When you’re hot, you’re hot

It’s getting to look a lot like summer. I don’t know how hot it was today. I am about to the point where I just as soon not know the temperature outside. It seems the more you know how hot it is the more you sweat.

Weather seems to be just one more thing to aggravate you as you grow older.  It’s as if I didn’t have enough things to piss me off. I’m becoming (am) a grumpy old man at 55. Just think of the potential!

I know, of course, I (we) only have myself (ourselves) to blame. When you stay inside an air conditioned world all the time, you are going to miss it when you step outside awhile. I doubt that it is no hotter than it was when I moved to this town the first (of three) times. This was 32 years ago come July. It was even hotter, for that matter, being in July. Ah the life after a four-year stint in the Navy and drawing that big, old unemployment check. I can’t remember what it was but I know it couldn’t have been a whole lot since I left the Navy as an E-5 making about $550 a month.

Now I could have just said: “No sir, I’m not going to take that government money. I’m going to get me a job.” I did that about a month and a half later as a firefighter. But it was nice to have it light for a little while. I didn’t bust my ass every day in the Navy although I did live a regimented life. Plus, I had lived, eaten, slept, showered, shaved and shined my shoes almost every day on a “tin can,” a.k.a. destroyer, for that past year. So I kind of enjoyed “the life.”

My typical day would start about 9 or 10 in the morning. It’s funny, I had no trouble sleeping late after having endured “Reveille, reveille, all hands heave out and trice up” over the 1MC loudspeaker each morning, even when I was off duty. I got so I could sleep through reveille or turn to (go to work) when I wasn’t working. Heck, I could sleep through a typhoon, a somewhat worrisome quality of which I still haven’t lost the touch, seeing as how I slept through the arrival of the Category 1 hurricane Humberto.

Each day I would get out of my little garage apartment. I would follow the state unemployment rules and go job hunting. Although it was plenty job hunting, to me, to apply at just one of the local refineries each day. I didn’t see any use in wearing myself out finding a job. What if someone called me and I would be plum tuckered out from job hunting?

Later in the day I would go see friends or my girlfriend, when that still happening, then it was off to The Keg, Fat Dawg’s, Lady Long Legs or one of the local places to quench a thirst or two.

Seeing the NBA Finals make me think of that time. I can’t remember who was playing, but I know that Queen’s “We Will Rock You/We Are the Champions” had come out earlier that year or the year before. It was one of the songs in the movie “FM,” which I saw that spring at a drive-in theater when I was was still on the ship in San Diego. But I seem to remember some kind of video montage at the end of the finals, Detroit or whoever it was who won, and it was set to “We Are the Champions.” We all thought that was pretty cool. Little did we know we’d still be hearing the same songs at ball games 30 years later.

Well, as usual I took off from a rant about the weather to my life as an unemployed ward of the state after serving my country. But I have to pose the rhetorical question: Which would be better, sitting around on a hot day thinking about how hot it was way back when or sitting around on a hot day thinking about all the good times and easy life way back when, which happened no matter the weather?

To each, his or her, own.  But I think the answer is pretty easy.