Too Hot to Be Bothered
It is 9 a.m. and there it is, on time. Our unwelcome conjurer: the heat. It has come in the back way today, turning the backyard into a big green sauna. Only 9 a.m. and already we’re slipping into a trance-like state.
The teenager shuffles into the living room, announces she’s going to the beach, turns around and shuffles back into bed. The 6-year-old picks up a video game and goes limp. The toddler staggers from room to room, rubbing her sticky hair over her sticky face with her sticky hands.
Dad puts on a suit and stumbles to his air-conditioned car, which will transport him to his air-conditioned office, where everyone will think of excuses to sit in meetings and use words like “strategic” and “team.” Which leaves yours truly, sitting at her home computer, wishing she could muster one iota of attention for any of the many strategic team efforts going on in this great metropolis, but too hypnotized to focus. You are getting sleepy, sleeeeee-py, the heat murmurs, shimmying across the patio.
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Surely this July can’t be all that much hotter than it was last year. High summer always hits this time of year and lasts until September. We know it’s coming, we know it will come again, and yet, every year, for those of us without air conditioning, it casts this voodoo, transfixes us, makes us its slaves.
Worn down by the sheer effort of keeping our bodies from overheating, we can only surrender. Even the weathermen on TV, who chatter nonstop but almost never make real conversation, have been tricked into genuineness by the mercury. “It’s unusually hot,” one remarked the other night in a strangely normal tone of voice, and you could tell he was surprised, not only by the heat, but also to be saying something he might actually mean.
This candor is an interesting phenomenon, one that, with the right team in place, a metropolis could put to strategic use. How spellbinding might it be if politicians, so accustomed to the luxury of coolers, were suddenly forced to sweat out a decision or two in a world without climate control?
I’m thinking, for instance, about the Los Angeles Unified School District board members and the eternity it took them to finally get off the dime on the no-brainer question of installing air conditioning in all the public schools. They dithered with that one for months before finally taking the job away from the district’s crack bureaucracy and giving it to someone who’d do it while we’re all living. Imagine how much more decisive they might have been in an un-air-conditioned room.
Or--here’s a good one: Let’s take the MTA board, load ‘em onto a crowded bus, turn off the A/C and tell ‘em they can’t get off until they replace themselves with nonpoliticians who’ll put good public transportation ahead of cronyism for a change. (A nasty hallucination, but I can’t be responsible. Heat like this can reduce even suburban moms to a primitive state.)
Or, even more ambitious, in the same spirit with which the Clinton White House has moved its long national slumber party to such places as Steven Spielberg’s house and Martha’s Vineyard, let’s move Ken Starr’s inquiry onto the street outside the federal building here. Imagine the spectacle of we, the West Coast people, speaking for the nation when we say: “Dude! We’re too hot to be bothered! (And even when it was cool, we were only pretending to care.)”
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But--whew! Strategy is an exhausting endeavor in July in a Southern California ranch house where the only thing between the sun and your delusions is a ceiling fan. How much more attractive is that pint of Haagen-Dazs Dulce De Leche ice cream in the freezer, that orange Popsicle melting down the toddler’s hand.
This, you realize, is why tropical countries have such a hard time getting it together; it’s a full-time job just keeping the mojo of summer in check. Time for cooler heads to call upon the god of siestas. Wake me when the heat breaks; I’m going back to bed.
Shawn Hubler’s column appears Mondays and Thursdays. Her e-mail address is shawn.hubler@latimes.com.