Sunday, September 8, 2024
Early this morning, I drove to the store to get some groceries to tide us over the next couple days. At 10 a.m., driving home, the car’s temperature gauge read 85 degrees. Durin the time I had been in the store, the morning had gotten warmer, but it wasn’t viciously hot. Four hours later, the heat had intensified to an exponential degree. It was like an interest payment on a debut that was being compounded by the minute.
This afternoon, the thermometer on the small side porch of the house we rent read 106 degrees. A half-hour later, near 1 p.m., it read 110. By 2:30 p.m., it registered 116 degrees. We live about a half-mile from the shoreline, and I have to assume that the heat was close to 120 degrees just a few miles inland.
Is it possible that the thermometer outside our house was faulty? I suppose so, but when I conduct a compare and contrast recollection of this morning’s walk from the store to my parked car, and what the direct burnt of the heat felt like as I stepped outside at 2 p.m., the gap between the two instances is more than 15 degrees. The official media report the high in Long Beach today as being 104 degrees. Well, who am I supposed to believe? The media or my lying skin?.
In any case, we can only afford an airconditioning apparatus that cools down one room. the rest of the house is soaking up all the excess heat that was absorbed by the ground during the day.
This heat has arrived like a balloon payment of.a hidden tax for August having been one of the mildest summer months I can ever remember in Los Angeles. “Pay back time,” summer says.
Despite the heat, I got some work done on an article on Allen Ginsberg’s posthumous collection, “Death & Fame.” I had not read the book until I received a request to contribute to a book on Ginsberg to the published by Cambridge University Press. The book turns out to be much more interesting and vital than I expected.
The oppressive heat forced me to miss a reading set up by Lynn McGee and her cohort of friends at the “W-E Bicoastal Poets Series. When the weather cools and the video is posted, I look forward to seeing the entire program. In the meantime, I want to call your attention to Joseph Zaccardi’s poetry. Like Ginsberg, Zaccardi was born in Newark, New Jersey. His most recent book is”Songbirds of the Nine Rivers” (Sixteen Rivers Press 2023).
About Bill Mohr