Waiting on the breeze.

I have given in to the heat. It’s been enveloping me all day, as it tends to at this time of the year, when it falls down upon this city for days at a time. I have succumbed to its bidding and ceased to try and do anything productive today. Instead I’m trying to keep exceptionally still, to concentrate on being immobile, and searching inside my mental world for an icy cold oasis, sweet like an icy pole, cool like the very opposite of the space within these four walls. I’ve sat at my desk, rested on the floor against my bed, positioned myself upside down and sideways on my couch, and from all angles it has become painfully apparent that the most productive thing my ceiling fan can do is make the shadows and the light flash spectacularly on my grey white ceiling. The pictures on my wall have risen, curled at the edges like the thoughts in my head. The numbing tones of Leonard Cohen are helping me keep still, still like a mouse, a dead mouse rotting in the putrid heat. Even the dog has been let inside, to rest on the tiles near the tired old air conditioner, which whirs away at the end of the house, so loud you can hear it trying, humming in its brackets from across the street. If you were stupid enough to go outside that is, and you’d have to be stupid, stupid like mad dogs and Englishmen.

Yep, you gotta love summertime.

Got to love those summer afternoons when you take one step outside the door and you’re bathed in sweat, when you venture outside to hang just one t-shirt on the line and your pale Anglo complexion is already rosy red and the shirt is not only covered in fly shit but dried crusty and faded from brown to yellow. When you roll down the street on your bicycle and you’ve got sweat coming out your ears, your thongs have melted into your feet and the tip of your nose, let alone the road, is hot enough to fry an egg on.

Summertime in Perth, a time not of love, but of rising tensions when it is as if, as I once heard someone say, God were trying to burn this city from the surface of his earth. Or at the very least, this is where his missus does the baking.

Right now while I try so hard to not exist I only sweat more, the wind outside is hotter than the air itself. I’m waiting for the wind to change and the breeze to arrive for the afternoon. For it to swing away from the steaming hills and race across the ocean, up the hill, through the park and in my front door where I will wait for it, like a long lost friend, with my nose pressed to the flywire, wait for the breeze to blow the mist from the sprinklers in against my skin...and when this oppressive heat is gone, perhaps to these stifling thoughts.

[This blog goes out to anyone freezing their arse off in the Northern Hemisphere, trust me if I could, I’d spam this heat to you.]