In Twilight Regalia

I am burning up.  I’m not talking this time about the fact that we’re million years old carbon or anything, not like the meteorites. But maybe it’s part of the reason the global warming issue is having special meaning for me.

(This is such an asinine topic, I think to myself.  What have I been driven to.)

But no one who is not inside my skin seems to understand what the hell is going on.  Not really.  Most all my friends are younger by a mile.

I’m so hot that I’m not thinking straight, but I have to say it.

People will make fun of me if I say it. They do, you know.

But the truth is, menopause makes you loopier than a Great Pyrenees with fleas.  You are going into a furry blurry death spiral and there’s nothing you can do about it.

I’m sweating so much I can’t put makeup on in the morning.  Liquid makeup turns into watercolor puddles that don’t smooth out.  The undermost layer of my hair has been stuck to my neck for weeks.  I’ve thrown all the polyester out of my wardrobe.  It doesn’t make any difference.  I’m radiating so much that a bra is overload.

For a while, I thought that the heat I felt was just within my own sentient self; that no one else would feel it.  It was just my reaction to life in the southern sun of California.  Ya, even in the dark.

NO.

My husband put his hand on the couchback against which my kidneys had recently been pressed (I was pulling myself off it, panting to the floor to collapse and flail out all limbs to allow for air flow, like a starfish flopping on the carpet).

It was BURNING UP.  He asked if I had a fever.

No dear, just me.  Just me flaming forward into the universe.

There’s a feeling that accompanies it — it’s the thing that wakes you up at night, not just the mere, sheer force of wanting to escape the heat.

It’s a sort of whirling YIKES sensation, rather like the feeling you get when something pulls you STRAIGHT UP suddenly into the blue on an Oct-o-pus ride at an amusement park, or a very fast elevator in Sears Tower.  It makes you inhale because you literally brace yourself.  You know it’s starting again.

Here we go!  HANG ON!!

You feel like a 10-ton pressure of prickly hot embarrassment flush compounded with a washover of UGGGGGGHHHHHH I’m being turned into a PPPPPPAAAAAANNNNCAKKKEEEE.  And when you’re at the bottom and you feel certain you might be able to fit through a mail slot, you realize you need to TAKE OFF ALL YOUR CLOTHES.  NOW.

But you can’t. So you turn on a fan, if you’re lucky to be sitting near one, or lying next to one in bed (which will be on continuously for the next 5 years). (Buy a good one.)

If you can’t turn on the AC in the car or immediately throw yourself in the nearest Italian fountain, since you’re already a coin’s width, you might as well be prepared for the comments you will receive:

“Are you ok?  You look sick.” (Actually, I always look like this anymore.  The teenager in my head is protesting it too, trust me.)

“It’s chilly in here, aren’t you?”  (Ah, so that’s why I’ve been functioning so well.)

“Please, there’s no need to be anxious.”  (No, really, it’s just me grimacing over the fact that I’m quietly combusting.)

“Are you expecting?”  (Thanks, no; it’s just the belly fat that’s compounding my inability to ventilate.  But thanks for thinking I’m that young.)

“Wow, have you been running?”  (No, actually at that point I would be turning a bright red color and wouldn’t still be in 4-inch heels, fool.)

“You should really check out my Weight Watchers book, it’ll help a lot.”  (Can I just hit you a small bit, right there?)

“Hormones suck, but I just got on the program with the progesterone, now I’m good.”  (I’ll see that you get flowers in the cancer ward in 2020, dear.)

“Have you tried Black Cohosh?  Works for me.”  (Yes, but it’s not all that effective; and I keep forgetting that I have to take it.  And then I forget to stop taking it, since you’re only supposed to take it for a short period of time.)

“I know this great herbalist…” (Oh GAWWWWD… here we go….)

But the most fun occurs when you get asked questions involving your short-term memory, which no longer exists, since you spend your nights waking up drenched, rolling over throwing off a blanket or sheet, falling slightly asleep, discovering you’re now freezing, throwing on the blanket, falling slightly asleep, waking up steaming and wretching, and lather-rinse-repeat.  Not to mention having to take a leak a couple times.

Your short-term memory on the average day after such a bout (particularly after two or three nights of this) is really a crap shoot.

Your synapses have entirely gone Helen Keller on you.

Your boss might say: “Remember the Vantage contract paragraph that went through three sets of revisons and we had changes to that third revision?  Where is that?”

And your first instinctive mental reply, having been pulled from some rusting, exhumed mental file cabinet by your myopic midget memory who, after a long waddle down a dimly lit passageway, standing for a bit with thumbs hooked in his belt, scratching his balding head, and fumbling with a boney finger through some dustbunnies and a flinging mouse, and finally holding up a yellowed crumbling card, would read: “Darling argyle funnel fruitbat??”

At which point your external reply to cleverly buy time would be:

“I’m sure I have it here, I’ll bring it in to you.”  

(Thankfully you still possess a rational superego that can still process on some basic survivalist level.  Lying to one’s mother in childhood actually proves a useful ingrained resource once again.)

But your dripping swamp of a face would show you’re lying. 

It is too busy responding to your internal metabolism that is dancing clockwise chanting WOOOGUM-OOOGUM BRROO-HOO HA-HA, WOOOGUM-OOOGUM BROU-HOO HA-HA, you’re going to come out just the right degree of tenderness if we poke you with a stick into this pot just a little bit further.

In short, you are doomed. 

You realize this is your body’s way of getting you ready for the torments of old age. 

Not the physical ones - but the external ones: The blows that come from people who will no longer have any respect for you as a human being and will treat you like the blithering fool you have inexplicably, helplessly become.  People who will make remarks about just leaving you out on the ice.

People who will laugh when you put a 911 autodial button on your cell phone screen.

Hahahhahahahaaa!  They will point and jeer.  “I’ve fallen and I can’t get up!”  Hahahhahahahaaa!  What idiot can’t dial 911!

Hahahahahahahaaaaa.  Why would you need that?!!!

Hahaha.

Ha.

And then they will see your furious red dripping face with the flaring nostrils and slightly skewed look in the eyes from 3 hours’ sleep and they will leave you alone.

Forever, quite possibly. 

It will get you acclimated to your new life of peace and solitude, and basket weaving.

That’s what it’s for. 

I’m beginning to think that all people past a certain number of years spent twirling around this planet start to act doubtful of good. I know that that feeling is hitting me hard. Maybe I can just blame it on age? Or maybe not. Maybe this time, it’s well-founded fears.

It’s a measure of our strength (or some say, delusion) at the end. Do we believe in life, in goodness, in God, in harmony, in LOVE? Are we able to pull through every insane thing in our lifetimes and say, yes, I know LOVE is really all there is and it is permanent and enduring and supremely healing? It beats everything that’s going on before my human eyes here.
Or do we aquiesce to fear, dread, doom?

I’m besieged with things that make me feel absolute doom lately: colossal things that shouldn’t upset me in the middle of the night. I think perhaps others are worried by these same things, but I wonder if they worry as much as I do. The question keeps coming back to me, Is it Just Me??? Or is life really, really, REALLY going under this time? Because I am beginning to think so, against all my life’s hopes and previously accepted sureties and it makes me question all faith. I am talking not about my own life anymore, I am talking about the world. I am talking about the physical phenomenon recently called global warming; I am talking about the redundancy of human endeavors to make change, good, fail, and go to war yet again. I am talking about life as we know it. I am talking about the fact that everything that once seemed as if it would always be there — like polar bears — a piece of a child’s reality — might one day be gone. With heat, or under water, or with a total global equatorial imbalance.

When was the last time I saw a fire fly? Perhaps 40 years ago. I am not even sure they still exist.

When was the last time I saw a milkweed pod in prairie grass? Again, over 40 years ago.

Stuff is disappearing. The opportunity to go out and find those things used to be disappearing, but now, even the stuff is disappearing. Even if you look.

The rate at which stuff is disappearing is really alarming me.
The heat waves are alarming me.
The constant building and paving over our planet, daily chewing up land that held forest, is alarming me. The lack of attention paid to an alternative to gasoline engines is bothering me. And I’m no rabid-for-change 20 year old. I’m not a joiner. I’m no card-carrier. And I’m telling you now, this is affecting us. This is alarming.

There was a day in particular when this worry first came to me, I can remember clearly. I mean, all my life my mother had been saying, repeatedly, “We just don’t seem to have winters like we used to when I was a girl…” and everyone had ignored it as foggy nostalgia. But I realized on one day in 1999 or so that she was right; and not only that, but that something even more out of control might be happening. This is my secret fear that might be ridiculous, but might be possible eventually. That we might attempt to control our weather.

On that day in 1998 or 9 or whenever it was (I really wish I could recall the exact date because it was strikingly strange), in a place in California where it NEVER OCCURS, a huge temperature swing in one day occurred. The temperature went from a typically cool standard evening up through an unseasonably hot morning of perhaps 80 degrees, and it just kept climbing. It rose to over 110 that day in places near us, and it rose so fast that everything seemed to stop still in the acridity. It got quiet. Things hid. We all hid.

This might not sound like an unusual temperature to someone from the valley in southern California or Death Valley in Arizona, but that was just it: This area, with its green vegetation and seacoast and such, NEVER had seen this kind of heat, and not in a rise of 30 degrees in a single day. There were no hot Santa Ana winds in that region. It was freakish. It was killing. It continued through the night, with no seawind coming to the rescue as usually happened at night. It stood there, baking us all. I remember standing in the yard that day and looking up at the setting sun and actually worrying that perhaps something was truly, truly wrong. It was suspicious, just by its sheer suddenness. It made me wonder, was the military experimenting with something that could alter the atmosphere from space or something? This is like, some kind of scary test, right? Where they demonstrate to some super-power head of state that, hey, look what we can do now! This is the latest in weaponry. Heat this place up beyond tolerable with our giant microwave laserforce! Huh? Oh, ok, we’ll turn it off now.

And just like that, the next day, the temperature dropped back to its normal range.
Nothing was said about it in the papers. A few people died. They mention that every time there is a heat wave, but it seemed very odd to me that no one mentioned that extremity combined with that severe brevity. I checked the papers. They were all silent on it. I fully expected someone to mention it publicly, but no one did. I have never forgotten how off it seemed. I still wonder about it.
Perhaps it was not the military, but just the first evidence of the warming that actually made at least me, personally, aware.

This is the first time in my life that I can stare into, really see the potential drastic death of my planet. And still I can’t accept it.

Other generations have seen global war that seemed as if God himself had died and left us all.
Is this something that we will pull through, like that? Can it ever be like the 1940s that evaporated into the 1950s and suddenly peace returned and prosperity once again blossomed and life went on? Or like the 1960s when everyone thought culture and civilization was turning tribal, but then it just mellowed back into normalcy? Is it going to be one of those things? Or …. not?

Will we never recover if all the cities that are built on our beautiful coasts are submerged? Think of it: Venice, New York, the entire south of France, Miami, Shanghai, New Orleans? Those places will all be gone? They will if things continue. And far far faster than we realize. Like, drastic changes taking place in the next 10 years. DRASTIC changes in the next 50. Like we could all be dinosaurs. Gone, into strata.

If we don’t find a way to change our entire management of our atmosphere. Together, not just as a nation, but as a planet. This entire system of the oil based empires of the planet must change.

It’s time to put the bombs and guns DOWN, people. We have no time for that.
There’s really No Time. I mean it.

And I realize with some relief, I cannot acquiesce to doom.

Not an option.