cabin fever

i was thinking on lands where the winter comes in harshly and locks down the countryside for extended periods of time and dreaming of snow,snow, snow. i would settle for a breeze that whispers of autumn but we won't be blessed with that until october. in those places accustomed to cold, summer is pure freedom. it is a time to get out and enjoy endless sunny days but here where winter is a ghost of itself, the summer is the real boogey man. it is a truly brave soul that ventures from the dark, air conditioned cave of a home and into the noon day streets where the heat rises, shimmering and distorting the look and feel of things. it is a wet wool blanket drawn tight about the face so that you panic into thinking you might literally drown in such a tepid soup. every day there is the unsettling feeling that maybe you are the frog in the boiling water as the temperature is slowly increased.

my girlfriend just left for the north and that has further accentuated my suffering in this circle of dante's inferno. new orleans settles in the summer. it is a slow sagging, pulling down into the miasma of this swampy mess of a place. we ooze, drip, and radiate dissatisfaction. the air is still. the air is heavy. the heat index has surged above 100 degrees. we drag ourselves along like weary soldiers burdened with shell shock, all of us inflicted with the ten mile stare. we have seen too much. we have felt too much. storms. oil. heat. stagnation. crime. decomposition. everything is slowly rotting in this heat under the odor of french quarter trash, stale beer, piss, and the ever present stench of oil. every year i say, there is no good reason to suffer another summer in the not so easy "big easy" and yet here i find myself.oh well...there is always next summer. russia? finland? alaska? in the mean time, i am sipping my pimm's cup and losing myself in reveries of snow, snow, and more snow, falling like sweet relief.