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My Profile
Retro-retrospection - 2008-10-06
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1:01 p.m. - 2003-06-16
This is dedicated to my hero, Willis Haviland Carrier. Who is this guy and why is he my hero? Willis Haviland Carrier invented the air conditioner. Actually, I have a love/hate relationship with air conditioning. I love it because air conditioning makes my life tolerable. At times even comfortable. Another one of the joyous gifts from the Neuron Gods is that MS kills the body’s inner thermostat and radiator. We MSers lose our ability to regulate our body temperature. Once we get overly warm, we have no internal way of cooling off. We sweat and pant as most mammals do to get rid of excess heat, but it doesn’t work for us. Our inner temp just keeps rising and rising until we pass out or manage to drag ourselves into a meat locker. Our environment has to change to combat the heat. A trip to Shoprite in August and I MUST take myself directly to the freezer section to cool down from the trip across the sizzling parking lot. If I don’t cool off immediately it’s likely I’ll pass out in the cereal aisle. An air conditioner is a necessity, not a luxury for most MSers, and for me most of all. Overheating is the most common reason I flare, winter or summer. A single degree rise in my body temperature and I start to shake. Not like chill shivers, more like watery knees and palsied hands. More than a one degree rise and I’m gone. My vision goes swimmy, the room starts to whirl, and BOOM! down I go. People who don’t know me intimately think it’s a fat chick thing when they see me swaying and gasping during a hot spell. It’s not a fat thing, it’s an MS thing, and one that’s getting worse the older I get. If I had my druthers I’d keep the house set at 62 degrees all year around. 62* seems to be my ideal functioning temperature. That I live with 3 other people who prefer NOT to wear 5 layers of clothing at all times and that no one’s utility bill should be more than they pay in income taxes, I’ve learned to manage up to 75* or so, but I’m cranky about it. The portable unit in my bedroom is in the window year round. It may sound absurd, but I’ve been known to run it on Christmas Day and make dashes between my overly warm kitchen and my cool bedroom while I prepare the dinner. I’ve tried just going outside and sitting in a snow bank, but the result is a wet tushie and strange looks from our guests. Mike is installing central air conditioning at the Hobbit House and I’m delighted. This summer I can visit other rooms in my house instead of huddling in my bedroom, curled around the window unit in all my nekkid glory praying for October. Yes, I’m glad about having central air, but I also hold air conditioning, especially car a/c and central air conditioning partially responsible for the wretched state of society right now. Get the net. LA’s finally flipped. AIR CONDITIONING is a social ill? Well, yeah. Used to be during hot weather folks sat on their porches to find some relief. They sat outside in rockers fanning themselves. So did the neighbors and their neighbors and so on and so on. Everybody was outside, calling greetings or sauntering over for a chat and drink of something cold. You knew who everyone was and what they were up to. The heat made it near impossible to rush around, so time was given to just sittin’ a spell and visiting. Everybody’s windows were open too. You knew what the Smith’s were having for dinner as the smell wafted over to your place. You heard the talk and the laughter and even the ballgame. Mr. Hanson was a bit deaf and turned it up loud. Privacy was more a matter of courtesy, than a physical thing and if you had good neighbors they knew when to keep out of it and when to intervene when that midnight argument got a bit too rowdy. Now we live in hermetically sealed boxes. Each house in a neighborhood an island of temperature controlled isolation. No porch visiting. No drifts of talk and music through our open windows. We lived locked down tight, keeping the cool air in...and the neighbors OUT. Who lives next door? Most of the time we don’t even know. A name on a mail box. A recognized car in the driveway. Occasionally some little kids outside playing in THEIR yard, neatly separated from yours by chain link. A “neighbor” now is someone you nod to as you race from your air conditioned car into your air conditioned house. And if you have a garage and a garage door opener, you might never catch a glimpse of the people next door at all. Driving with the windows down used to be another opportunity to socializing. A quick hello at the corner. Greetings to those pedestrians you passed. Even traffic jams were fun sometimes. We’d go to the shore and inevitably get stuck in a jam on the way home. We’d catcall from vehicle to vehicle and often pass around drinks from coolers and flirt with that carload of college guys in the next lane. Now? What do we have now? Isolation. Glassed in isolation and tinted windows. Shutting out the occupants of the other cars, turning them from potential friends and dates into hostile strangers. Unknown and unknowable enemies who are between you and where you want to go. Our vehicles have become rolling fortresses, even battle wagons as we charge around in our sealed up solitary space, our needs superceding any others’ who are on the road with us. What do we care about them? We don’t know who they are, nor do we care. It’s OUR road. OUR right of way. OUR journey and woe to anyone who gets in OUR way. Willis Haviland Carrier is still my hero. Without his nifty invention I’d be making plans to move to the North Pole. It’s not Carrier’s fault air conditioning has contributed to the nasty self-involved society we live in now. Physical isolation is just a small part of the problem. We’ve done this to ourselves. We’ve chosen to withdraw. We’ve chosen to put our individual selves before all else. All for one and one for all? Ha! It’s Me for Me and to hell with all of you. It’s a cold world and I’m not just talking about the a/c. ~LA
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