1687 words; 7m40s read

They’re almost here.

Those muggy nights, when your shirt sticks to you like a plastic trash bag, and slipping between the sheets is like sliding between two slices of unrefrigerated bologna. When even a cool shower and handfuls of talcum powder won't ease the sticky that's got on the back of your knees and into your elbow-pits.

Florida summer. When the mildew sprouts a two-dimensional rainforest across bookshelves, walls, and toilet-seats. Advance party for the plant kingdom waving all green and expectant just outside the window-screens where june bugs bounce like love against a hardened heart. When all that's outside wants inside. When powder-winged nightmares buzz in horrid yearning for the bulb of your floor-lamp, and geckoes prowl the walls, barking like tiny dogs.

You try to hold out long as you can, windows open, as the nights get warmer. Stickier. Closer. The bugs get to singing so loud you can't hear half the dialogue on Andor. Then late one night when a barred owl sits you bolt-upright in bed with a scream and a monkey laugh, the echo of a bad dream, you won't be able to stand it no more.

When the sweat soaks your brow like naked guilt and drenches your bedsheets like an embarrassment of passion, that's when you'll get the freon jones real bad.

That's when you'll know you goin' do it again. You goin' turn on. “Just for a little while,” you'll say. “Just long enough to dry things out a bit. Then I'll turn it back off.”

Who you foolin'?

You goin' tell me you ain't addicted? That you ain't no BTU junkie? First thing you goin' do after you flick that little switch on your wall is go stand by a vent and let the cool, dry air whisper over you like a satin sheet. You'll lift the damp hair off your neck, close your eyes, and roll your head left and right, real slow and sensuous-like, for maybe fifteen, twenty minutes, while the moisture steams off your body like mist off a sinkhole.

You tell yourself you'll turn it back off in the morning before you go to work. And maybe you do, but that's just ‘cause you know you'll spend all day inside some concrete cave where AC units the size of lunch trucks soak up the heat and moisture and wring it outside. You know you'll be buzzing all day long in an atmosphere like a virtual Colorado. Ain't no withdrawal symptoms allowed in those cool opium dens, where people wear jackets and keep sweaters draped over the backs of their chairs. Where the hypodermo-thermostats are locked up like the cabinets in a hospital pharmacy, to prevent costly overdoses self-administered by coolant freaks. You'll be in that cool dry all day long.

But come the afternoon, when the sun is so bright and hot it shines right through you, leaving no shadow on the asphalt fudge under your feet, you'll come home and your closed-up house with no AC will feel like the inside of a pizza oven. Garbage-can special.

“I'll just turn on until the sun goes down and things cool off a bit,” you say, peeling off your underwear like a soaked bandage.

Uh-huh. I heard that.

Sun don't set until near 9:00 anyway during the summer. And by then you figure it won't cost that much just to run it through the night. Just to get you through the night. Just this one night.

Next thing you know, you’re cool inside on a Saturday afternoon, with the blinds shut tight, sprawled on the sofa with slack jaw and sleepy eyes, binge-watching Stranger Things on Netflix and eating Doritos right out of the bag.

You tell me what that sounds like.

I know you can't face up to your addiction. You don't want to hear about it. You say you don't really need it. Just makes you feel good. Helps you relax. And besides, you mumble from the sofa, pulling a coverlet over your feet, it ain't hurting nobody.

But I can see in your eyes you know better. You know what kind of people deal your drug of choice. You know who the players are. Utility-company executives. Coal merchants. Shady characters of all sorts.

But you pretend not to see these things. You turn down the thermostat a notch, and the mercury switch sparks like a Bic lighter over Martha and Snoop’s bong. You get a head-rush just watching the houselights dim when that compressor kicks in. The freon blood moves through copper veins and boils in coils, vampire-sucking the heat from your air, and where does it go? Where does it go? Outside is all, where a swamp forms from the drip, drip of wrung-out water.

You'd rather not know. You'd rather not think about what matter was converted to energy to power that 2-ton unit that squats in the backyard like a brooding robot, shifting your electric meter from 33-1/3 to 78 rpm at regular intervals. The windows are shut. The plants and june bugs can't get inside, where you're zoning out in an artificial mountain evening.

It's gotten so bad you even use it while you're driving. Turning on before the engine even warms up, man. Mad Max AC. Fan on high. Then your tolerance builds up and you have to tint the windows—sunglasses you can't even take off at night.

If you think I'm criticizing, think again. I know how it is to have the freon jones. I'm there. Man, I'm thinking 'bout turning on right now. About getting out of that heat that makes me feel like I've got webbed fingers. About sitting on upholstery that don’t feel and smell like some cat with a bizarre UTI peed on it. About sheets as dry and smooth as a cotton-lined envelope.

I know it feels so good to turn on. I been turning on since I was about five, man. I was exposed to freon in my own home, by my own parents. I know. It's hard. I know. We used to be clean, man, and then one day they put window units in the dining room and in their bedroom. Uh huh. That's right. The dining room and bedroom. Bodily pleasures.

We went to central air before I was ten years old, man.

By then I was so hooked I thought it was my right to be refrigerated. I'd sneak into the hallway late at night and tap-tap downward on the temperature control; tap-tap; tap-tap; until the mercury flashed and I could hear that dry exhalation begin to stir the drapes. And then one more tap for good measure.

A power outage in July would set my teeth on edge, my skin crawling. I'd begin to see sweaty pink elephants. I'd like to die before the juice kicked back in and that cool rush sprang from the vents like gaseous ambrosia.

One summer I spent time in an old beach house with a wraparound screen porch and one inner bedroom that had AC. A holy of holies. At night those of us exiled to the muggy porch with the mosquitos whining in our ears would nurse revenge fantasies about those inside, while the AC unit droned through our fitful dreams, making the night seem a few degrees hotter. A few gallons muggier.

Oh, man, it's so much worse when somebody's holding and you ain't. You know what I mean. Just makes that freon jones grip you tighter and tighter. You get to where you'd sell your body for a night in an air-conditioned bed.

Ain't no other high like AC. Ain't no other drug gets supplied to your home by IV hoses strung from one pole to the next. Ain't no other drug's got a statue and museum dedicated to its inventor. I seen it, man. Apalachicola.

I wish I could kick it. I tried goin' cold turkey, but that only works in the wintertime. I tried ignoring it, but I can't. Even the outdoor queues at Disney World got AC vents blowing cool air on the sweaty crowds to keep 'em docile. That's the ultimate, man. Blowing AC right out into the world, while somewhere else a giant compressor unit is evening things up by radiating heat like a barbecue grill. Downers and uppers at the same time, man. AC don't get rid of the heat. It just moves it someplace else, with a portage fee in kilowatt-hours.

If it weren't for AC no one would make pizza in the summertime. If it weren't for AC no babies would be born in the spring—that's a math problem, y'all. If it weren't for AC nobody would use hot water in the shower before October. If it weren't for AC half the heat-seeking reptiles that slither into Florida would be gone by April, and there wouldn't be no endless ticky-tacky stucco tracts where buggy cypress bayheads and stifling piney woods used to stand.

Every time I turn on I know I'm participating in the assault on the environment. Maybe not throwing the punches, man, but helpin' to hold it down, you know? Pinning its arms back. Maybe kicking it in the ribs once before I walk away.

Just 'cause it makes me feel good.

Yes, I got the freon jones, man. I'm a BTU baby. I need that refrigerant bad. Keeps them palmetto bugs from buzzing round in my head. Soothes my body like a dry salve.

I'm hooked. Stoned cold. Tonight I'm goin' go home and set the thermostat on fifty-nine, man. Get out the electric blanket. When the bill comes I'll just skimp on groceries. Be late with the child support. Pawn some jewelry. Sell some plasma.

Anything to make my feet quit sweating. Anything to keep from sticking to the kitchen counter. Anything to get that squirrelly feeling out of my butt-skin.

Long as I can't hear them katydids I'll be fine.

The Skyway was actually two identical, two-lane bridges right next to each other, and the northbound span was unscathed. I was in grad school at USF at the time, and in a bit of morbid tourism a few of us took a break from pondering Sophists and Social Constructivism and drove down in the VW bus for a transit and a look-see.

As we crossed the good span, the bus rocked in the wind whistling through the open metal-lattice roadbed far above the green water. Alongside us was the place of horror, a great vacant space bracketed by twisted girders on the sister span less than a hundred feet away.

This I saw and knew only from the corner of my eye as I battled the wheel and felt the breadth of the missing span in the pit of my stomach, a Peterbilt on my ass the whole white-knuckled way.

The bridge was like people I'd known, their lives for a time parallel to mine, maybe even indistinguishable from mine if viewed from enough distance—then something happens: a misguided freighter, a failure of will, a character flaw—whatever—and suddenly there's this great yawning space where that other life was. Maybe some twisted remnants, but you can only glance over quickly because all your attention's on your own road with that Truck behind you.

This is an excerpt from my prize-winning essay Maintenance, first published in the 1990s. The Skyway incident happened on May 9, 1980.

Hearing stories from Dog Island post-Hurricane Hermine put me in mind of another aftermath, over ten years ago, when a storm surge from Hurricane Dennis inundated much of the island and left debris piles for months.

One standard-issue consequence of storm erosion is the emergence of septic tanks — vaguely submarine-like fiberglass vessels with what we'll call an ominous air about them. The one in the photo below reminded me of classic Civil War monitors, or even Japanese WWII mini-subs:

I captioned it “Hobie pontoon and mini-sub” and posted it to Flickr along with a set of post-storm photos. Here's another evocative poop-tank shot:

My late, greatly lamented illustrator friend Bruce Hall — always ready with Photoshop and a kindred twisted wit — saw it and used another of my shots from Lake Seminole to create this chilling historical re-enactment:

As I described it there:

Government secrecy has — until the release of this photo — concealed the scope of the “Battle of Thronateeska Landing”, which demonstrated the alarming extent of freshwater intrusion by hostile forces during WWII. Photo credit: Bruce Hall.

You may have seen the military memoir:

Of course, thoughts of small, unusual submersibles naturally led Bruce to the next discovery, which confirms the rumors that Only A Northern Song was about bathroom tissue:

And who can forget this classic adaptation of a less well-known Asimov sequel?

Nothing like the heady sophistication of toilet humor to get the creative juices flowing, I say.

I miss ya, Barce. Definitely a duller place here without you.

I started developing pain in my right heel a little over a month ago. Feels a little like plantar fasciitis, which I had a few years back. Some mornings the first few steps would be really painful until my foot sort of loosened up. Although the symptoms would sometimes abate, they kept coming back, so I made an appointment with a local orthopedic surgeon to have a look.

They started with a couple of xrays, which showed no breaks or tears: https://flic.kr/p/2rK3cee.

The doc pretty quickly diagnosed it as Achilles' tendonitis and said that it might have required surgery if left untreated!

The upshot: I'm wearing a “boot” for the next couple of weeks to immobilize my ankle. It's a heavy, Velcro-loaded piece of footwear with super-high arch support and a snug inflatable pocket for my heel. The med tech who fitted it said it would feel like wearing a high-heeled shoe.

So now I know how that feels. My drag career may not be happening.

I can get around in it fine but feel a bit like Herman Munster. Walking around on our hardwood floors makes an ominous, shuffle-clump, approaching-horror sound. Driving with it on is basically impossible, but I can remove the boot whenever sitting or lying down, so I'm not trapped in the house. I've already confirmed that I can make it to the pub and play pool.

So at the moment it's basically an inconvenience. I still get a little pain from the heel now and then, but I can already tell after a couple of days that I'm not making it worse. We'll see how it goes....

Update May 2026: greatly improved, mainly due to stretches prescribed by the physical therapist.