I move through the streets from store to store. A moth drawn forward by a promise of coolness — my own virtual landscape, the places that sooth, islands in the sea of heat, and me (strange vessel, proto-cyborg, unbending will) blown crisscross by a wind known only to myself.

Mistah Kurtz-he dead
            A penny for the Old Guy

There will be in a time in my life when I have read Dante’s Inferno. For now, nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita, I find myself with just two nebbich lines, which, as I look in the hollow faces that pass me by, I realize puts me on top of the food chain of literacy — a feat that is these days achieved by the knowledge alone that there was someone who went by the name of Dante (1000 points) who wrote something called Inferno (5000 points and a bonus game).

Es ist viel zu heisss. My brain feels like a bowl of Jell-O wrapped in a thick blanket. A fine mist of water sprayed over me is meant to compensate for my inability to sweat and lasts for about 23 seconds. Like the Wicked Witch of the West my self is melting: Reason, sense and language get replaced by a very annoying parade of quotes and references and drown in a maelstrom of the lavalike fabric of what is best called a hot summer afternoon in Freiburg.

You are terminated.
And Mistah Kurtz-he still dead.

I refuse to perceive this as something bad. I’m a child of summer, Leo King of the lions, lion among man, and humility is one of my most outstanding qualities. Summer is the natural state of things, I was born under sweat and blood and cries as everybody else and the world greeted me with a friendly cushion of intense heat. So, yes, I suffer, but I love the reason for suffering (not the suffering itself, mind you, I’ve almost no masochist tendencies). That’s a concept hard to grasp for some people.

Friend: How can you say you love the heat when you so obviously suffer from it?
Me: I simply do.
Friend: I don’t understand how you can like something that doesn’t do you good.
Me: You like Pizza?
Friend: Of course.
Me: Do you really feel good after a huge slice?
(he’s my age plus seven)
Friend: Well… No, but...
(cont’d ad nauseam)

Yadda, Yadda, Yadda, this annual highlight of intellectual discourse shows how little we usually are aware of what we want or why. No need to be coherent or dispense wisdom all the time but at least try to look at yourself without prejudice. But I digress.

A flock of Kim Kardashian clones just passed me by in search for the next location to be another background for the empty stage of their lives. Death and hollowness and slavery can have pretty faces.

The disgust finally flushes me in the entrance of a warehouse. There, between things I don’t want to buy and people I find hard to watch, I place myself under the strong airstream of the AC and enjoy for a while the fact I didn’t die from the heat once again.

Mistah Kurtz-he dead

But I’m fucking alive.