than new asphalt laid down in August. It’s a still heat…nay it is stagnant. It hangs like a heavy curtain. I imagine being wrapped in a wet, wool blanket and forced to sit in a sauna. I just took a shower after an early morning fitness walk, and I don’t know why I took the time to dry off.

It is a silent heat. The birds aren’t singing or flying about. The only movement I detect is the swarm of mosquitoes chasing a swarm of gnats. I just mentioned three of the five most hated things about summer in the South. The other two? Stinging critters and the humidity.

According to the biology, sweat evaporation is necessary to keep the body cool. It ain’t working. I’m sweating gallons but the humidity is so high the perspiration drips from my nose and runs downhill into my shoes.

My mind wanders to a hot, midday August practice. Football in the South, gotta love it. The player was an industrial sized defensive lineman dragging himself through whatever hell I was having him do.

As I watched him huff and puff, I asked, “Are you okay?”

The young man didn’t even look up, “Coach, I’m okay, I’ve just dyin’ of heat castration.”

I knew better than ask but I did, “What exactly is heat castration.”

“Coach, when it’s so hot I’m sweating my balls off.”

It is as still as the inside of a coffin and I’m not moving fast enough to create a breeze. Southern authors might describe the heat as “sultry.” No, Elizabeth Taylor as Maggie the Cat was sultry. I’m sitting on the hot tin roof without her. (For those not old enough, Elizabeth Taylor starred in the movie “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.” She is referred to as Maggie the Cat by her husband, portrayed by Paul Newman.)

Elizabeth Taylor making a slip look “sultry”

I think our Southern summers are trying to kill us. I need to cut my grass. I walked out before checking the temperature on my phone’s weather app. After I got outside, I no longer needed to check it. “Lawd, I’m gonna burst into flames.”

I decided the grass could wait. After checking the daily forecasts, cutting might have to wait until October. The heat index, what hell feels like to the skin, is 105.

I have grown fat and soft. The heat didn’t bother me as it rippled the air over the corn, cotton, and hay fields of my youth causing heat mirages to form over the fields. Well…it bothered me, but I didn’t let it stop me…I wasn’t allowed to let it stop me. That is not the case now. It stops me dead in my tracks.

I live in the foothills of the Blue Ridge. It is cooler here than the rest of the state. I don’t know how people live in the midlands. Orangeburg is located just south of Columbia and just above hell. Living there must feel like living in the top of a double boiler.

Before you folk living in Texas, Arizona, and Death Valley, California, chime in, heat and humidity are relative to where you live. You live there, I live here and I’m sweating like a sporting lady sitting in the front row of a church.

As a young church goer, I remember sitting through summer sermons in our unairconditioned church. Tall windows open for wasp to fly in but are catching little of a nonexistent breeze. If there was a breeze it always seemed superheated as if from a blast furnace. On a particularly hot day, our stoic minister recorded what had to be the shortest sermon of all time. “If you think it is hot now, just wait. Mend your ways or suffer hellfire. Benediction please!”

Overdressed women with funeral home fans frantically trying to move the air. Overdressed men in suitcoats sitting stoically as perspiration pooled in their underwear. The women’s movements creating more heat than the heat they dissipated. My own perspiration causing my shirt to stick to the varnished pews.

Summer may be trying to kill us, but we wear our sweat stains like a badge of honor and produce creative and colorful ways to describe it. “Hotter than a blister bug in a pepper patch” and it’s close kin, “Hotter than a goat’s ass in a pepper patch.”  “Hotter than the devil’s housecat,” and my all-time favorite, “Hotter than two rats screwing in a wool sock.”

Blister Bug (Beetle) One of 7500 different varieties that cause painful blisters. Not nearly as sultry as Liz Taylor.

One of my favorite quotes comes from Eugene Walter, “Summer in the deep South is not only a season, a climate, it’s a dimension. Floating in it, one must be either proud or submerged.” Proud to be submerged in what must be a vat of very warm molasses.

Still, without the summer there would be no scents of honeysuckle mixing with jasmine and gardenias. There would be no lightning bugs, no lonesome call of the whippoorwill, no blue tailed skink living on my back porch. There would be no watching dragonflies chase each other over the cooling waters of the local lake.

There would be no anticipation of rain from the tree frogs, their croaking rising with the late evening breeze and the distant display of heat lightning. If fortunate, the blessed cool after a thunderstorm and the smell of ozone in the air.

There would be no tomato sandwiches and corn on the cob roasting on a grill. There would be no smell of BBQ slow cooking in a smoker…well, you can slow cook pork in the winter too, but winter tomatoes are God awful.

Summer might be trying to kill us, but it gives us sustenance, not physically but emotionally. We are all proud survivors…until we are not and in the South the dead don’t quite stay dead. I wonder if the ghosts of our past sweat as much as we do.

Don Miller writes at https://www.amazon.com/Don-Miller/e/B018IT38GM?fbclid=IwAR1M-GLJxRmzg_d2txgswxw3AvY26zxoXZH02axPJ0gJN3Kn77lEDX79vPY

Hotter Than The Devil’s Colon

/ cigarman501 / 11 Comments

“It’s a sure sign of summer if the chair gets up when you do.” — Walter Winchell

The “Dog Days” of Summer just ended but I guess no one informed Mother Nature.  Maybe she is “going through the change” and is sharing some of those hot flashes my wife tells me about.  Much of the country is finding out about Momma’s hot flashes. Good Lord I’m dyin’ here. It is hotter than “all get out!”

Dog Days? Credit the ancient Greeks for the name. They dubbed Sirius, the brightest star in the constellation Canis Major, the “Dog Star”.  From the Greek word Canis we somehow arrive at the word canine…the word for puppy dog. 

The star appears above the eastern horizon just ahead of the Sun in late July and with its appearance, the hottest days of summer arrive. At least that is the folklore. It was already “hotter than a pepper sprout” before Sirius peeked at us from above the horizon.

The Greeks believed the combined power of the stars, Helios (Greek for the Sun) and Sirius. Their combined heat was what made this the hottest time of year. As hot as puppy breath.

The Greeks also believed the Dog Days didn’t bode well for humans…or dogs. All you have to do is read Homer’s Iliad. It refers to Sirius as Orion’s dog rising and describes the star as being associated with war and disaster. Even the Romans believed the rising of Sirius to be a time of drought, bad luck, and unrest when dogs and men alike would be driven mad by the extreme heat.

“Only mad dogs and Englishmen go out in the midday sun” is believed to have been coined by Englishman Rudyard Kipling and might too apply. Not sure his quote has anything to do with the Dog Days but “Mad Dogs and Englishmen” was a great album. Sometimes my thoughts wander like Joe Cocker singing in front of a microphone.

I do know it is hotter than a mosquito’s tweeter.  When I walked through the Wally World parking lot yesterday and got into my black truck with its black interior it was hotter than “blue blazes” which with “mosquito’s tweeters” got me to thinkin’, always iffy for me. I began to mull over all of the Southern colloquialisms I have heard to describe how hot it might be. These are some of the “cleaner” ones I’ve heard throughout my lifetime. Mostly cleaner…well borderline cleaner.

First, to be clear, I’m not complaining about the heat.  After a particularly brutal winter, for the foothills of the South Carolina, I swore I would “nevah, evah” disparage the heat of summer again.  Humidity, now that is something else. I will disparage humidity, it is fair game.  So to be clear, I’m not disparaging the weather being “hotter than a Billy goat with four peckers.”

Seems we Southerners have several colorful colloquialisms involving Billy goats and heat.  Besides the previously mentioned curiously endowed Billy there is “hotter than a Billy goat with a blow torch” and my favorite, “hotter than a Billy goat’s ass in a pepper patch.”  Man, that’s sho nuff hot.

We have a gracious plenty of sayings involving animals and heat.  “Hotter than Satan’s housecat.” “Hotter than a fire hydrant chasing a dog.” My very favorite, “hotter than two rats fornicating in a wool sock” or its variation, “two dogs fornicating in a croker sack.”  Those sayings lose something in the translation but I felt it prudent to change from the other “F” word.  I know a gussied up pig is still a pig. Finally, one I really don’t understand involves an owl I reckon, “Hotter than a hoot ‘n a poot.”  Nope, don’t understand at all but it is somewhat rhythmic sounding.

Including the title of my epic, many sayings involve the Devil or Hell as you can imagine.  “Hotter than the Devil’s armpit.” “Hotter than Satan’s toenails.” “Hotter than the hinges on the gates of Hell.”  “Hotter than Hell and half of Georgia.”  

Poor Georgia. Georgia is at best semi-tropical and at worst, centered directly over Hell.  “Hotter than a Georgia firecracker lit at both ends.”  “Hotter than Georgia asphalt.”  Sorry, Georgia, I don’t mean to denigrate but there are few places I’d rather not be in the Southern summer and you are included on my list along with Columbia, South Carolina. 

I know why “the devil went down to Georgia” in the old Charlie Daniels tune. Despite the lyrics, he wasn’t “looking for a soul to steal” or to challenge Johnny to a fiddle contest.  He was on his way back home to Georgia from his vacation spot in Columbia. Sorry, Ray Charles, Georgia is not on my mind.

I reckon I would be remiss if I didn’t include one off color response to the Southern heat involving women of ill-repute. “Hotter than a two-dollar whore on Saturday night” or a variation on the theme, “Sweatin’ like a whore in Sunday school.” I’ll quit. Yeah, I know I said one off color response and your got two. Must have been Saturday nickel night.

During my early football coaching days I questioned a player who seemed to be struggling in the afternoon heat and humidity after the second practice during August two-a-days. His steps were slow and plodding, his head downcast as we fought our way up the hill to the locker room through soup like humidity.

“Bub, you lookin’ a bit wane. You okay?”

Exhaling heavily, “I’m ah sufferin’ from heat castration, Coach.”

“Heat castration? That’s a new one on me.”

“Yeah Coach, It’s so hot I’m sweating my balls off.” Bah-da-boom.

I read a quote recently that was directed at the Pelican State but could have been directed at any Southern state during the late summertime…or the rest of the United States this year.  Tom Robbins wrote, “Louisiana in September was like an obscene phone call from nature. The air–moist, sultry, secretive, and far from fresh–felt as if it were being exhaled into one’s face. Sometimes it even sounded like heavy breathing.”  Well said, Mr. Robbins, well said.

From previous experience, my guess is the obscene heat and humidity we Southerners endure will continue well past the official end of Summer.  Mother Nature doesn’t seem to abide by calendars or such. At times I’ve found late October to be “hotter than forty dammits”. 

Please don’t get me wrong.  I’m not complaining and I will not wish my life away longing for fall. I wouldn’t live anywhere else but am thankful for the invention of air conditioning cause otherwise I’d be “sweatin’ like a pig in a sausage factory.”

Meanwhile, here’s Charlie Daniels with a few of his friends. “Devil Comes Back to Georgia.”

Don Miller’s author’s page may be found at https://www.amazon.com/Don-Miller/e/B018IT38GM?fbclid=IwAR1AnHOdby4tY4i5xWAMfNinEgy1Y4K5EpLKQBVaDr5-QeTZX1fkiYOzOW8

The soaring thermometer image came from https://newsinfo.inquirer.net/1429525/beware-of-soaring-heat-index-stay-cool-and-hydrated-pagasa

Summers Now Past

/ cigarman501 / 4 Comments

Or when I reaized Peter Pan had died.

My best summers are behind me not ahead.  If memory serves me, my best summers ended when my hand could reach around the end of a hoe handle or I became strong enough to heft a square bale of hay and toss it onto the back of a flatbed truck.  It certainly ended the summer I walked into the den of heat and noise that was Springs Mills.  Peter Pan died that day.  Despite my best efforts I had grown up.

The last day of school before the summer break.  Elementary school kids squirming in their seats waiting to cast off the chains of their forced imprisonment.  “I’m free, I’m free!”  And just like that, it was September again.

No more Tonka toys and little green soldiers in a sandy ditch.  No more corn cob fights with Mickey and Donnie Ray around the barn. No more playing war in red clay banks around the cornfield.  Fewer trips to the river to check trotlines or intently watching a bobber while praying for a bit of a nibble just to let me know something was down there.

Ode to youth now past.

Here in the foothills of the Blue Ridge a high-pressure dome is making life unbearable.  Hot, hot, hot.  Humid, humid, humid…but no rain.  Hotter than two mice mating in a wool sock and even the devil is bitching about the humidity.  Despite the humidity and the thunder that rumbled around yesterday, my garden is dryer than a popcorn fart.

There is something about the heat and humidity that brings the memories back.  I question how I survived without air conditioning but somehow, I did.  Tall screenless windows at school, perspiration dripping on notebook paper as I practice my letters.  A wasp flies through the window causing a momentary lull in the activities.

No reprieve at home or at church on Sunday.  Humidity and heat causing my shirt to stick to the lacquered seatback.  Ladies in pillbox hats, gloves, and long sleeves fanning as if their lives depend on it, and it may have.  Men in suits and ties sitting stoically in their own perspiration.  The minister announces with a thump of his Bible, “If you think it’s hot now…just wait.  Benediction please.”

As I remembered, my back was bent toward the ground as I straddled the short row of beans.  Perspiration ran down my nose and was soaked up by the dusty soil underneath me as the rivulets landed with a plop.  My sweat ran like the Catawba River during the rainy season when my revelation occurred.  I was thinking of a simpler time.  In my mind my grandmother is beside me, both of us straddling a row, the sweat running down both our noses.

Summer was the time to make hay while the sun shone…tomatoes, beans, squash, okra, watermelons, and corn too.  The sun shone hotly and pulled the moisture into the air encapsulating me in what seemed like a wet, wool blanket.  Hot, moist sun-heated air.  Squash and cucumbers wilting, corn stalk leaves drooping in the afternoon heat…humans wilting and drooping as if they were plants.

As I shift briefly to the present, I realize, there will be good Summers ahead…they will just be different.  Miller Kate and Noli cavorting, splashing in the pool remind me of their mother searching for crawdads and salamanders in the stream by the house.  A memory that brings the smile to my face.  It is about their memories and dreams now.  Mine are still focused on the past.

I remember the welcomed afternoon thunderstorms.  The smell of ozone heralding the cooling winds to come…a few minutes of chill until the sun returned…heat and humidity with it.  Storm clouds outlining the distant water tower in Waxhaw to the east, the western sun reflects off of the tower and makes the thunderheads seem ominous.

My grandmother’s admonishment, “Don’t stand in the draft you might get hit by lightning” or “Get away from the sink!  Lightning will fry you like fatback.”  Needless to say, nothing electrical was turned on especially the TV.  Lightning strikes were worrisome on her hilltop if the lightning rods on the hip roof of my grandmother’s house were to be believed.

Despite sitting in a low ‘holler’, the transformer down the river road from my house was hit a few times and I remember mini lightning flashes jumping between the telephone and the lights over the kitchen bar.  Probably shouldn’t answer the phone.

Ball jars filled with water and wrapped in newspaper to keep it cool.  It didn’t work.  Water was welcomed even warm.  There were times I would have sucked the water from a mud puddle if I could have found one.  Those transcontinental rows of corn that needed to be hoed or forty ‘leven thousand hay bales to toss and stack.  There is nothing much hotter than corn, hay, or cotton fields during July and August.

Inside the relative cool of a non-airconditioned kitchen, sweet Southern iced tea, or a glass of chilled buttermilk, helped to quench your thirst.  Drops of condensation succumbing to gravity on the side of an iced jelly glass…Sylvester the Cat staring back at me, a huge grin on his face.  He knew how much I enjoyed the tea and the peanut butter cookie that accompanied it.  

Late in the harvest season, a watermelon might be picked and put in a nearby stream to cool.  Maybe a ripe tomato or two.  Late afternoons we would crack open the bounty and fight off the horse flies as watermelon juice mixed with the sweat and dripped from our fingers and faces.

In this new timeline, I think about cracking open the Tanqueray and adding some tonic and lime.  What? We have no lime?  Wait! Ah, I found one.

I stare out of my French Doors wondering if I really want to leave the air conditioning to cut grass or pick beans…or do anything else…  How did I get so old?  I also know that the extra piece of watermelon I want to eat will add at least two trips to the bathroom during the night.

I once had an old man tell me the problem with getting old.  “Young man, you know what is bad about gettin’ old?”  I think I was fifty at the time.  In his overalls with a fedora pushed back on his head, he answered the question I had not asked, “There are no dreams left for old men.”

I thought I knew what he meant.  Dreams of love, or an unreasonable facsimile. Getting ahead in the world, earning triumphs and victories, winning another state championship, and overcoming the disappointments of being close but no cigar.

The old man was correct.  There are no pursuits of state championships any more but I would edit his comment.  “There are no young man’s dreams but there are dreams.”

Dreams of a different time when Peter Pan was still alive.  Dreams of summers without a care in the world…a time when I knew I never wanted to grow up…but yet I did.

Still, I shan’t be sad.  There will be good summers ahead as long as my sun continues to rise.  I won’t dream only of the past.  Even dreams must change with time.

***+

The image is of a summer sunset from Pixabay and found on The Old Farmer’s Almanac.

Don Miller’s author’s page may be found at https://www.amazon.com/Don-Miller/e/B018IT38GM?fbclid=IwAR3YwCXc-tSERSihnz93ceDKB3PzxGIYX3lVWrJx3-mYmPV89rNT4j7PvxA.

How Did We Survive?

/ cigarman501 / 3 Comments

 

My downstairs air conditioner is out…specifically the air handler.  I felt it when I came downstairs first thing this morning.  For some reason, air-conditioned air at seventy-one degrees feels different than non-air-conditioned air at the same temperature.  Am I crazy? Oh yes but not because of that last statement.  I knew immediately something was amiss.

I am anxiously awaiting my rescue from the remnants of the lingering summer.  It’s not too bad…yet.  We are well shaded but I’m expecting temps in the mid-nineties by week’s end…it could be bad by Friday if my problem hasn’t been rectified by then…it could be bad tonight as inside temperatures approach a balmy seventy-five.  I don’t sleep well above seventy-two…who am I kidding?  I don’t sleep well.

I should warn you; I sweat in Biblical proportions.  Noah’s forty days and nights look like a clearing off shower.

My predicament once again has me scurrying down a pig trail that leads to those thrilling days of yesteryear.  How did we survive in the days when air-conditioning was not the norm?

I know.  You get used to what you get used to and I have become acclimated to air-conditioned air.  There was a time….

I remember an unairconditioned school building.  We never called off school because of extreme temperatures, hot or cold…but I forget we were built of sterner stuff.  As first graders, we walked ten miles to and from school, uphill in both directions, wind, rain, snow or asteroid strike be damned.

A brick building with wide and high windows.  Ceilings twenty-five feet high if they were an inch, not really but twelve at least…may be.  Unscreened, high and wide windows, I  remember the panic caused by red wasps visiting our eighth-grade history class and trying to take notes around the droplets of perspiration dripping onto my notebook.

During those wonderful years of junior high school, one young lady decided shucking her underwear might help with heat transfer…in the middle of class.   Much in the same way my wife can change clothes using her tee-shirt as her dressing room, this girl squirmed out of her slip.  Our teacher, a somewhat flustered Mister Gunter cautioned us that we should reframe from removing foundation garments due to the heat.  Somehow, we survived with most of our clothing on.

Church Sundays were the same…except for the removing of our underwear.  Tall windows open to catch whatever breeze was available.  No screens and plenty of wasps visiting, dispensing their own version of hellfire and brimstone.

Handheld funeral fans causing us to sweat more with the effort needed to keep the hot and humid air moving.  Sweat soaked dress shirts ruined when the varnish on the pews stuck to them.  I survived even if my shirts didn’t.

At home, it was ceiling box fans and window fans, sitting on the front porch until the bedroom had cooled sufficiently enough for the sandman to visit…sleeping on the front porch when it was miserably hot.  Hmm…decisions, decisions.  Sweat yourself to sleep in the bedroom from Dante’s Inferno or risk getting sucked dry by mosquitos.  I believe I’ll just lay here with a window fan installed backwards in the window at the foot off my bed.  I actually slept that way…with my head at the foot of my bed with chicken wire covering the backside of the fan so I didn’t accidentally stick a body part in it.  Somehow, we did survive…body parts and all.

I know we spent our awake time outdoors.  No matter how hot it was outside, it was cooler than inside.  A lot of the time was spent in my grandmother’s garden, playing cowboys and Indians in and around the barn or recreating World War Two in the woods or on the clay bank behind my house.  For some reason, it didn’t seem as hot then.

It’s persimmon season despite the heat and I remember running barefoot under the persimmon tree in my grandmother’s backyard.  Rotting persimmons caking on the bottom of my feet, oozing between my toes, sticking to the brown, dusty, dry dirt.  Hearing, “You chaps clean your feet before you come into this house!”  Heading to the stream that ran through the pasture trying to pry the mud off our feet.  Getting distracted with the crawfish and minnows…forgetting it was time to do my chores.  “Go out there and pick me a keen hickory!  I’m gonna switch them legs.”  No physical marks remain and eventually my feet came clean.

When my bride and I first moved to our little piece of heaven in the foothills of the Blue Ridge, we had no air conditioning and were surprised at the low ceilings our little farmhouse had…until winter hit, and we understood.  It gets cold in them thar hills.  The original owners were required to feed five fireplaces to heat their home.  Low ceilings make for a warmer house.

In the summer we never ventured onto the second floor, it was just too hot.  For seven years we survived with the help of the hemlocks, poplars and black walnuts surrounding the house along with ceiling and window fans.   Late nights sitting on the front porch waiting for the bedroom to cool down.  Just talking and rocking or swinging, holding hands, the smell of a cigar mixing with the forest smells and citronella.  Good times.  Maybe we did more than survive.

My guess is we will survive this little blip on our radar.  Still, I hope it is a short little blip.

The image is of Robert Hays sweating it out as Ted Striker in Airplane! (1980)

Further musings may be found at https://www.amazon.com/Don-Miller/e/B018IT38GM