Humidity

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 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 to 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 on 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 create more heat than the heat they dissipate. My own perspiration caused 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 to apply. Not sure if 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 uncertain for me. I began to mull over all 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 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 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 was 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

Deafening Silence

/ cigarman501 / 2 Comments

 

I’ve been outside three times this morning…and it’s not yet seven-thirty.  The puppies woke me way too early.

I am troubled by the silence…the sounds I don’t hear.  I seem to be drawn to the quiet like a moth to a flame.  Everything is muted, even the vehicles climbing up the grade toward Hendersonville.

I don’t understand the silence and I am a bit disturbed.  Usually, the birds and bees are active by this time, chirping and buzzing.  But nothing is moving…just the toad that keeps trying to find a way into my house and the mosquito he must be chasing.

I don’t really mind the toad and admire his persistence.  I wish he would nab the mosquito. The blind puppy dogs seem to mind, picking up his scent and leading me to his location.  Waiting patiently for their “good dog” treats after I remove the interloper to his normal habitat.   Where is that damn mosquito?

Now I am looking at the bird feeders and they are not attracting any kind of activity…squirrels included.  I squint into the pre-dawn light to see if they were emptied during the night.

Did some spaceship descend from the heavens and abduct my wildlife deciding they didn’t need my toad?  I’ve seen too many end of the world movies.

My murder of crows has been quite active recently but not this morning.  Why I wonder?  Why are gatherings of crows called murders?  As I ponder, I realize I really have seen too many horror movies and am crazy as a loon.

It is as if the very air is absorbing sound.  Not a leaf moving.  The citronella torches I just lit are burning straight up, reaching toward heaven.  The heavily scented smoke defies gravity, swirling neither left or right as it disappears toward space.

It has been hot and dry…for us.  I think that makes us all crazy…wildlife included.  Mid-nineties in the foothills of the Blue Ridge.  Pre-dawn has become after dawn and there is no dew on the grass at all.  We need rain badly and a break from the heat.  It is as if the wildlife has already hunkered down in a cool place for the day.  Maybe that’s why the toad continues to break and enter.

Maybe it just my diminished hearing or my increasingly bad mood.  I find myself anxious and a bit depressed.  Am I depressed because of…or is because of why I am depressed?  I don’t know.  I don’t know if I even make sense.

What I do know is the silence is as oppressive as the building humidity and heat.

According to the local weather guru, there is hope on the horizon.  Rain chances increase late in the week.  Nothing for sure…just like life.  Maybe what rain we do get will wash away the silence…or maybe I should get off my ass and make some noise.

The featured image from https://dahni.wordpress.com/2012/03/20/words-matter/

Please take time to like Don Miller’s facebook page at https://www.facebook.com/cigarman501/?eid=ARB0OtYgbYydIVtqtxaOGKECb-AvbbILtPybDOE835b4sChVMzC7w_vB9jqu161yiZWOmbn134yI6lwT

Or his author’s page at https://www.amazon.com/Don-Miller/e/B018IT38GM