It’s so hot a cactus exploded in my front yard. Now it looks like an empty alien egg sac, rotting in the heat, giving off an awful stench as whatever creature--or brood--it spawned wanders the neighborhood in search of sustenance.
Thank Ehecatl for air-conditioning!
He’s the material aspect of Quetzalcoatl, the god of wind, air. Moving air. The gadgetry that cools and moves the air are his children. Some offerings or sacrifices, or at least some recognition, are in order.
Right now in Phoenix, the air is horrible. Not just the usual pollution, but lots of dust. The haboobs, storms so big that they fill the sky leave everything coated in dust. Ultra fine, in all the colors of dirt. Just try breathing it.
August in Arizona. We try to avoid going outdoors. We scurry from one air-conditioned environment to another, be they buildings or vehicles. It might as well be a Mars colony.
Knocks me into the world of my Paco Cohen, Mariachi of Mars novel.
What is a spacesuit, but a portable, one person air-conditioning unit? Maybe next year Amazon will be delivering them.
And I’ll be riding the bus for a while, due to the usual mechanical breakdowns. Air-conditioned environments on wheels. Sometimes it actually works.
The library where I work is in a postmodern ghost town next to I-17. A few businesses struggle to stay alive amid the abandoned buildings around the desert of grey rubble left where the Metrocenter mall was torn down, and there’s no sign of any work being done on the walkable village that a faceless corporate entity is supposed to be building. Occasional personages that look like extras from a Mad Max movie, some with bent spines, hobbling with walkers, wander the new urban wasteland.
This is what the Wild West has become in 2026–surreal with overtones of the post-apocalyptic. I could be scouting locations for a science fiction movie, but not the Surrealistic Burrito Western of My Dreams. This would be a different movie, darker, but not in the visual sense. It's the mood. The visions I have are flooded with light–the deadly light of this dangerous summer, heavy on the invisible light that makes scorpions glow in the dark.
Not noir, but ultraviolet. I just checked—it’s 112 degrees.
Maybe it broke a record, I don’t care. We’re doing it so often than it's no big deal.
When I scan headlines on Google News I get a horror fix and turn away. It’s like a random page torn from a William Burroughs novel, without the wit and gruesome fun. Are we having the biggest, stupidest war of all time yet?
Once back inside a properly air-conditioned environment I feel like making an offering to Ehecatl. In the old days, he accepted things like copal incense, obsidian, bird bones, and maguey thorns, conch shells, and monkey or duckbill effigies. None of those are handy. He also accepted blood offerings, but that’s too messy and would violate blood-born pathogen regulations. And just mentioning human sacrifice could have repercussions.
Maybe I should just give my thanks.
Also thank him for retrieving those bones from the Lord of the Dead, grinding them and breathing life into them, creating the current human race.
As a certain Nobel-prize winning rock star once said, “The answer my friend, is blowin’ in the wind.”
