Humanity’s Only Hope

They say murder rates go up in a heat wave.

I understood why when the power went out in my building on one of the hottest days on record.  The grinding of my air conditioner’s fan coming to a halt was echoed in the grinding of my teeth.

Of course I was the person to get punished.  I’m the one who switched off all my unused lights and electronics to conserve power.  I’m the one who half-shuttered all my windows to stave off heat and sunlight.  I’m the one who turned my room temperature up to the highest bearable degree to ease the burden on my HVAC.  But no, the grid still got overloaded.  Because people are stupid.  They don’t think about how much energy it takes to run your air conditioner constantly in this ridiculous heat.  And apparently no one else is aware that they’re not the sole resident sucking electricity down like a camel at a watering hole.

I didn’t waste too much time feeling my feelings, though all of them had no problem squishing into the space of four seconds.  I had to act fast.  I had to…

…what?

My initial thought was a slap-dash homemade air conditioner.  A bowl full of ice cubes from my freezer-turned-insulated-box and a small but effective fan, just like they did in the good ol’ days.  But for that I would need electricity.  All my fans plugged into the wall.

Hm.

Okay, weeell maybe the outage wouldn’t last very long.  Maybe it was just a temporary overload.

But that didn’t feel like a very wise stance to take.  Sit around: wait and see.  That wasn’t what the tornado drills at school had taught me about emergency preparedness growing up.  But was it really an emergency?

Yeah.  Yeah, it was.  That’s how it felt, at least.  The way the air hit one’s face like a solid thing upon walking out the door; that had to be an emergency scenario, right?

So maybe the trick was to cool myself instead of cooling my home.  I could go jump in the lake.  A nice, comfy, sizeable body of water never failed anyone, even on the hottest of summer days.

But the lake was so far away.  I’d have to spend half an hour in the car, and the thought of that was horrific.  Talk about out of the frying pan and into the fire—or in this case, my car which now doubled as a pizza oven after sitting in the parking lot all day.

And it was late.  Rush hour.  Everyone would be on the road.  I imagined the horns blaring and the asphalt sizzling, so hot it could almost melt our tires.  All while we didn’t move on our respective journeys that now took at minimum twice as long as normal.

There’s your increase in murder statistic right there.  For a moment I imagined myself stuck in that traffic jam, my anger rising until my blood boiled (figuratively… kinda) and I finally went on a rampage, abandoning my car and taking a tire iron to everyone else’s vehicles.  The shatter of windows, the hissing of punctured rubber, the clang and crash of aluminum under the swing of my makeshift weapon, each beat of the iron accompanied by my screams; “ZIPPER!  MERGE!  ZIPPER!  MERGE!”

But even just imagining the incident made the heat rise on the back of my neck, which was entirely too hot, and suddenly I felt exhausted and sluggish.  Yeah, maybe I shouldn’t go to the lake.

Good Lord, could it really be too hot to be angry?

I sagged where I stood, a whole two minutes into the power outage, still considering my options for this not-really-an-emergency emergency.  No matter how hard I tried to come up with a practical solution, all I could really think of was that the ice cream in my freezer was going to melt in under an hour.

So I moseyed over to the fridge, yoinked out the half full pint as quickly as I could to preserve the ice cream’s other frozen friends, grabbed a spoon because who needs a bowl, and laid down on the floor since my furniture would radiate back too much of my own body heat.

I stared at the ceiling, working through the cold treat one spoonful at a time, wondering if there was any hope for humanity in this kind of weather.  Maybe our only chance at salvation was if temperatures had gotten so hot that we as a society would loop around from murderous to too tired to even consider murder.  Like I had.  We’d all still die of dehydration and heatstroke, but at least we could do it while eating fudge cookie dough swirl.

About half an hour later, I was scraping out the last of the ice cream when the electricity kicked back on.