Dog Days, Fiery Permanence, and Senor Love Daddy’s Forecast

“I feel all the time like a cat on a hot tin roof. What is the victory of a cat on a hot tin roof? — I wish I knew… Just staying on it, I guess, as long as she can…”  ~ Maggie

“I have today’s forecast for you: HOTTT! Today’s temperature’s gonna rise up over 100 degrees. And that’s the double-truth, Ruth.”  ~ Mister Senor Love Daddy

“In the summertime, when the weather is hot, you can stretch right up and touch the sky.”  ~ Mungo Jerry

Here in the northeast, the scorching torridness of our dog days of summer have become relentlessly inflexible. Solstice – (combining the Latin words sol for “Sun” and sistere for “To Stand Still”) – is for delayed descending suns, water balloon battles, fruits with & without seeds, swimming in various accumulations of water, the fragrance of B-B-Q’d food wafting over backyard fences, the interminable crescendo of firework amateurs, frozen libations after early Friday emancipations, and blue skies decorating the aerial landscape of our lives.

However, the past six weeks here in the Garden State have provided oppression on a level rarely seen. There appears to be no sight to its end.

Extreme temperatures of the sweltering persuasion are multitudinously maddening. The cold can be unforgiving and rude in its rawness and subsequent attack, yet it is escapable. Heat consumes and it does so in a persistently purposeful way. When you walk out into the sun it deceives you for a slender second. But, when you believe basking is an option it rapidly exposes its true agenda. It is there to build up, blister, boil over, and burst – leaving a ravenous tension in its wake.

This wave we are being ridden by seems to crest but never break. It swells without resolution; it retracts without a plan; it undulates without meaningful movement; and it strengthens from exhaustion. This fever is ferociously seeking fiery permanence in a place of our collective chosen defenselessness.

I am beginning to wonder when the motives of this blazing season and endless chaos will disappear and desist.

The action produced by these long days are not crafting narratives of progression or presenting enlightened ideas that may change any current (weather) systems in place.

Summer will eventually surrender to the FALL, right? Or has this even become a rhetorical question?

Did You Know? The longest continuous string of 100 °F or higher temperatures was reached for 101 days in Yuma, Arizona during 1937.