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Keep Your Cool in this Brutal Heatwave with a Little Surf Rock
Surf’s up
To quote Elaine Benes from Seinfeld: the heat, my God, the heat. Summer has returned to Texas with a vengeance, with the heat index where I’m at projected to be between 115 and 120 degrees this afternoon. That’s not a temperature you live in; that’s the temperature you set on your oven to cook the turkey at Thanksgiving (I realize the turkey temp is a lot higher, Arpad Nagy; don’t rain on my analogy with your Super Chef skills). Every winter we have at least one ice storm here in the Lone Star State, and every winter I swear that I will never complain about the heat of summer again if I can just survive the Arctic blast.
Every year I lie, which I know will be the case even as I’m saying it, and start complaining about the heat in mid-May. I’ve lived the majority of my life here in the Great State of Sweltering Confusion, so I fully understand General Phil Sheridan’s frustration with Texas summers when he said in 1866 that “If I owned Texas and Hell, I would rent out Texas and live in Hell.” And he was here without air conditioning or even a ceiling fan, the poor Yankee.
I could continue raging at the sun, but that has proven fairly ineffective over the past five decades; the sun pays even less attention to me than my cats do, which is something I didn’t think was…
