Cold Ones
I have been to a movie theater just for the AC. I have bounced from cafe to bookstore to a second bookstore just for the AC. I have spent entire afternoons working in our bedroom because it's the one room in our place with AC. I have spent hours at the studio of friend and neighbor Gary, just for a change of AC scenery. I have given serious thought to buying a second AC unit for the front of the apartment. There is an unusual October heatwave happening.
Los Angeles is at its hottest in August and September, but by October, the air tends to turn cooler in slow-moving waves until boom it's Halloween, and you might want to wear a light jacket except for when you're dressing like a 3/4-naked slut at a party.
Sometimes, though, a freak oven blast comes to visit, just to make everyone upset. I've decided that David Ellison has unleashed a curse. It invades your mind. It alters your mood. It makes you feel like your life isn't working, like the last straw before you quit.
A bank employee: "How do you like this heat?"
This is the kind of public small talk I find annoying, but acceptable. It's not the norm here. People tend to leave you alone. But then, on the occasion of agonizing weather, the sixth straight day of temperatures over 100 degrees, someone wants to know they're not losing their own grasp on sanity. Life is unfair, and the air is cruel, and they need to be reminded that everyone is suffering and that we're all in this together.
Me: "Have you met anyone who does like it?" I thought her chuckle was the end of the conversation. We'd established mutual misery. But she wanted extra camaraderie. "I have two friends in Arizona who think I'm being dramatic. They're used to it. And my electric bill has been insane!"
Me: "Same."
Of course, what I thought to myself was: "You work in a bank. Just take some money home from, like, a drawer or something. Figure it out. It is quite literally a dog day afternoon. Get busy with that inside job. Also, the Meat Puppets are from Arizona and though they are admittedly a great band they're also weirdos and that's probably because of Arizona. The people who live there have been baked into submission. They gave up a long time ago, and they just hide out in caves."
Driving home from the bank, where the AC was fine – not good, fine, a corporate decision to keep it at somewhere between 76 and 80, an environment in which no one is satisfied – I saw a person who likes it. A Cold One. A young person sitting at a bus stop, wearing a hoodie and a scarf. It was 101F.
I witnessed this among some other young people at one of the bookstores we hid inside last week. The AC was very bank-level. On, but not on enough. These twentysomethings were wearing jackets. I didn't ask them questions, even though I had questions. Now, obviously, I am not the world. Some people are like me, running hot and fat and dreaming of a life where it's always 45F. Other people are the Cold Ones, and that's just how they are.
Being a Cold One is not the same as being old. When my mother lived in a nursing home, there were a lot of people there who were always cold. She had become that way herself. But that's a different phenomenon. That just means you're probably going to die soon. If you're Gen Z and shivering, that's you being a Cold One. There were at least two Cold Ones inside the bank.
I notice them everywhere I go. Their layers make me feel insane. I cannot think outside of my own overheated brain when they cross my path. I try to imagine what it's like to be them, but it's beyond me. I can only think of my need to have been born in Finland.
That's all. I didn't intend for this to be a post but now it's going to be one. Lucky you. Someday, a Cold One and I will explain ourselves to each other in a room that is in the mid-50s. They will wear a parka. I will be shirtless. Good luck, everyone. Stay safe. Don't collapse because of a temperature.
