Hot enough for you yet?

It’s not a good time to be a roofer or weed eater operator or required by convention and stuffed shirts to wear a suit and tie, or any clothes at all beyond a pair of shorts and a t-shirt and some flip flops.

And if it ain’t the heat, it’s the humidity. Or both. And if it’s not that, it’s the sudden torrential insane combustible afternoon thunderboomers that flood yards and roads and parking lots and zap lightning indiscriminately all over the place, scaring the (bleep) out of anyone with any sense.

Trying to drive in it reminds me of something a paramedic told me 20 years ago about running ambulance calls in such weather: “Rain creates instant idiots. You just add water.”

Oh, and one such hyperactive lightning storm came out of nowhere and knocked out power at our office last week for about 90 minutes smack dab in the middle of deadline for the print version of this sawed-off little newspaper, which seems these days to be held together mostly by what my dad used to call 100 mph tape.

I sat in the dark on my cell phone while the BCN press deadline loomed ever larger. I may’ve contemplated my belly button a bit because I’m occasionally suprised those things don’t fall off after a while. If I was a navel I’d want a change of scenery after 50 or 60 years, wouldn’t you?

And then another shot of lightning hit something very, very close. It went bang, only in all caps. BANG. I admit ducking.

The BCN didn’t catch fire, however. Later the lights came on. So did the air conditioning. I finished the paper; it wasn’t exactly what I had in mind when I started the day but us print editors have to be flexible in addition to good looking. That’s why we do a special form of yoga in which we stand up and scratch a bit and then sit down again. Sometimes we do it twice. I recommend it highly.

Yes, the weather is with us much these days, one way or the other. Maybe it’s always been hanging around, but since it happened to people who are no longer here we don’t care.

I hear us humans tend to suffer from what somebody calls “recency bias.” I’m told it means we’re biased toward what’s happening now, or happened recently. You see this behavior on sports message boards a lot, where people with nothing better to do argue over whether some athlete from our day is the “greatest ever,” without giving much thought to greats from decades or centuries ago.

I digress. It is blasted hot even for Georgia. And humid. The result is a squalid, sneaky, damp, sweltering, greasy sort of heat that smells like fried squid, wet cat and deodorant, especially when you roll your windows down anywhere around restaurants.

My arch nemesis Basquat Finch says it’s what you get when you keep messing with Mother Nature. So does the Weather Channel, which should know. They cover this stuff all day long.

Despite such stern warnings we homo sapiens, in some examples of our species worse on Mother Earth than termites and fire ants combined, keep transforming coastal Georgia.

Trees hardly stand a chance if they’re in the wrong place, and you can say the same thing about people and animals and marshes and wetlands too. Nothing must stop the paving and building, it’s for the good of future generations. And, truth be told, probably quite lucrative for some in the here and now, too.

At times, looking at it from the outside there appears to be a lemming-like quality to it all this ballyhooed growth, like a gold rush with the crowd of usual suspects hurrying to get their’s before it’s gone.

I suspect it will be gone soon enough, a self-inflicted wound, a case of us doing to ourselves what the Chinese or the Republicans or the Democrats or the Russians or the Invaders from Mars couldn’t, and patting ourselves on the back all the way to the end.

I wonder, sometimes, whether the private well my wife and I have relied on for decades will still provide water half a decade from now, as the demand for that particular resource intensifies.

Water has always been a finite resource, you see. Back in 1995 I covered a meeting in which officials from the Georgia EPD likened the Floridan aquifer to a milk shake with a bunch of straws stuck in it, all busy sucking like there’s no tomorrow.

The idea being no matter how big the milk shake, it’s going to eventually get sucked dry.

There are a whole lot more straws sucking water out of it now than there were in 1995.

And more straws on the way. And then, when the Floridan is finally tapped out and relegated to memory, somebody will just get longer straws. And probably celebrate.