From What I've Tasted Of Desire

This specific post is for posterity. I feel like my roommates and I have gone through something traumatic: and even though it is now blessedly only a bad memory bordering on the edges of a hazy sun flare-filled dream, the journey should be documented. Those few harrowing days took a lot out of everyone involved--even casual visitors to the scene were impacted; they'll remember how dreadful it was almost as long as the poor persecuted residences of the house will. Let the week of July 19th go down in infamy as the Time Our AC Broke.

Don't you dare laugh, even though that entire paragraph was set up to induce a chuckle. It was terrible. If there was an instrumental expression of the kind of oppressive, gummy, muculent atmosphere we were trying to swim through, it would be layers of thrumming didgeridoos, sending out walls of white noise in waves that simulate our own deadened world of endless malicious heat. Overlaying that would be a group of discordant basses getting sawed to bits by their players, much like our minds were rapidly being shredded by the fiery gasps of air we desperately tried to eek out of our infernal atmosphere.

It was bad enough that we tried to eat, talk, move, and entertain in our stifling surroundings, but sleeping was just out of the question. I did everything short of actually dismembering myself to insure that my limbs wouldn't accidentally touch any other part of my body and through that contact be the last bit of friction between me and spontaneous combustion. Not that the conflagration of my fevered extremities would be spontaneous--it was almost inevitable.

You'll notice that in my efforts to capture this atmosphere, not once do I use the word "sultry." This is because any positive connotations present in that word have no place in the airless, bleached-out world that was our house. Sultry is a word you use to describe eating seafood outside while swatting away a cloud of mosquitoes, Peggy Lee's "Fever," or the crowded amphitheater of an outdoor summer rock concert when everyone's enthusiasm for the music makes the press of bodies and slick bare skin only a supplement to the experience.

All of these enticing, amiable nuances were banished from our ravished perception of the world until Jose the AC guy came on Friday and brought back to our scrambled minds the words draft, cognition, moderation, breeze, and animation.

God bless speedy repair service and controlled climates.