Sarter Resartous = the blogger reblogged

Pace yourself:

The heat has at long last come and with it comes exhaustion. Why aren’t you blogging? Is it the heat? Could be. Yesterday it was in the high nineties and one hundred and ten degrees with the heat index (temperature plus humidity = how hot it feels). Today was more of the same. This is not what people call a dry heat. Humidity is at 100% so you have the pleasure of sweating without the linked enjoyment of evaporation, merely clothing saturation as the air has all the water it can hold “thank you very much”. I have friends from Taiwan who are shocked to find themselves in this non-equatorial sauna, thinking that they had come from the fires of Hades only to find themselves down a few floors in Dante’s Inferno. If it were more predictable from day to day, the city planners could market it, put rock piles on street corners with water pails and little ladles, distribute birch switches at roadside stands like the pretzel sellers. St. Louis in the summer, all sauna all the time. A white toweled city parading its gutted flabbiness and pristine plasticity with the anonymity of a Swiss bathhouse. Every home with an exterior of cedar seeping sweated sap into the sultry night.

How does that humidity scale work? You would think 100% humidity would put us down with Atlantis, submerged. I suppose it means, “If it were any more humid it would be
raining”. Meteorologists of the world please elucidate. Heat doesn’t interfere with writing, air conditioning does. AC has oft been credited with the demise of southern fiction in the U.S. Heat encourages slowness, encourages the slowness of memory, encourages long slow sips of gin in which musing is the most amusing thing one cares to be up to. I have not been moving slow, I have been moving fast. Jen thinks that my blogging hiatus means I am considering writing something more substantial then a blog – actually getting after a book of some kind. It could be as simple as being very busy. I’ve been cleaning. I mean really cleaning. Rented steam cleaner with massive chemical accoutrement cleaning, trips to goodwill cleaning, mental health cleaning. Following the advice of friends and psychics alike I am trying to let things go, but instead I am just on the go.

Just an example:
Friday workday followed by Syberg’s Sports bar with sister and family, followed by cards at sister’s, followed by poker game in St. Charles with BJ, Tyler & Adam (left with forty on a thirteen dollar stake) until three am, up at seven am and golfing nine holes with family at Ruth Park by nine am, grocery shopping, afternoon “cosmic bowling” with nephew for fourteenth birthday (2:30-5:30), Sister Sandy’s pending child is a boy to be named Henry, home to function three dogs – a cat – and twenty three fish (dog sitting two additional dogs all weekend for Vanessa), south to Bree’s twenty fifth birthday BBQ (seven pm until one am), up and off to target for baby gate to restrict dogs to the first floor & steam cleaner to de-dog the upstairs carpet, steam clean whole house carpets and upholstery, folks arrive for afternoon of cards & beer, folks off to dinner and conference so to Beth & Brad’s for Six Feet Under, Queer as Folk, Full Metal Jacket & Gin. This has been the typical pace of late on both weekday and weekend. Workday Monday, return steamer on lunch hour, function dogs, work till six, function dogs, bowling league with nephew subbing for Vanessa who is off with Hannah & Madonna (seventh row) in Chicago, pool with nephew, White Castle with nephew, home to yet another black out, up to blog (now) and then off to Kirkwood for tandem massage (two people work on you at once) at friends new business (Barb & Sandy), back to work while doing an impression of Jell-O having just been myofascialed within an inch of my life, to write “news” article for The Healthy Planet on the benefits of massage on a Thursday deadline and receive several hundred bottles of various Biotone Massage Creams into inventory, as well as dealing with the thirteen as yet unforseen crises which await me - primary - finding Theresa a place to live for three months while she completes her course work.

Makes you tired to just read it doesn’t it?