Random thoughts from the bowels of hell

It's like a thousand degrees in my house right now, and I can't sleep...so I'm updating this thing instead.I've been meaning to update for the last week or so, but just haven't gotten around to it. So hey, why not take advantage of not being able to sleep?

This heat is making me think of those Chicago summers when it would be so hot I would strip down to nothing, jump into a cold shower, and then lay in the middle of the living room floor under the ceiling fan. I still marvel at how I survived living in all those third-story walkups with no air conditioning. I can still remember the first summer there, the way my kitchen on Pratt smelled like coffee and cigarettes and pine-sol, mixed with the occasional rotting banana. There was only one small window in the kitchen, and it faced another building. Our back "porch" was little more than a landing, and in the summer our lack of diligence in taking out the trash would manifest itself in yet another lingering smell in the sweltering kitchen. Michael and I would sit around and smoke and read and guzzle gallons of iced coffee and slurpees while the pets would flatten themselves out into furry pancakes on the bathroom floor.

My second summer there, 1995, was the most brutal summer on record. Over 800 people died in one of the worst heat waves in Chicago history. It was so bad that the city had to call in refrigerated trailers to store the bodies, because the morgues were all full. I was managing the Shell station at that point, and I would get up at 4:00 in the morning, walk the dog down to the lake, and the two of us would jump in and swim for half an hour. Then I'd go back up to the sweltering apartment, take a cold shower, and go to my air-conditioned job, where I'd stay for the entire day - not because I had that much work to do, but because it was cooler than my apartment. I hated that job, in fact, but it kept my body temperature down.

Speaking of the apartment on Pratt, the friend who found it for us - Michael's best friend since childhood, Bill - passed away last week. He's the third person under 40 I know who's had a heart attack in the last year, and the second one to have not survived. I had a whole entry on the fragility and futility of life planned out after I learned of his passing, but I just haven't had the energy to write it. Maybe if the temperature drops a bit.