The enduring joy of oppressive heat

Apocalypse now, s'il vous plaît.

Marrakech, Morocco is not an oppressively hot place, with mid-day early June temperatures scraping 100° F (37° C), but it is hot enough to begin visually separating those who will survive the coming apocalypse and those who will not. Red-cheeked Germans dabbing foreheads with handkerchiefs whilst swaying, dangerously, between souq stalls, usually stout Poles transformed into lilting linen-clad wastrels, the odd American announcing, “I’m cooking” at high volume, not meaning it in the Gen-Z slang sense but literally.

I have always adored the too hot, maybe as a product of growing up in Coos Bay, Oregon and never seeing the sun. Palm Springs was an early joy as a young boy, visiting grandma, getting into the car doing whatever we were doing and feeling like I had just entered an oven. I loved that feeling and was sad when the ignition was started and the air conditioning began to pump. My grandpa would tell me someday he’d take my to Blythe, California’s hottest town, and we’d eat peanut butter sandwiches under a cactus. I had an inkling that he was joking but wished he wasn’t.

When I got older, I experienced furnace joys far beyond, though. Deep Yemen without a splash of climate control to be found, the middle of the Red Sea where sky and water were both near boiling, Djibouti, maybe hottest of all, with nighttime temperatures hotter than continental Europe’s hottest-ever day.

I don’t discriminate between my heats. I love dry and wet equally, Marrakech’s a very pleasant 80/20 dry/wet ratio. Wandering through small alleyways, a sort of fever emanating from ground, from wall, from sky, pure bliss and I do not care if the young Australian couple fanning themselves while ordering their coffees with extra ice die on the spot.

Neither they, nor their children, if they had any, would have survived the apocalypse anyhow.