I may have mentioned this somewhere before, but the winters in Boston are harsh.  Ball-freezingly harsh.  Arctic circle, getting-locked-in-a-meat-locker and then having half-crazed French chefs use a three-man slingshot to wing packages of frozen vegetables in your face while the Abominable Snowman rabbit-punches you in the kidneys harsh.  But for as much as the winter makes you want to want to kill yourself with one of those specialized ice-sculpting chainsaws, the summers here make you feel like taking that chainsaw and using it to shave every single inch of hair off your body in a bizarre attempt to cut down the amount of body heat you're retaining.  And of course this summer is no exception.  The temperatures are soaring higher than Courtney Love in a cocaine-laden hot air balloon, there's more moisture in the air than there is in the Charles River and the skanks are out in full force.  This week in particular we've been in the fiery grip of a blistering heat wave so hot that it makes bathing in a river of molten hot liquid magma seem as cool as Samuel L. Jackson at a Dungeons & Dragons convention.

Now normally when it's this hot out I don't feel like doing anything except maybe laying on top of an air conditioning unit or putting ice cubes down my pants.  But how can I sit idly by while the heat index is so great as our own Sexx can be in danger of having his inhumanly-sized balls sweated right off, potentially rolling down the street and crushing people and automobiles alike in a demented re-creation of the opening scene from Raiders of the Lost Ark?  Surely we can not allow this to happen, and truly there is no greater aspiration for a fifth-rate internet writer/complainer with too much time on his hands than to spend hours bitching and moaning about things over which we have no control.  Though I guess if you ask Mel Gibson, he will probably tell you that this is all the fault of the Jews somehow.  Those zany Jews screw everything up apparently.

Speaking of Jews and ballsacks, here's your Joke of the Day, emailed to me by Sexx in direct response to the previous paragraph:

Q:  What did Mel Gibson say to the ballsack?

A:  "Stop making it so hot and controlling all the banks, you Jewish ballsack."

Sunstroke and Butte pretty much sums up my week.

I Am the Biggest Bitch in the World When It's Hot Out

Hot Andrea can vouch for this one.  If you guys thought I was a whiny, petty bitch before (and if you've ever read anything on this website, you should already be pretty confident of this fact), you ain't seen nothing until my internal heat-o-meter passes the "uncomfortably warm" mark.  Then it's over.  Some jackass samurai could break into my apartment and start loading all my personal possessions into his buddies' Ryder truck downstairs while angry lemurs bite my ears off and I'd still be content to just sit motionless in my living room with my arms crossed, saying "this sucks.  I'm hot.  Fuck this place."  It's truly pathetic.

Well I guess that's not totally true.  Here's a list of fun things I like to do when it's as hot as ten thousand flaming hells on the surface of the sun inside an oven that's also on fire:

1. Sit completely motionless so as not to generate any unnecessary body heat.
2. Sweat my nuts off.
3. Complain about how fucking hot it is.
4. Think about going to an awesome water park but then realize that I'm too broke (and lazy).
5. Ask everyone I meet if it's "hot in here, or is it just me?".

Sadly, the only thing that helps keep me going through these difficult times is imagining that the guy who stole my iPod was a homeless dude and that what little amount of brain matter he hasn't already melted out of his head with crack is currently being slow-roasted like a delicious Kenny Rogers-style chicken breast by the scorching heat of God's Holy Vengeance.  But that's just because I'm passive-aggressive, bitter and vindictive.  I guess.

Me on my way home from work yesterday.

110% Humidity Can Pretty Much Eat Me

How the hell can you have 110% of anything, anyway?  It's like Mother Nature was like, "fuck these guys.  I'm going to make it so miserable for these jackass humans that it's borderline statistically impossible!  MWAHAHAHAHAH!!"  Seriously.  I feel like I'm living inside an offensive lineman's athletic supporter.  Every time I even so much as think about going outside I start sweating like Donald Rumsfeld at a prisoner abuse senate subcommittee hearing or like a three hundred pound Pokémon fan trying to show up his friends at Dance Dance Revolution after a long day of eating his own weight in greasy day-old pizza and forgetting to wear deodorant.

The humidity was so high at one point that I actually got rained on.  But not the nice, cooling "beginning of the end of the heat wave" type rain, either;  it was that drizzly shit that scalds your skin and feels like that time I accidentally broke into my neighbor's house and they threw a pot of hot coffee in my face for no reason.  The rain that magically falls from the sky even though the sun is shining brightly, and ends up just making large puddles that reflect the sun right back in your eyes and blind the shit out of you.  The kind of rain that, if there is a God, it's probably his way of saying "fuck you" to all of us.

On top of all that, it is becoming more and more obvious to me that the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority hates everyone who lives here.  Why else would they send ONE goddamned train between noon and 1PM in the middle of a fucking insane-o heat wave?  They're obviously thinking that if they leave enough people standing around in the blistering heat in the middle of the day at an outdoor station for a long enough period of time, at least half a dozen of them will drop dead instantly, therefore making the MBTA's job a lot easier since there will be fewer people to transport.  It's either that, or the T guys figured that since Bostonians are generally pale enough that we can lie down in a snow bank and become completely invisible, they should leave us out in the sun to tan a little bit.  That way it will be easier for them to find us when they send their MBTA Kill Teams around in the winter to weed out the sick and the elderly.

Nobody in Boston Has Air Conditioning

I'm from South Florida.  In South Florida it's fucking hot all the time.  Like hotter than the Human Torch in "flame on" mode having a threesome with a toaster oven and a coal-burning steam engine furnace.  And in the summer, it's even hotter than that.  But you know what?  We get used to it.  We deal with it.  We adapt.  But mostly, over the summers in Florida, we do nothing.  Nobody leaves their houses, nobody goes outside, nobody gets in their cars, nobody does a goddamn thing, for any reason, ever.  Of course, in South Florida there really isn't any reason to leave your house in the summer, since every building has fucking central air.  In Boston it doesn't work like that.  Because Bostonians are apparently all self-loathing masochists who would much rather cook themselves inside their super-heated furnace-apartments than do anything that would even remotely contribute to maintaining any semblance of an ambient temperature.

As far as I can tell there are two places in the entire city of Boston that have air conditioning - my office and the bedroom of my apartment.  That's it.  And even then, it's those old-school window-mounted crapstasms that only work when they feel like it and, in the case of my office A/C, only when you have a good half-hour of so to devote to bashing the damn thing with a sledgehammer, punching it with your fist and invoking the spirits of the Dark Gods to aid you in your unholy quest.  Anywhere else you want to go and you'd better bring an inflatable raft and a SARS mask because you are going to be riding the high tides of human sweat.  Everyone you see is either glistening like a greased-up professional wrestler or beading sweat like they just got finished running the marathon while wearing a full suit of 16th century steel knight's armor.  When I'm anywhere but my office or my room I'm doomed to the same fate.  As such, I've managed to create fortified, self-sustaining bunkers in both locations in an effort to minimize the amount of time I spend bathing in my own disgusting filth.  Andrea and I have moved the TV and computers into the bedroom, boarded up the windows, installed MG42 machinegun nests wherever we could work them in and even contemplated installing a mini-fridge so we wouldn't risk breaking a sweat when we headed to the kitchen for a drink.  I've taken similar measures with my office at work.  I can only hope and pray that I've brought enough provisions to last until this foul heat wave plays out to it's final conclusion.

"It's like a sauna in here!"