If you’re anything like me, you have a lot of trouble getting anything done when the temperature breaks the mid 90’s mark, and you know those deceptively calm days with a mild 80 degrees and a calm breeze are only the harbinger of the slow cancerous death marching toward us with every inching tilt of the Earth’s axis.
These are the days to prepare your family and loved ones, because once the sunlight armies come over the horizon, towing 100 degree Fahrenheit trolls in chains right up to the gasping dirt of your browning lawn, there will be no hope of happiness.
Tip #1 Stay Positive!
Prostrate yourself before the Sun, for it is a jealous and merciless god. It will take your children and your spouse and your livelihood and dash them upon the rocks to be baked into ash. Your skin will turn red, and you will hear it crack to the touch, and still the Sun will beat down upon your shriveling body.
It will shine its glory from every surface until you are blind, then rip the moisture from your limbs until the only feeling left in your body is the dull throb of your heart.
Tip #2: Wake Up Early and With a Clear Plan of Action
The graveyards of your puny civilization will cover the fields in which you once found comfort, back when the gentle Autumn leaves tickled the whiskers of your chin. Such memories will be but dust upon the tongue as the plains turn to desert and the lamentations of pale-skinned wretches can be heard echoing off the valley walls as they peel themselves out of their morning beds.
Time will lose all meaning. Days will be measured by the minuscule rise and fall of the thermometer.
Tip #3: A Little Fan by the Feet can make a Huge Difference
To take a single step will be as painful as the ache of a hundred, and a hundred steps will sunder your legs as though you had limped a hundred days through a desert.
Love your feet as they are now, whole and unblemished, for they will never be the same from the first time you unwittingly step outside in the early morning that is masked in cool colors which only serve to lure you into the fires of your front step. The little pebbles and stone pathways around your dying garden will never be cool again.
The tenants of quaint home and garden blogs are like the close whispers of the anti-Christ. They are paths only to ruin.
Tip #4: Hot Tea Helps you Concentrate, and Actually Triggers the Body to Cool Itself Down
There is no god or science. There is only the ever burning eye, and the heat rising from your molten driveways. If Jesus returns, he will find only the blackened meat of our bodies. If the last avatar of Vishnu rides in, his white horse will burn until it mingles with our ashes, and there will be nothing left out of which to birth a new world. Ragnarok will be but the flame of a matchstick compared to the coming inferno of summer.
Tip #5: Stop Complaining and Get to Work
This is the end. There is nothing left now but to seal myself into a dark coffin, and even then I can’t be sure that the shade of death will save me from the blistering tendrils of the eldritch horror that has risen every day to torture all life on the planet for a time that is incomprehensible to humans.
I can take solace in knowing that some day the sun will wear out. It will grow old, and fat, and weak, before it finally bursts into a trillion particles and dragged into the cold heart of a black hole. My one regret is that I can only live to see that happen in my sweaty dreams.