The Air Condition

On a trip to Westminster, Md., for a family event, so the sunsets – tonight’s very interesting one from here and tomorrow’s probably from somewhere between Mt. Airy, Md., and Culpeper, Va. – won’t be posted until Monday. Art stuff, bulky and messy as it is, is still not too challenging to carry around; it’s the photo setup that’s the deal-breaker.

Anyway – meanwhile – as temperatures both here and at home have been stuck around 100 to 103 for several hours now, I’ve been thinking about air conditioning.

The New York Times today has a short item about living without air conditioning, and some of the effects of AC culture, that I found interesting, especially since I spend most of my time in a non–air conditioned rented farmhouse. But I’m now in a fully chilled room in a nice motel. I arrived via a four-hour drive that was easily the hottest I’ve ever experienced, and that includes the mid-July Mojave and Anza-Borrego deserts. (The car has “problem AC,” so we didn’t use it.) Brutal. The room, though basic, was a luxurious relief. I cooled off. I took a nap. Then ... I took a short walk to a store. Brutal again. The cold and the hot, back and forth, are each equally disorienting.

Shuttling between the two states seems to create something like a zone of non-being, in which it can be difficult to know or feel just where you are, how you are, perhaps even who you are. So what I’m thinking about today is not so much air conditioning itself. It’s the strange discontinuity between air conditioned and non–air conditioned life. Perhaps the discontinuity is striking only when it’s this hot. But then, as I was walking across parking lots to the store, I realized: It could be hotter.

Well, yeah. It could be even hotter.