There was a time many years ago when I spent about a week in a small oasis town in Egypt's west desert. It was probably spring and way too hot to be there that time of year, but I recall the locals had a smart way of going about it: they had switched their schedules: sleeping during the day, rendering the place very much a ghost town during those hours, only to emerge in the evening, and that's when the place became bustling with all manner of activity.

As a morning person, this was at odds with my typical circadian rhythms but very much made sense given the circumstances.

It strikes me as very odd that places like Houston don't enact similar schedule changes given the unbearable summer heat. But then again, nothing in Houston is the result of a culture that slow-cooked and simmered over hundreds or thousands of years. It is colonized in every sense of the word; outside ways of being, building, planting, and existing forced upon the landscape. This is one of Western civilization's greatest evils, an insistence on subjugating the natural world rather than working with it, even worse that it is done in a one-size fits all approach. We should know by now that such subjugation never truly works, and almost always tends to backfire (the over arching theme of TSG I s'pose). It even makes capitalist sense: Imagine the exorbitant energy bills that would be drastically cut in all those air-conditioned glass-case office buildings that wouldn't have the beating rays of that high-noon sun to contend with.


Wardrobe change enacted: sandals, cotton tank tops, linen pants and shorts, the occasional loose-fit shirt, and big hats. I've never been much of a hat person (or sandals person for that matter), but you do what you gotta do to cope with a scorched Earth.

None of the measures mentioned above have been enough. I may have to also enact a drastic haircut.

#journal