Temperamental Temperatures :: Icarus' Fever

I won't bore you with the details, but I've been shissing all day. I wonder if that word already exists. I refuse to check Urban Dictionary. Were I to find the word already in our cultural lexicon, I would feel upset and old. Speaking of feeling old, I re-watched Terminator 2 today. I remember seeing it as a child; a blackboard full of faded memories written in ghost colored chalk. There was an eponymous video game, too. I remember playing it, maybe even using Game Genie to cheat. Genies are cheaters by nature. They cheat you into thinking you're cheating reality, but you're only cheating yourself. Unless you're Aladdin, and then you get the girl and the kingdom.

Earlier I watched most of a podcast about civilization and climate change, glaciation and melting. It was three hours long. My attention waxed and waned, but what I took away from the talk was a reminder - we are totally at the mercy of nature. As technologically advanced as we believe ourselves to be, we are only ever a few degrees away from drowning or freezing. It's kind of beautiful actually, the delicate balance. In recent times we've been blessed by the most stable temperatures the earth has ever seen. The fluctuations we've experienced have been minor, and they lack the temperamental, stone-cold fire-and-brimstone severity seen in other periods.

The discussion made me think of how subtle temperature changes, even on a micro level, can drastically affect organisms. A fever for instance, an increase in temperature of only a few degrees, can kill a person. A batch of beer brewed and left at room temperature in the summer thrives, while in the winter it dies. Improperly prepared foods, cooked at too low a temperature or for too short a time, can harbor life threatening bacteria such as E. coli or salmonella. Warmth, a thing so essential to life, when present in abundance, claims the very gift it bestows.

Fortune's wings are febrile, waxen and thin.

We should all be thankful to the earth for not cooking us, or turning us into cavemen trapped inside thawing hunks of ice. We live in a privileged position, one which allows us time for thought, leisure, safety and security, happiness, love. Our current era is a sort of prolonged Thanksgiving, a period of bounty, yet we waste it feeling dissatisfied, unfulfilled, miserable and ungrateful. Maybe this inner uneasiness is heralded by some persistent survivor's guilt, or the tacit acknowledgement of nature's fickle favoritism. She'll wear us like a new hat until we're no longer fashionable, and once the winter comes, she'll stuff us in a closet next to a mammoth scarf and a panda pelt. Extinction is so passé.