Iam burning up and itchy. How can I be expected to
deal with day to day life in this heat? Slime, grime. An inch of extra flesh
feels like ten pounds of lard. I am pounding cold beer at 4 pm to stave off
the stove of this fire.
We are faced with an energy crisis. The temperatures
here rise to over one hundred degrees in the summer. Walking outside from an
air-conditioned home is like walking outdoors into an intense pizza oven. We
are told by SCE that because our state has misused its power supply blindly,
we now have the opportunity to experience rolling blackouts all summer. So
combine that idea with too hot to handle heat and Indian Summer comes
rolling into California with the ferocity of dragon's breath.
Summer time slinks in with whole buckets of cut up
desire. It is a prickly thing. PJ Harvey in the middle of disaster. An itch
that comes and won't go away. It is my friend sitting still in a crowded
theater as the woman next to him takes off her shoes. It is so irregular
that only the muse can rouse it.
Summer. Heat. Desire.
I slide into my car every afternoon with fingertips
poised and hopping over my burning steering wheel and crank up the music as
sweat rolls down my brow. It doesn't surprise me that everyone seems so
detached including myself. We are all melting in our flesh, struggling to
trust our pigs in mud while keeping a handle on our internal weather
conditions. And all these while our presidents sit and fatten in old school
reform. People with guns under a torrid sun. Nice thoughts to loll away an
afternoon with.
If I owned a pool I would invite everyone I know over,
strip them naked, hand them margaritas and spend the next three months in a
drunken state of oblivion, from which we would all walk out shriveled,
blistered and blissful with the season long gone.
A few weeks ago my lover, my friend and I drove to LA
on a Sunday night to attend a birthday party.
Driving into LA is always an exercise in surreal
spontaneity. You spend an hour or so on a freeway littered with gorgeous and
gory graffiti and are suddenly plunked down into the streets of Hollywood,
which have been renovated and resurrected to look like a dirty Disneyland on
acid.
Anyway, back to cherry Maryville.
This is the norm.
And to top it all off, two weeks ago I was faced with
the Scorpio moon, which made me insane. Like a true scorpion it sat in the
sky demanding attention, garnering fear andS
It's times like these that make me want to boycott life
and run away to Mexico, sit among the bordello pink buildings and bridges
with butterflies, tequila shot in hand, huarachis by the wayside, dirty
pigeon colored linen spaghetti straps dropping from my shoulder, Tao of Pooh
in hand and just BREATHE.
Kimberly Nichols is a freelance writer splitting residence between the
southern California Desert where the air is clear and the mountains are
magical and Boston for her much needed fix of urbanity. She is a featured
freelancer for the local alternative weekly, The Desert Post Weekly.
She is also a society columnist for The Desert Sun newspaper. Her
non-fiction specialties are women's issues, psychology, philosophy, sex, and
art, book, culture and music reviews. Her fiction and poetry has appeared in
Feminista, Alternative Arts and Literature and 3am
Magazine. She also works as a publicist for various bands and artists.
In her spare time, Kimberly can be found in the yoga studio, on the dance
floor, at the beach or in Greek and Indian restaurants. She is currently at
work on a book of poetry and a series of fine art collage entitled Girls
of the Hundred Proof Bordello Define Desire.
