Let's keep some perspective on the weather

Marty didn't even give them an almanac or anything. Photo by Tim. — Marty didn’t even give them an almanac or anything. Photo by Tim.

I took this picture on July 27, in front of Alchemy in Park Slope, in the dead of the heat wave (almost exactly six months ago). It was a perfect steamy summer saturday: I had camped out at Uncle Barry’s under the blissfully refreshing air conditioning, the Mets afternoon game on TV, sidling up to the bar for a drink while reading the just-released post-humous David Rakoff book, Love, Dishonor, Marry, Die, Cherish, Perish, which was wonderful and sweet and just sad enough. The summer was swinging hard for the fences with high temps, and the Mets were puttering along in another loss to the Washington Nationals, Dillon Gee trying his best on the mound but unable to break the fever of a lost season. With a cold beer in hand, the summer was cresting in all its sweaty, gritty glory, that golden page of the calendar when all your neighbors suddenly turn into an art show hawking beautiful tattoos that burst alive from under tank tops and jorts, speeding by on bicycles. It’s that time of year we flock to bars to abuse their air conditioning, not fireplaces. The sign is, as one twitter follower said, predicting the obvious, so why the hyperbolic fretting now?

Don’t make me dig through twitter to pull up all your tweets bitching about how oppressive the heat wave was last summer, and don’t make me save your tweets today about how paralyzing the cold is so I can pull them up in the summer. Might I remind you that we’re past the winter solstice, the very first protoplasmic sign of life the coming summer, when every passing day adds one more minute of sunlight.

Even the most brutal polar vortex can’t last forever, and the next heat wave (or, at least, the next July 27) is exactly 200 days away.

Follow Tim for a daily countdown to summer: @timdonnelly.