The Heat Is On

Remember that song? I don't know if it was actually called "The Heat is On," but that line certainly composed a significant part of its message, repeated ad infinitum to the accompaniment of synthesizers and the inevitable stray saxophone. It was some sort of theme song, I think, to a movie or TV show, or perhaps to a particularly ignoble episode of my early-mid teens, when I was determined to be a fashion designer, and spent hours seated importantly at my desk, perfecting fussy little doodles of Dynasty-inspired gowns, which invariably sported inflated shoulder-pads and frothy immense headgear that would make even Cecil Beaton demur. I remember I created a moniker for myself, convinced that I could never enjoy success in my destined field without an acccent and a hyphen somehwere in my name, and hence was born "Vasz-Don" (sadly the anglocentric limitations of Blogger forbid the critical flourish, the accent grave perched languidly over the "a", but pray imagine it), and it was this thrilling foreign-sounding signature (as if my name needed any help at all in that department!) that adorned in a flamboyant swoosh the cover of my "portfolio" - a weak assemblage of eight or ten derivative "creations" - stapled together into a folder and held at the ready for proud display to any unsuspecting dinner-guest who foolhardily engaged me in conversation. My poor parents. I think they actually attempted an evincing of pride at my endeavours, but could they really not have been quaking in the pits of their puritan souls for the eternal jeopardy of mine? Needless to say, the career of Vasz-Don was brief and unmemorable, failing to blaze any streaks at all across the Parisian springtime night.

The foregoing was an unplanned tangent to the somewhat less personal declaration that the heat is on: summer has started with a slowly-building vengeance. Cold showers yield immediately to clammy sheeny sweat. Everyone, everywhere looks moist, all the time. Humidity, like rain, is one of the flaws in the cosmic design. One of those last-minute oversights, unavoidable glitches that every major project must endure and learn to work around.