This Summer in this City

Well, after a clingy winter and an ignoble spring during which it rained 50 out of 45 days, we've had a brief stop at summer and have gone straight into the Minnesota season I like to call "laundromat," when the humidity is up past 90% and the temperatures remain in the 70s all night long. You feel that every night is your last night, nude but wearing a cloistering camosile of sweat. The tiny little fan you've got in the window does shit except blow what feels like hot lecherous man's breath into your face. Your dreams are the stuff of heat exhaustion; the clawing nightmares of a brain slowly turning to refried beans. You pray for a fitful sleep to deliver you quickly to 7 a.m. and a cold shower. You look forward to work--yes, you look forward to work--because it's air conditioned.

That's the typical experience, in any case, when you lack an air conditioner. You people probably all have air conditioners, don't you, and have no idea what I am talking about. Bastards.

There's a part of me that doesn't believe in air conditioning. I'd rather have the windows down in any car I'm riding in. The thought of sealing yourself off from the outside world seems too artificial, too suburban for me. I resist the Minnesotan urge to crank up the air conditioning full-blast on the first day the temps crack sixty degrees. Buses, restaurants and shopping malls in Minnesota are absolutely frigid in the summer--they bring on hypothermia, goosebumps, and runny noses. My disdain for air conditioning doubles at night; I want to hear the night sounds of my little street; late-night walkers heading home from the bar, the last bus laboring up the avenue's short rise, the soft shrieks of nocturnal birds, the unexpected soft patter of rain.

Yet, I'm starting to believe in air conditioning more and more.

It's because the "night sounds" in this neighborhood include my neighbors, an incongruous mix of punks and other assorted characters who live in a ramshackle white house with a pirate-skull blanket hanging in the front window and empty cans of Black Label strewn across the lawn. They're an odd mix of punks, though I admit I know very little about the milieu. Is it okay for punks to carry cell phones now? Do punks in other cities have remote keyless entry for their VW Golfs too? Are utilikils standard punk garb these days? From a distance, I'd find them quaint and a much-welcomed addition to the authenticity of my 'hood. But when they're sitting on their roof at two in the morning, putting them about five feet away from actually sitting on the corner of my bed, and they're talking about how one of them discovered some guy has an uncircumcised cock and how "fucking fucked-up and freaky that fucking shit" was, I find it hard to get to sleep. I have to have the window open; closing it would be suicide; death by dutch oven.

So last night I lay spread-eagle on the damp sheets and dreamt of other cities, and whether I would be happier in them than here. I dreamed of jobs that I might find as fulfilling as the publishing job I have now. I thought of Brian, and what might happen if he doesn't get a job soon. All of these nail-biters are fertilized by a thought that's always festering in the back of my mind there, like a tiny little cavity, but last night was pounding in the forefront, like a vein on my sweaty brow--the feeling that I am running in place here, not accomplishing anything. I'll be turning another year older in a few months, and increasingly I question what I am doing with the weeks, days, hours of my life. Unfinished pieces sit on desktops, rejection slips trickle in. I long for the years when I could have just upped and moved to London. That was already two-fucking-years ago. Christ, I wish I was back in school. Have I become safe? Have I become mundane? Do I really need that right now? Safe, easy sex on a quiet street in an out-of-the-way town, schoolmarmish about loud kids next door (plotting against them from behind the blinds), making a few pennies a week at a relaxed job, peddling my poetry to no one in particular, no one of consequence... Fitter, happier, more productive...yada-yada-yada you know the rest.