Tuesday's Burly Rant or I Was Born to Love Latinas

So, what is everybody going to do when the Earth sh*ts the bed, a great big hole opens in the sky, and we're living on a cinder?

Here in Virginia, we've been experiencing over 100 degree temperatures pretty much daily, until just today. 100 degrees with an index of 116. Does it really matter whether it's 112 or 116? I'm a man, I don't even use AC in my vehicle. I use it sparingly, because I feel it's a challenge to the whole human race hiding indoors with their AC units cranked up, blowing their hot fumes into the environmental carnival tent and causing untold damage to my heart. I don't necessarily blame people I suppose, though it'd be nice if they gave a sh*t about anything except "not being hot." In another fifty years, when your grandkids are outside playing in environmentally-controlled space suits because the air quality is about the same as a Viet Cong rat hole doused in Agent Orange, and your clean water supplies and all evidence of it have to be hidden so your neighbors won't potentially kill you and steal it, you can pat yourselves on the back for a job well done. Nobody has lived through this kind of heat before, because People of the Past didn't have the ecological nightmare of carbon monoxide mixed with acidic humidity from charbroilled clouds or seeping up from a crumbcake Earth.

The recent trend is to "Go Green." It's nice to see. People are changing out their 100 watt bulbs for energy-saving ones, and recycling. All that saved money goes right into their SUV's gas tank.

I recycle. I'm not "environmental." That would suggest I want there to be a planet for people to inhabit. The only people I like are in Ray Bradbury stories. They are good, fundamentally, dreamers with adventure in their hearts and a romantic interest in the passage of time. I still believe all people living west of Elvis Presley's house and north of the Red River and southeast in a diagonal line from Portland, Oregon are just like the people in Ray Bradbury's books. Those people have been to Mars and have strange stories told to them by an Illustrated Man on a lonely country road. Those people have never heard of the Black Lagoon of the Gulf BP Oil spill. Those people think American Idol is what the best college football player in Iowa wins. Older adults whittle sticks with pocket knives, creating little rockets they give to kids to play with. Porn hasn't been invented. It's just love between a girl and a boy looking up at the stars.

I saw a Ray Bradbury person today, or at least someone who would have inspired Bradbury. She was a beautiful Latina with her dark hair tied back, in a sleeveless brown dress with those folded layers over the legs like Carmen Miranda used to wear. She lifted the skirt part so she could walk fast, showing off good strong legs. She was a mature woman on a city street trotting barefoot across hot tarmac. I nodded to her while driving past and in the rearview she smiled with her face tilted back as if she was actually happy. It was a moment that made the very atomically-small Bradbury portion of my brain wonder if I'd somehow contributed to her happiness. I'm just a thick-armed creep in a work van, but maybe she sensed I thought she was beautiful in that moment. Maybe she knew I was born to love women like her. It pleased her to know this. She continued jogging toward some destination, low-striding like she was about to be joined by two lines of shirtless dancing boys for an impromptu paean to the Bronze Gods of Heaven and Earth.

It strikes me that only Ray Bradbury people can make me care about the Earth. We all know tigers are being slaughtered and unique plant/insect species are being eradicated every single day. This leads to a black bear chewing the intestines out of some hunter in Alaska and the fearful platitudes of a culture praying to be assured Nature is not coming for revenge.

But when we come to the proper conclusion, we find that human beings are the worst thing that ever happened to Earth. Agent Smith is right: humanity is a virus. The Cosmos, or God/Jack Kirby's Celestials/Lovecraft's Cthulu, would probably let us alone for millions more years. At least until the next five-mile wide meteor devolves the planet into a roiling mass of lava and disposable diapers. The Cosmos has no real interest in Man's fate, so Man has decided to apply an endgame to His Own legend. Every great hero needs a great end. Mankind has decided to writ large using vast ecological disasters to drive home the point: there is no future. Every child born into this world is on the verge of becoming Soylent Green in a boiling raw-sewage sh*tpond in what used to be Denver, Colorado. And if that's so, what becomes of the Ray Bradbury people? The obvious? They burn, just like everyone else? At fahrenheit 451? Or fahrenheit 600?

And once it gets that hot, does it really matter if it's 451 or 600?