Crazy From the Heat
- Mike Dickey
- Aug 2, 2024
- 3 min read
"I'm goin' crazy,
Goin' crazy,
Oo, from the heat."
-David Lee Roth, 1985
Awakened this morning to gray skies and cool, damp air, much like the June Gloom during my time in Southern California.
Maybe there would be a reprieve from this miserable heat that's spanned this seemingly endless summer. The plan had been to escape from the tropical gooey air of the panhandle during the hottest weeks, but instead we've spent most of our time here hugging our window units as a heat dome remains settled over western New York. We'd have been better off staying somewhere with central air.
And despite the cool morning, today promises much of the same, right up until the Southern-style thunderstorms begin rolling through after lunch. It'll be pushing 90 degrees by noon. Just ick.
This new reality we're living, with months of equatorial temperatures all over the U.S., I think is a proximate cause of my observation that a number of lawyers and clients in my sphere appear to be going quite mad, raving on TikTok videos and in emails and texts about conspiracies and cabals, putting their madness on full display for the world to see.
The medical community agrees with me on this.
There are a bunch of similar articles out there, all pointing out that humans aren't meant to live like this, and we tend to go nuts when we're walking around with our shirts stuck to our backs.
Add a contentious election to the mix as a catalyst to the madness, and pretty soon you have a society wandering into full lunacy in search of shade or something cold to drink. It's not where I was hoping to find myself this summer, although my almost complete isolation from other people during the week seems to help keep my mind within the guardrails. Then again, crazy people often don't realize they've gone mad, which is part of what makes that sort of crisis so terrifying.
A year ago this morning I awoke at Dad and Johnnie's house to find two voicemails on my phone from a nurse at the Plano Medical Center. Mom lay in the ICU there, a couple blocks away, and the duty nurse promised to call me if she took a turn for the worse, which seemed likely as they transitioned from a ventilator and feeding tube to lots of morphine. I turned up the volume on my ringer when I crawled into bed, not realizing there's another on-off button for the ringer that apparently had inadvertently been turned off. I awakened at 5:30, as usual. Mom passed away at around 1:30, four hours before, with me snoring blissfully down the street, not hearing the calls from the hospital to come quickly if I wanted to see her alive.
The next time we were together was when I picked up the box of cremains a couple weeks later, and we drove around Plano to the places that had been the backdrop to that tumultuous time in our lives after she and Dad split up. I still go see her at the columbarium whenever I'm in Texas, just sitting rather than speaking, lest the custodians think I've gone crazy from the heat. Dad doesn't seem to have long, and I reckon a day will arrive when I pull onto the George W. Bush Tollway for the last time, and leave what's left of all of them and that ugly, crowded, hot place behind forever. A part of my life spanning nearly five decades now, from my own arrival as a fourteen year old through bringing the boys for holidays, to now burying my parents, closed.
This is the rarest of days for me, with not a single appointment. I will lean into a to-do list that never seems to shrink, and look forward to P coming home and the two of us heading up to the Cliff for the last weekend we'll have until late in the month. The forecast calls for storms, and my fantasy weekend will entail the two of us lying on the couch reading, and listening to the sibilant whisper of rain on the lake.
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