Harmony

It’s not Spring allergies, it’s the Summer ones. Those ones slay me. All the blooms and pollen in April-May-June, I’m fine. It’s when the heat and especially the humidity kick into torture mode in July-August that I want to curl up into an air-conditioned corner and go comatose. I don’t know; mold, grasses, I don’t know. The over-the-counter allergy meds I’ve used, sure, they work in so far as they alleviate symptoms and make me feel better. They also alleviate any motivation I might have once entertained to function like a human being. I’ll drop one 24-hour pill only when absolutely necessary and count on two days gone from anything resembling active human behavior, productivity or, as I’ve been accused, civility.

A buddy this week floated a scientific article (DO follow the link - it's a pretty good article​) which suggests the reason Midwest Summers are so repressive is because the eighteen-quazillion acres of corn maturing across a dozen-plus states at this moment produce something called “corn sweat”. A guy with the U.S. Department of Agriculture says plants shed water, sucked up through their roots, when it gets too hot, that “sweat” then evaporating into the already humid bubble of air surrounding us, making for an even more humid-ass bubble of air.

I gotta believe, having been filtered through the corn stalk, that water ain’t just water anymore, and what evaporates into the air ain’t just nitrogen and oxygen. It’s an allergen, spores, and mold infested soup genetically designed by a vengeful God to be sucked into my brain where it metamorphizes into tiny bugs that begin digesting my corpuscles from the inside out. (NOTE: This is just me being me, theoretically logically projecting a hypothesis into an arena I know nothing about).

The article suggests a field of corn will raise the dew point by 5 degrees. An acre of corn will sweat 4,000 gallons of Me-destroying soup for evaporation every day, multiplied by the eighteen-quazillion acres in cultivation as we speak.

Each year, about this time, I reach a period in which I look upon the chores throughout the house, the projects waiting on my desk, and shrug and go watch TV instead. These are my White-Trash Days.