One of the few advantages of this foreshadowing of Global Incineration they’ve been telling us about is how it tends to increase the productivity of a normal workday through anxiety and sleep deprivation.
Being San Franciscans, mostly, and used to being coddled in a billowy, white Marine Layer dotted with the lulling boomlets of foghorns and the piercing cries of seagulls we’re not used to these periods of high heat. And, yes, we know they don’t have foghorns anymore and that’s too bad but after stumbling around The Bunker with a cooling do-rag for 36 hours straight we’re prone to hallucinations.
So, we were up and apparently so were a lot of you as tips and enquiries came rolling in over the weekend and, okay, we know a lot of you think we misspelled/misused “enquiries” just there but we were castigated for using “improper English” by a corporate overseer when we used it years ago when it’s an accepted British English usage so suck it, Corporate Dude, we’re our own bosses now!
See what the heat does to you? Makes you cranky and rebellious. Kinda like Americans in general.
Our weekend stretch of “Buck Ten” days resurrected thoughts of another Englishman’s sentiments on the topic and we re-appreciated Mr. Coward’s “only mad dogs and Englishmen go out in the midday sun” rhyme scheme, finding it still applicable a hundred years or so after it was written.
Folks who did wander out in the midday sun often found themselves in need of rescue or succumbed to the brain-scrambling temperatures in a variety of endearing ways.
To sum it up: we heard of unabashed skinny dipping in public places, there were impromptu strip-tease shows – some appreciated, most not – there were one-man pyrotechnic shows, knife-throwing, lariat twirling and – most recently – a whip-cracking demonstration.
Many among you may see this and say: “Meh, it’s Contra Costa, bro…” and we get that, things can roll a little bit differently out here (see our “Couch Dragster” story) but then we started hearing about the Midnight Thunder Runners – folks running from police at high speed – and others just running into things (see our story on Moraga Way).
But we can’t help but think that much of the weekend’s Tom-Foolery was at least stimulated in part by high heat mixed with alcohol or pharmaceuticals and pent-up post-Pandemic Partum.
In the end, for us, all we needed was the return of the Marine Layer and our first good nights sleep in a week to get us back on track. Now, if we can just convince the Powers That Be to bring back those foghorns.
