Signs: & Things I wonder about

So it's now the tenth day of a heat wave (in West LA, the valleys have been burning up longer than that) with temps above 100 digits and I say "It's hot." It didn't bother me really, it still cools down at night (though apparently not as much as it used to according to the LA Times the low temperature has risen 7 degrees in the past twenty years because we keep on cementing things up.) Until a couple of days ago and then it had just been too damn hot for too damn long. Our apartment is un-air conditioned and so we use fans and appreciate the bit of ocean breeze that kicks up around 4:00 ish. But we're on the ground floor and it's a bit of a dicey neighborhood so I don't like to leave all the windows open at night, particularly in the bedroom. So I spent a lot of the weekend napping with my body sweating up the sheets where ever my skin touched the bed. And staying awake at night listening to the motorcycles roaring down La Cienega and homeless people routing around in the alley, while sweating.

The thing about heat this hot for so long is it saps your ability to do anything. You certainly don't want to move fast. And you certainly don't want to have the sun touch your skin. And you certainly don't want to exercise, or paint, or walk about town taking photos. Cooking seems incredibly complicated and ice cubes are in high demand, but you are too unmotivated to get up and walk the ten steps to get them.

Which makes you wonder about the commitment of all those suicide bombers in Iraq. It is hot in Iraq, temps for months in the century mark. And yet people can consistently get worked up enough to go out and blow themselves up in a crowd of civilians. I mean when it's as hot as Hades and you are going to blow yourself up, you know it's going to get quite a bit hotter when you explode. I can barely make myself go out and water the herbs in this weather and yet day after day someone is willing to strap on twenty pounds of explosive and walk in the heat to a market and blow himself up. That is a marketing message that is WORKING!