it's too hot

it's over 100 degrees i think. maybe 110. it feels like it. this is one of those days that makes you squint when you're walking across a parking lot. it makes you feel like if you can squinch your face up enough, your brow will jut out far enough to protect you from the sun, so you walk with a weird squint that also requires raising your eyebrows like a surprised marmoset and also furrowing, like an angry, maybe burrowing, marmoset. by the time you get to the car, you are so tired from manipulating all of those little face muscles, that you have to go drink a slurpy lemonade drink even though you hate lemonade. that, right there, is the trouble with summer. i understand that the autumnal equinox is in 28 days. i should make an autumnal equinox advent calendar, but instead of taking out little wedges of chocolate or hazelnuts or some such thing each day, i will fill the thing nightly with little swatches of fabric from every outfit i sweat through during the next 28 days. by the time fall comes, the thing will have little relics of perspiration. and then if we suffered a blow from bioterrorists, somebody would find it and think that they had stumbled upon some kind of reliquary of gauzy artifacts. in fact it would just be sweaty pieces of my unfashionable wardrobe. i think that's what the king tut exhibit is. it was probably some kind of jumped-up kind of drycleaning thing and now everyone is standing in line to see it. well, not everyone is in line. i'm not. i went 26 years ago and i pretended like i was deaf the whole time. my friend maureen and i were in a school that had a deaf student teacher and we all learned american sign language. so i remember leaning against that big thick illuminated glass of some kind of ewer from the burial chamber, and signing out the words to you light up my life with maureen. i hated field trips. we had to go to the page museum too and they had a wall with something like 400 wolf skulls on it. this was supposed to be for kids? i hated it and felt weird and had to go home and spit and wash my hands about 100 times before i ate. i would never make someone have to go see that. they also have a thing made out of plexiglass where you have to pull up on a big metal rod and the sign says: FEEL WHAT IT'S LIKE TO BE STUCK IN TAR!! and all kinds of kids were pulling up on that rod, pretending it was their big hoof or something. come to think of it, that might have traumatized me. that's partly what i hate about summer. all those buzzing & hissing bugs and remembering those sweaty field trips and the ride in the school bus and the skulls and the tar and squinting and feeling sticky and nauseous. i did like coming home into the air conditioning though. once i was home, i felt pretty good. 28 more days, everyone. dog days of summer. good-bye summer, don't let the screen door hit you on the way out.