heatwave.

Hot
as
HELL
today.

How hot? Try this. 90-something degrees. In San Francisco. In October.

That's not normal, folks. That's not even *remotely* normal. I don't think it was this hot all summer. Some sort of El Nino this year, but goddammit, the last time there was El Nino it rained.

I miss the rain. I would do a lot for one good, drenching rainstorm. I know by the end of winter I'll regret saying that, but right now I crave rain the way I craved it in the artificially green desert that was San Diego.

It was so hot today that everyone on the street was in shorts. Guys wore no shirt and girls, being trapped by society and all, wore the skimpiest shirts they could find.

This is usually a good thing. However, when you're baking to death in your car and the leather feels like a steam-iron on your back, you tend to care less about ogling curves and more about getting into air-conditioned buildings. Red lights last forever. Traffic jams are unbearable. If you stand too long in one place, you feel like your shoes have melted to the ground.

The air was hot. And it was humid. Not really humid - but decently so. 50, 60%, the way it usually is here. It was the kind of heat that surrounded you and poured into you, even if you were in the shade. And if you weren't, the sun blistered the skin off your back.

The heat broke around 4pm. Sort of. It went from 90-something to 80-something. There wasn't a breeze, but at least the air was liveable in. As long as you stayed out of the sun, you were okay.

I took three showers today. I took one every time I had to go outside for more than a few minutes, because if I didn't I felt gross. At least that still works. I remember in San Jose sometimes it'd get so hot showers didn't work. You sweated before them and right after them. Hell, you sweated right through them, and all day you dripped and melted and sweated and stuck and stunk and thought of one thing: night.

All day, I thought of one thing: night.

At dusk, it was 80 degrees. An hour later, it was 77. At 10pm, it was probably still 70 degrees. It was so warm that it felt earlier. It felt, tasted, smelled and sounded like summer. Not just summer this year, but summer a long time ago, when I was little. Strange how these perceptions stay with you. Air conditioners, food cooking (ever notice how in the summer you always smell food cooking because people leave their windows open, and also because warm air seems to hold smells better?), warm breeze, people congregating in outdoor cafes lounging around sipping ice tea. And frogs. It was so hot the frogs were fooled. They thought it was summer and they started croaking like crazy, advertising their presence, looking for mates. In the darkness, all you heard was frogs from every patch of greenery there was.

All that was missing was the smell of flowers.

3:32am this instant. I can still hear the air conditioners going. Frogs are still going too, though some have giving up now. I'm writing this from my balcony. I've been hanging out on this balcony since I got home today. Air con would cool my apartment, but A/C is expensive. So I just opened the door to the hall and the windows, and I'm still waiting for it to get below 80 inside.

This is one of those nights you don't sleep. If you try, it's too hot. You toss and turn and get hotter and toss and turn more and get even hotter and...

You just don't do it. Unless you spread out a towel and sprawl on the floor, but somehow that's a little too summery and I don't feel like doing that right now. So. Yeah. This will be a night I don't sleep. Or not until 4am. I'll just hang out on my balcony sipping a cold one, coke, not beer, fizzing it on my tongue letting the breeze slide in from the sea. One of my cats just came to jump up on the retaining wall. That used to scare me, since we're up on the 14th story, but neither of them have so much as lost their footing once, so I'm used to it now.

Cat silhouetted against city. Cool breeze stirring sluggish apartment-heat.

Like some sort of haiku.

It was a damn good day.