I hate heat. My heat-hate is legendary among the people who are within earshot of me for any extended period of time, which, admittedly, doesn't happen very often. I hate heat so much that it makes me want to break pencils in half, just like Goldfinger did when his gin rummy scam got busted by James Bond.
In fact, whenever it gets really hot, I start to feel a lot like Goldfinger. "Do you expect it to rain?" someone will ask. "NO! I expect you to DIE!" I'll respond petulantly. Only instead of planning to use a nuclear device to blow up Fort Knox, I would use a bunch of them to create one of these "nuclear winters" you hear about. That would be my criminal master plan--a glorious nuclear winter with no heat whatsoever, anywhere. The governments of the world would collectively scream, "Why? WHY? What evil goal could you possibly have hoped to achieve by doing something this overwhelmingly disastrous to humanity?" and I would say, "Ehh...I just hate heat, that's all. MWAH-ha-ha-haaaaa!" and they would shriek, "You incredibly insane BASTARD!" and I'd be all like, "Yeah, whatever."
Of course, we'd all eventually freeze to death. Or die of starvation. But for a while, it would be perfect. I'd get up in the morning and flick on the radio, and the weather report would be: "Well folks, absolutely no sunshine plus increasingly plummeting temperatures for the tenth week in a row, thanks to that incredibly insane bastard, porfle. Super weather for ice-fishing, I guess. That's...that's about it. May God have mercy on us." And then the DJ would play something sadly ironic, like "Hot Fun in the Summertime" or "It's a Sunshine Day" by the Brady Bunch, and you'd be able to hear faint weeping in the background. Which reminds me, I hate sunshine, too.
Come to think of it, Katie Couric would probably bawl her eyes out during her entire newscast every night, until a frozen doom inevitably overtook us all. And your local "happy talk" news show would be considerably less happy--no more cute human interest stories about some dopey little kid frying an egg on the hot sidewalk, or humorous video footage of fat people waddling around in bathing suits at the beach.
Fat people, in fact, would now be envied, since their vast stores of body fat would enable them to live longer than the fashionably skinny people like Fiona Apple or Adrien Brody, in addition to keeping them warmer--thereby giving them the last laugh. Which they would, by all rights, owe to me.
Stand-up comics wouldn't be so funny anymore, either. They'd probably try to joke around for awhile, until the crushing horror of the situation became too much and they broke down onstage. Except Carrot Top, of course--he'd end up with a big goofy, stupid smile on his face while frozen solid in the middle of some horrible sight gag, until someone came along and mercifully kicked him over and he shattered into a million pieces.
As for Janene Garafalo, I can only imagine the razor-sharp, intellectual barbs she'd unleash against me in a dull, droning voice until she keeled over. Sarah Silverman, on the other hand, would probably find the worldwide "extinction-level event" to be an endless gold mine of priceless black-comedy material. Until she keeled over.
Anyway, I hate heat, and days filled with bright, glaring sunshine, and all the frolicsome things that sun worshippers love to run around doing when it's hot and sunny. Ever go to the beach? It sucks. How about a hot, grimy, sweaty sport, like football? Sucks. Picnics are stupid, or at least they have been since the day some caveman piled a couple of rocks together and invented the chair. Cookouts are okay if someone cooks the food outside and then brings it inside for you to eat like civilized people, i.e. without flies crapping all over it.
Mainly, though, nothing is worth doing outside in the heat if it can be done inside under the air-conditioner, and preferably while lying down. You see, God knew that we would suffer through discomfort and toil for much of our lives, so that's why He invented the prone position sometime around 20,000 B.C. It's our reward for all that standing up that we have to do. Therefore, I consider it my moral duty to partake of it as often as possible, and as far away from heat as is geographically feasible. Which for me is about 17 feet, since I live in Texas and most of our summers are horrendous and last at least nine months.
Last year there was a day in mid-October when the temperature reached 100 friggin' degrees. Mid-October...100 degrees. "Do you expect it to be this hot again tomorrow?" my neighbor asked me over the back fence. "NO! I expect you to DIE!" I screamed. By 4:30 there wasn't a pencil left in my entire house. I was sorely tempted to finally go through with my nuclear-winter criminal master plan at long last, except I had neither the resources, the skills, nor the intelligence to actualize such an endeavor. But if I had, Carrot Top's dumb ass would be a giant frozen jerksicle right about now.
EPILOGUE:
And don't even get me started on humidity.
(Originally posted at Andersonvision.com)
