Hell in Melbourne Town

I love summer, I really do. But the monster that invaded Victoria and South Australia in the last week is not summer. It's some extra new season. I think we should call it Beezlebub. Winter, spring, summer, beezlebub, autumn.

I enjoy nice dry 35 degree heat. But bump it up 10 degrees, and repeat the experience for three days in a row, and everything goes haywire, including my head.

I caught the train to work yesterday. Well, a train. My usual train wasn't running, along with the other masses of trains that were cancelled this week. The heat was so intense - three days of 43, 43 and 45 (that's 109, 109 and 113 for you Fahrenheitians) that the steel rails were buckling. My train had to stop for a couple of minutes just before Spencer Street station, and the seat I was sitting happened to be in the sun. I was already battling a bit of heatstroke, I think. Sitting in the sun for those couple of minutes, I really began to wonder if I was going to fall over on my way to the carriage door. And then the 10 minute walk to my office. I have heard of people coming to Australia from the Northern Hemisphere and getting caught out at how quickly it is to be sunburnt here. That damn ozone layer hole. The beating sun is an intense beast for us here these days. Yesterday, I'm surprised the footpath wasn't beginning to melt, the street lamps, the trams, everything. I kept to any shadows I could find and battled nausea for the rest of the day.

The trip home was even better. A signal fault at Flinders Street meant that no trains were running at all by the time I went to catch mine. And so what is usually a 40 minute tops trip for me turned into a trip that took over two hours. No trains meant a bus trip, but after four consecutive buses that sped by me, full to capacity and not taking any more passengers, I started getting desperate (mainly because I was going to wet my pants). I was also desperate to get home because my dog was inside, and there was talk of rolling power outages to start occurring across the state to try to get the grid under control. I was getting really worried that I would get home to a house so hot that my dog would have expired. It was a real worry, even though by the time I had left work the cool change had rolled in (oh, bliss. Bliss bliss bliss).

So finally I got desperate, hailed a cab, and paid 20 bucks for the privilege of getting home. At the shopping centre the power was out, the only light coming from the Coles, brightly humming along on its generator power. The refrigerated shelves, however, were empty, making me feel somewhat like I was in a Russian supermarket in the 1980s. The checkout operator informed me that the power had been out for quite a few hours. Turned out that there was an explosion in one of the electricity thingymybobs-where-explosions-occur and that this was also another reason why entire suburbs were without power. Traffic lights were out, all sorts of mayhem. On the way home in the taxi, I witnessed a car accident that had one car crumpled in on the other side of the road while the other car sat where it had landed, through the plate glass windows of a shop.

Luckily I got home, opened the door to something resembling a furnace, but my dog was okay. His poor tongue. Lester's tongue is so long he's like the Gene Simmons of the dog world. If I ever have to have him operated on, while they are there I will ask them to cut off 5 centimetres and he'll still have one that is fully operational. Lester's tongue was lolling out of his head. The house was uninhabitable, so me and Lester went and sat outside, with a blanket and a candle, and I commiserated with my cousin's husband via text message. He is a linesman for an electricity company, and has gone back to work after holidays to rotating shifts of 12 hours on 12 hours off for the foreseeable future.

My power was off for about another two hours. Whenever there is a blackout, I am always reminded anew of how monumentally reliant we are as a people on things other than ourselves and the earth. As we sat outside in the growing dark, and I admired the stars, which seemed just a little bit brighter for the blackout, I thought about how it would be if all of a sudden electricity was no longer an option for us.

And it sort of scared me a bit, how reliant I am on it. Sometimes I wonder how we as a people must appear to the centuries that have gone on before us. Such a different way of living. It would be a terrifying thing if, say, you came from the 16th century and were given a chance to witness people living now. We must be curiously out of touch in so many ways, like people who have a leprosy sort of relationship to the earth, the thing that sustains us. How fragile our existence must appear to be to them.

Which is ironic when you consider that most of us probably look at people from centuries before and wonder how the hell they managed to get through a life without refrigerators, air conditioning, heating, computers, Internet, television, movies.

I suppose they must wonder at our dearth of storytelling skills, our strange little ways we go about things, our masses and masses of distractions, the humongous amount of bloody plastic everywhere. Sometimes I think the days of living individual, in the way that we have been allowed to in the past few generations, are coming to a close. And by God that scares me, but in another way it excites me. Because it's not meant to be like this. There are so many layers of artificiality concocted around our lives, between us and each other, us and sister earth.

When the power was off, all around me in my suburb, it was so much quieter. There was less of a hum in the air. Our efficiencies and trinkets and toys are indispensable to us, but they silently hum in so many ways just behind our conscious awareness. How much of an effect do they have, all of these things? All of these waves flying through the air, messing in ways we don't even understand with the delicate electrical balance of our bodies. I spoke on my mobile last night for two hours to my cuz. I could feel the effects afterwards. There is some evidence that some instances of certain types of disorders such as autism, ADHD and the like, can be linked to urbanisation gone mad, to the lack of basic nature in children's lives. A Chicago study found such conclusive evidence that more trees and greenery around its high-rise developments lowered crime rates that they plant trees as a matter of course now.

I want this crazy monster that has built up around us dismantled. But I can only pray that it happens slowly. This frog is comfortable in her boiling water, as bizarre and as crazy as that sounds.

Current temperature: a beautiful, balmy 21 degrees (69F). I appreciate it like you wouldn't believe :)