by Nick Callanan
I don’t know if it still will be by the time you read this, but right now, it is hot. Too hot.
It’s 1 p.m. in Bingham and the digital thermometer at the bank says its 96 degrees Fahrenheit.
Now, I’m not from Texas or Ecuador, so when all of a sudden when the weather turns from 70 and rainy, to 95 and humid, like it did this week, I suffer greatly.
One tactic I employ to avoid discomfort on these sweltering summer days is to stay completely still. That’s right. I just don’t move and hope the heat passes me by ... sorta like in the cartoons when Shagg and Scoob are being chased by a ghost or vampire and then they run around a corner and try to blend in with the statues. Inactivity leads to success.
Of course, there are other viable alternatives to beat the heat besides statue mode.
For example, what’s better then splashing in a crisp, cool river on a wicked hot day? (Besides that pervert.) Not much. And, believe me, there are several rafting outfitters in Maine just waiting to help you attain this reality (have your credit card number ready).
But, unless you’re one of those full time raft guides, river trips don’t exactly pay the bills.
With that in mind, I sit here typing in a pool of my own sweat. However, as hot as I feel, I can’t help thinking of those folks out there on Rt. 201 holding the ‘Stop/Slow’ sign at the construction sites. Just standing there in the heat: breathing in the fumes from Automobile America, enduring the stares of every passing motorist and sipping off a Big Slam Mountain Dew. I hope they give you guys a bonus for standing out there on these humid days, like maybe a special pass enabling you to cut all the cars waiting in the “Stop” line on your days off.
Back inside my office, air conditioning is the ultimate luxury. I don’t have it, so I try to concoct intricate cool-air-flow schemes to keep myself from overheating. For example, right now there is one fan blowing directly in my face while another rests in the open window, sucking the hot air from the room and blowing it outside. Complimenting the fans is a washcloth wrapped full of ice cubes resting on my neck. I also have a large bucket of water out back that I dunk my head in whenever the heat begins to frustrate me.
Another useful heat-beating trick I use – especially when there is a need to defrost some chicken, sausage or beef for supper – is to place frozen meat down my pants. Although health code officers may not approve of this practice in commercial eating establishments, I find keeping frozen meat inside my underpants an effective cool-down technique. Here’s a helpful tip: just make sure to remove the meat before it begins to decompose. (Anyone for dinner at my house tonight?)
Two serious dangers facing humans in the hot weather are sun burn and sun poisoning. A lot of people adopt the “No Sunscreen” strategy in the summer months, using logic such as this: “I prefer to let the sun burn my body until my skin peels off and re-grows as a tough, thick leather.” That way they get a base for a dark tan, and they get to let strangers peel the dead skin from their backs. Damn, people are numb. Almost everybody has a relative or a friend or knows someone with skin cancer; yet, instead of using others’ experience as a basis for our actions, our hot-day priorities are as follows: call in sick to work, beer, cooler, ice, cigarettes. If that’s not a recipe for a red neck, I don’t know what is.
When it comes to combining skin and sun, tan lines are almost as cool as sun poisoning sucks. Life jacket tans, Teva tans, sunglasses tans, jelly roll tans (“hey, look at the white stripes on Dilbert’s belly when he pushes out his stomach!”), watch tans, dry top tans. Collect them all.
Another thing I worry about on extremely hot days is the well-being of my Guns’n Roses tape collection inside my truck. My little Nissan becomes a greenhouse on these 95+ degree days, and everything inside it is subject to melting. Just yesterday, in fact, I opened up my dry bag (which was stowed behind the bench seat) to find melted Sex Wax oozing onto my sunglasses, baseball cap and bike lock. In the past three years, I have bought a new copy of “Appetite For Destruction” four times thanks to carnage from the sun. And forget about stashing energy bars in your vehicle for after the river; if you don’t have a cooler with ice, you’ll be drinking those Balance Bars.
So this summer, be sure to drink plenty of water, don’t forget the sunscreen, avoid direct sunlight in the hottest parts of the day and definitely don’t eat over to Nick’s house.
Email nick [at] noumbrella [dot] com with your questions, comments and concerns.
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