Regress report

The paperback cover of the book I’ve been reading lifts and curls back, as if unable to endure contact in this sticky heat — especially with anything as dense and woolly as poetry. It’s the season of light beer and light reading. We close up the houses in the morning and the cooler night air persists through much of the afternoon, but we can’t do anything about the humidity. I make salads for supper — rice salads, bulghur salads, pasta salads, bean salads — cooking in the morning so they have the rest of the day to marinate and chill. When I need to make bread, as I did this morning, I bake it down here so as not to heat up the kitchen at my parents’ house. If there’s a breeze at suppertime, we sit outside and try to convince ourselves it feels refreshing.

The heat seems global. Facebook friends all around the northern hemisphere have been complaining, from the Pacific Northwest to Western Europe and even Japan. I’m a bit surprised: I thought that unpronounceable Icelandic volcano’s emissions last winter were going to give us a little short-term global cooling, but apparently not.

I’ve been happily occupied in designing a website for this year’s winner of qarrtsiluni’s chapbook contest, but that won’t be unveiled for another month. If you start noticing Via Negativa undergoing major changes, you’ll know that the heat-induced blog ennui has reached a critical stage.

0 Replies to “Regress report”

  1. and to think that I turned on the heat in my house briefly this morning because I was too chilled in the early morning northern California fog… I have yet to wear my summer clothes, but I am sure the heat will reach us, come September, as it always does, and then it will do so with a vengeance, making up for lost time and territory…

  2. That’s quite a notion Dave, ‘heat induced blog enui.’ If I was coming down tough I’d say that while more imaginative it’s in the same realm as ‘The dog ate my homework!’ However I know whereof you speak. Maybe it’s me being fanciful, but I sense a general loosening of blog commitment in myself and in others. Maybe it’s not just the heat (here it’s OK at the moment, with plenty of rain and temperatures clement) but the sense that much of what we looked forward to all through the Winter has now passed. The shorter days and longer nights are moving closer. When Summer has gone then the idea of sitting in front of a laptop screen may seem more attractive again, and I’ll catch up on all the e-mail correspondences, blog posts and put-off paperwork that are presently languishing in the file labelled ‘Manana!’

    Those salads sound good. What time do you eat? I may pop round.

  3. We’ve got heat advisories down in my area (Charlottesville, VA). Even in my air conditioned home, somehow it manages to melt my bones.

      1. Ah, so “heat induced blog ennui” approximates to “collapsed with heatstroke”? :-)

        I’ve been hiding indoors a lot for the last week or two…. But even central AC has its limits, and this heat wave is demonstrating them for my place.

  4. We are having a surprisingly mild summer here in Austin. We haven’t cracked 100 yet–this time last year we’d had 30 or 40 triple digit days. Of course, mid-90’s in the summer time counts as pleasant and mild down here, but we’ll take it.

    I laughed about the litany of salads, as I’ve just finished making 3 salads for the next couple of days. Lite beer, light reading and light eating.

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