Uggggh — fuck it's hot

Gatorade has made a lot of money off me this week. Well, maybe $7.

I don’t drink Gatorade often, but it’s my choice of hydration when it gets this hot. And boy, it’s fucking hot.

The high along the coast today and tomorrow, in Huntington Beach, is forecast to be 90º. It hit 100º yesterday. When it’s that hot at the beach it’s even warmer inland. Right now at the LA Times newsroom, in downtown Los Angeles, it’s 96º. In Riverside it’s 101º. In Ontario it’s 102º. And in Palm Springs it’s a blistering 115º.

The plan this weekend was to visit my uncle in La Quinta. But we’re postponing my visit until it cools off. They’re expecting record heat of 117º. Sick.

The National Weather Service in San Diego has issued this statement:

... VERY HOT WEATHER WILL CONTINUE TODAY AND SATURDAY...

STRONG HIGH PRESSURE ALOFT OVER THE SOUTHWEST WILL CONTINUE TO BRING VERY HOT WEATHER TODAY AND SATURDAY. TEMPERATURES TODAY WILL EXCEED 115 DEGREES IN THE LOWER DESERTS AND 110 IN SOME INLAND VALLEYS. HIGHS WILL EXCEED 100 IN MOST OF THE LOWER ELEVATIONS NOT FAR AWAY FROM THE COAST AND IN THE UPPER DESERT. HIGHS NEAR THE COAST WILL BE IN THE UPPER 80S AND 90S.

TEMPERATURES ARE EXPECTED TO DECREASE ONLY BY A COUPLE DEGREES AWAY FROM THE COAST ON SATURDAY AS THE HIGH PRESSURE WEAKENS SLIGHTLY. IT WILL BE NOTICEABLY COOLER ON SUNDAY AND MONDAY AS HIGH PRESSURE WEAKENS FURTHER AND A SHALLOW MARINE LAYER RETURNS TO THE COASTAL AREAS.

This is the “late-August/early-September/Labor Day” heat wave that cooks SoCal. It’s happened every year I’ve lived here. My mom even recalls the weeks flanking Labor Day as being especially hot when she lived in LA. Combine a high pressure system with dry desert air, little shade, and millions of square miles of concrete and you get a frying pan. That analogy works best if the cooking equivalent doesn’t include any kind of oil or spread to prevent sticking and burning. The Southland literately burns and smokes, adding a nasty and suffocating mesquiteness to the air.

Taste the freshness!

It’s another reason to leave. Sure, it’s hot in the Midwest, but it’s the kind of steam cooker, life-sustainable heat I grew up with. This shit dehydrates you, leaves you for dead in an inhospitable wasteland, and bleaches your bones after the vultures have picked them clean.

That’s another thing I don’t like about SoCal: it’s not so much the heat as it is the…sun. (That humidity cliché doesn’t apply here because there is none.) The sun is oppressive. It’s omnipresent and inescapable because there is very little shade. No giant oaks or maples; no sycamores or weeping willows. Just the skinny, worthless palms and whispery eucalyptus trees that provide no protection. (I love the eucalyptus smell, though. But not as much as I love the smell of sycamores.) Coupled with the low moisture, the sun sucks me dry.

That’s when Gatorade helps. Water just doesn’t cut it.