Life As Performance Art 94

It is dawning to be a beautiful day today. And today, the Cuban dark roast coffee I am sipping on is almost decadent, it is so rich and potent. This morning is cloudy, cool. It could rain. And it is early July. In the elevator yesterday, a tenant mentioned that he doesn't like this kind of weather and longs for hot sunny days again. I told him to not wish too hard because the hot sunny days will return soon and with a vengeance. Well, we have already had plenty of hot and sunny days, through an uncharacteristically warm and dry May and June. We have already had lots of summer. It feels, to me, like we have truly already had our summer. And according to the long-range forecasts, the hot weather is likely to return anytime soon. So, why not enjoy the break? Yesterday, it drizzled a bit off and on. I walked around in shirtsleeves, no umbrella, cool but comfortable and refreshed. One lady of age paused to mention to me that not needing anything other than the shirt I'm wearing must make me hot-blooded. I suppose. I just find this kind of weather refreshing. I find it kind of ironic that Bogotá has one of the chilliest climates in Colombia, and Colombians complain bitterly about how cold it is, as well as how cold are many of the people who live there, but I love it. It is for me an ideal climate I could easily live in all year round. Even when it's sunny, the temperatures are seldom higher than twenty. Often it rains. It really rains. With thunder and lightning and such special effects as will leave you slack-jawed with awe, shock and wonder. I love thunder and lightning, and regret that here we seldom have these kinds of storms. Right now, the sky is grey, the air cool, and everything else is so green, so deliciously and exuberantly green. I just heard on the radio. It is fourteen degrees. There will likely be a little sunshine today, maybe this afternoon. Rain is also forecast for later this week, perhaps for two days. I just had a peek at the fourteen day forecast. It will be sunny with cloudy periods and a little bit of rain till the twenty-first, or for the next two weeks. It shouldn't get warmer than 22. For me, this couldn't be more perfect. I suppose the conditions are still less than ideal for the beach lizards. Those diehard pale-skinned melanoma hazards who insist on lying in the sun like el lomo a la parrilla or beef on a barbecue. I can't understand this toxic obsession with suntanning. Except that white folk, like me, don't really like our skin colour that much. We look pale, unhealthy, almost leprous. Northern caucasian people, it seems, are a human genetic anomaly, we are near-albinos, almost against nature with our incredibly pale skin. I believe that the normal human skin colour is brown, and that there is something in our collective unconscious that longs to have that colour, and so we still like to cook ourselves to death under the blistering July sun. By the same token, I often wonder if the racism that some of us are afflicted with has its origins in envy. That some of us, feeling inferior to brown and darker skinned people because of our own lack of pigment, try to make ourselves superior, and maybe that's where some of the racism comes from. Well, I know for a fact that I would rather be brown. But I am not going to cook myself in the summer sun and end up visiting the oncologist. I accept as a stigma of nature my pale skin. And I love wandering outside in the cool, cloudy and drizzly weather of Vancouver in early July and in Bogotá, Colombia, any time of the year. But still, there is something so dazzling and transfigured about the world when the sun is shining and the way its heat caresses and smacks us like a playful sadistic lover, and even now when it is cool, moist and refreshing, I still at times long for the dazzling hot days that intoxicate the senses and smite us with cancerous tumours. Bring out the sunscreen. Lots of it. And enjoy the hot days, enjoy the cool days, the sun and the shadow, because they are all equally beautiful and they too are part of this wonder of our existence here on this glorious earth.