The Purge

Remember that movie The Purge?

 

In case you have never seen it, the basic premise of the movie is pretty simple: for one day a year, people are allowed to go out and do anything they want, which is basically murder other people for sport.

 

There were five of those movies and they were all basically the same. Twenty-four hours of unbridled freedom to do bad stuff.

 

So, in the same spirit of these (horrid) movies, I take one day a year to voice my distaste for this sweltering lava pit we live in here in the South.

 

And today is that day. It’s my Purge.

 

Now, don’t get me wrong, I love living in Southwest Georgia.

 

People here are friendly and generous and I know that if I needed someone to pull me out of the ditch or watch my kids while I went to Biloxi to play Black Jack for the weekend, all I have to do is ask.

 

I’ve lived other places and it’s not like that everywhere.

 

For example, in one of the places I lived after graduating from college, the person in the apartment above me was murdered and the police never found the killer. Oh, there were plenty of people in the apartment complex who knew who did it, but they wouldn’t talk.

 

Snitches get stitches.

 

I’m pretty sure that if somebody shot one of my neighbors now, I would hear it and be able to identify the perpetrator simply by the sound of the muffler on their truck.

 

Yeah, I love the South. But me and the South have been having a bit of a spat the last couple weeks over this blasted summer weather.

 

“That’s what you get for contributing to global warming!”

 

The social justice warriors love to rub our noses in that one.

 

Let me be the first to admit that I have been a climate criminal for quite some time now.

 

I have been driving a big truck that gets 12 mpg for over thirty years. I’m sure that this alone has killed a whole herd of baby seals.

 

And I still have a burn pile in my backyard and have been known to prance around it like Tom Hanks in the movie, Castaway while the inferno pours CO2 into the fragile atmosphere.

 

Sorry, Al Gore. I guess I am the one who made things so inconvenient for everyone.

 

So, I guess I deserve to burst into flames when I step out of my back door. But that doesn’t mean I have to like it.

 

“You guys have it so lucky. It was never this hot when you were a kid.”

 

That’s another thing I hear from young folks these days as they drive around listening to NPR in their little electric cars, drinking their venti green tea frappucino with a strawberry smoothie base, two pumps of caramel, three espresso shots, topped with whipped cream and a caramel drizzle.

 

Well, I hate to break it to you, Cardi B, but your attempts to blame this sudden heat wave on us geriatric old geezers just proves how poorly they teach climate history in school.

 

Since 1970, the average rise in temps in the US is just 9/10ths of one degree.

Sorry, Greta, but I guess your constant screams that we are all going to burn to a crisp by the end of the week unless we park our cars, turn off our ACs and stop eating red meat is a little premature.

 

When I was a boy, I spent my summers working as a farm laborer. I picked okra, loaded watermelons, picked peas and, my personal favorite, rode in the ‘skid seat’ harvesting tobacco.

 

All summer long.

 

I have never met one single teenager who has sweated as much as I did between the ages of eight and eighteen.

 

But somehow I survived. Despite every effort by Mother Nature to roast me like a pig with an apple in its mouth, I somehow managed to grow into adulthood unscathed.

 

It was a 100 degrees in July 1972. It’s 100.09 degrees now.

 

So why does it feel so much hotter?

 

I have thought about that a lot the last couple of years and have discovered the problem.

 

It’s me.

 

No, I don’t control the weather but I am different that I was back in 1972.

 

Quite a lot different.

 

I am no longer a strapping young boy in the prime of my youth. I’m a geriatric old fool with high blood pressure, bad knees and sleep apnea.

 

The weather hasn’t changed. I’ve changed.

 

Just like an old water heater eventually gets full of rust and can no longer heat water efficiently, I’m full of cholesterol or lipids or just tired, worn out blood and my body can no longer cool itself like it did when I was ten years old and working the okra patch in the middle of August.

 

I also think one of the reasons it seems so much hotter than it used to be is because we cannot remember a world without air conditioning.

 

I told my children that we did not have air conditioning in my house until I was in high school. They thought I was lying.

 

I was not.

 

We had an attic fan. And a box fan in the living room. But air conditioning? The only place to find that was in Sears, at the movies or rich people’s homes, which we were not.

 

They were also flabbergasted to know that we had no AC in our school.

 

Imagine the uproar if we decided to yank air conditioning out of schools today? I’m pretty sure that our young climate warriors would collectively scream, “Screw the planet! We can always read about polar bears in books.

 

Turn the AC back on!”

 

That’s the thing about most attempts at change. We are all for them unless they affect our comfort.

 

I am like everyone in the South. I like to complain about the heat during the summer. It’s a daily contest to see who can be the most miserable.

 

“I’m hotter than Satan’s toenails.”

 

“Well, I’m hotter than a jalapeño’s armpit.”

 

“That’s nothing. I’m hotter than doughnut grease at a fat man’s convention.”

 

From May to October, we replace the standard greeting ‘How are you?’ with something like ‘I’m so hot, I’m pissing lava. You?’

 

And then we wait to see if our neighbor or co-worker can out-misery us.

In reality, we all know this is coming every year. It’s always been like this. It will always be like this.

 

And it’s only going to get worse, thanks to our unconstrained glee with burning coal and the invention of the chain saw, which naturally led to us attempting to chop down every tree, bush and shrub on the planet so we can make more Amazon boxes.

 

We created climate change. We are all guilty. Even those self-righteous tofu-eating, Tesla-driving hippies who think baking soda and vinegar will cure cancer.

 

Complaining about it won’t change things. But it does make me feel better to just lay it all out there at least just once year.

 

And today is that day. My annual Heat Purge. So here goes…

 

I hate the heat. I abhor the humidity. I despise walking outside every day and sweating like a fat whore teaching Sunday School.

 

There. I said it. And somehow, I feel a little better. At least until tomorrow when I go outside again.

 

And to all of you people who consider me and all of my geriatric energy hog junkies to be the reason we are going to have to abandon the planet and colonize Zergon 634-B, I have only one thing to say.

 

You can come turn my AC up to 78 whenever you pry the thermostat from my cold, dead fingers.