You Can Take The Girl Out Of the Desert…
…but you can’t take the desert out of the girl.
So here’s something that is grinding my gears lately.
It is the summertime here in the Bay Area and that is a complicated thing. As many know, the marine layer and I have long had a tempestuous relationship.
July looks like this: overcast morning gives way to a very hot and sunny day which is then doused by fog by the afternoon.
This phenomenon is why you see tourists shivering in their shorts down on Fisherman’s Wharf. The Bay Area warms up quickly then is naturally cooled.
However….
Before the fog rolls in, it can get truly hot around here. Hot enough that a little air conditioning would be a nice thing.
Most of the Bay Area doesn’t believe in air conditioning. I recall when I first moved here and was shopping apartments. I asked one landlord “where are the air conditioning controls?” and he laughed and said, “No air conditioning.”
“Whaaat?!” Was my reply. That was when I lived in the South Bay and temps could climb into the high 90’s during the day.
“Just open the windows. We get a cross breeze,” he said.
I scoffed. And harrumphed. And muttered something like “I’ll give you a cross breeze you rattin’ smattin’ rootin’ tootin’ son of your mother….”
As it turns out, very few homes in the Bay Area have air conditioning. No place I have lived since I’ve been here has had the sweet miracle that is air conditioning. Only some windows and a hope for a cross breeze.
Compare that to New Mexico where every home has some form of AC. It’s only right. Just. Moral. Upstanding.
I’ve survived many a Bay Area summer season by working a few longer hours at work, sucking down their gentle corporate paid cool air, or riding in my car with the AC on max to cool off.
But what’s grinding my gears lately is all of the retail stores that either don’t have or don’t use air conditioning.
Look, I learned as a young child about moving quickly from the freon cooled car into the refrigerated air cooled grocery store that was so frosty it would raise goose flesh on arms and my legs clad only in shorts. Malls and clothing stores and other retail shops are a respite from the heat.
Not here. Stores have no windows and no AC and no moving air at all and they become this stale pit of muggy heat. Bleah! I saunter around the store wiping sweat off my fevered brow.
My desert hewn body was made to be a wonder of convection cooling. I sweat, breeze passes over it, water evaporates and I’m cooled.
This is how nature made me!
But deep inside a Walgreens or a Safeway there ain’t no breeze and only the sweat remains. Gross.
So then I take up residence somewhere near the freezer section where I crack open a door and it takes me a reeeeaaaalllly loooooong time to select which brand of frozen orange juice I would like.
It just ain’t right.
Image created by quickmeme.