I Am Obviously Writing from Beyond the Grave
because i took a walk
I’ve been thinking about this headline from the New York Times all day, for very personal reasons:
It lives in my head next to this now-deleted-but-infinitely-screencapped tweet from a former naval aviator (whose career ended poorly), who killed this tweet but saved the rest of the insane thread if you want to go watch someone have a mental health crisis:
“Anything above 90 degrees F means that outdoor activity is likely to be deadly.” See, I just started laughing again. I was in Palo Duro Canyon State Park, this afternoon, and took this picture at a closed trailhead:
But the rangers only closed the most strenuous trails, so a few seconds after I took this picture, a family came climbing out of the bush on another trail a few feet away from me, a mom and a dad and two children, laughing and having a good time. AND I JUST STARTED SCREAMING AT THEM, because didn’t they even realize that you can’t survive outdoors at that temperature!?!?!?!? eVeN iF yOU’rE iN thE sHAdE dOInG nOThInGGGGGG!!G!G!G!G!G!G!G!G
They wore hats and carried water. And, um. So that’s how they navigated this cruel summer.
A little later, when the sun started to travel to its secret home behind the earth, the temperature on the Texas Panhandle plummeted…
…and I wandered out to take a walk, on a beautiful evening, feeling so incredibly grateful:
I feel like I survived, but I obviously must be mistaken. In any case, I am now drinking a can of special survival fluid, so maybe. Just maybe.
My conclusion is nothing I haven’t said a thousand times. There’s a war underway for your mind. It’s dumb and it sucks. You should ignore it. Most people do. The desperation for desperation, the need for crisis, is destroying people for no actual reason. It’s like you pass some guy on the street who’s writhing and screaming OH GOD I’M BURNING ALIVE, and you can tell he’s…actually fine? And you try to tell him, but he gets really mad about it. Because he has decided, for whatever reason, to pretend to be in agony. Please imagine me shrugging, with an awkward facial expression.
We have a culture of desired crisis. You can just opt out, pretty easily.
I have a blocker installed on my browser so that if I accidentally click on a NYT link, it blocks the website.
I too, live somewhere that's 95 pretty much every day and 100 is not unusual.
And unless I'm a zombie, I think I'm still alive
What's so frustrating about this culture war is that it's just so bloody fucking stupid, and we're wasting our time on this bullshit instead of trying to solve real problems.
This is the most checked out of mainstream culture I've ever been in my life, for whatever that's worth
Uh....trying to stop rolling my eyes and keep all the steam from leaving my ears.
I grew up in Arizona in the 1960’s when we were super dumb and unafraid of normal variations in temperature. We played outside in the summer heat for hours. We drank out of hoses. We didn’t have special protective clothing and a hydration schedule. Our parents were inside and had no idea where we were at any given time. We might be mikes away. We threw baseballs and footballs and rode our bikes. I lived next to a mountain. We would climb the mountain. We didn’t wear sunscreen - GASP. We might go swimming to cool down or ride our bikes a few miles through the valley of non-death to the air conditioned movie theater to watch a flick. The asphalt would get gooey in places - hot. Nobody died. Nobody got heat stroke. Nobody melted into the shape of Jerry Nadler. It was 105-120 degrees. It was hot, like it is now. We ate popsicles. We would go down to the irrigation canals and catch crawdads. It was....wait for it...fun. It’s called life, people. Could you die? Sure. Can you die when it’s cold, sure. But unless you’re out in the middle of the desert stranded with no water, and gave zero survival skills, or doing something your body isn’t equipped to do, you’ll be fine. I don’t suppose any of the NYT nitwits have ever heard of the Apaches, Navajo, Hopi, Yaqui, and myriad other native peoples who have lived in the AZ desert for the past several thousand years without air conditioning until the 1950’s or afterward....