Concrete Summer

Concrete the foe.

I stopped after a minute of my walk home. Went into the bookstore because I couldn’t, just couldn’t, bear it any longer. The heat was like creepy guy rubbing my arm.

I blame the concrete. Walking on concrete in 105 degree weather is like pouring gasoline over a fire to put it out. Concrete makes the heat no longer heat. Instead it makes a web of slime, a wall of bad breath, something your body must walk through not in.  And the heat, the texture, the weight, its not air, its something else. Like walking into a blow dryer, or drinking a glass of water somebody used as an ash tray. You just know its not okay, its not normal. Good things are not happening as you inhale and walk through this substance.

You don’t really notice concrete until it’s this hot. It’s like not noticing car pollution until you’re standing in a city stuck in a valley and the sky is black and smoky. Then you start to hate concrete like you hate cars. I mustered my courage and walked out of the bookstore onto the sidewalk. I looked at the concrete as I walked, wondering how, scientifically, it was adding to the equation of wrongness.  And then I thought why do we have this concrete. And my gaze fell upon the cars parallel parked on the street. We have the concrete for the cars. And we have the cars for the people. So we have the concrete for the people. No. The concrete is not for people.

Then I start to conjure up solutions, urban plans, materials that are more natural, to comprise sidewalks, like the stuff they put in playgrounds and around tree roots, flexible, soft, and more able to ingest and cool the heat, like the path in a forest, made of old trees and grass and mud. Mud. Mud is cool. Mud.

And the sun. You could make a videogame out of us pedestrians, trying to dodge the sun like it was a space ship with a missile. The sun becomes a strange radioactive burning laser that makes concrete meaner. And suddenly the lack of trees all around is apparent, like we are in the last phase of hunger games with nowhere to hide.