Postcard from the Ninth Circle...

After a few weeks on the new homestead, I can't even believe I had honestly forgotten just how Goddamn hot the Deep South can be.

Beginning the slow and steady slog through the muck that is an Atlanta summer, my family Stone and I have discovered a newfound appreciation...wait, nix that...an honest to goodness adoration of all things air conditioned.

For those of you not fortunate enough to have ever experienced a Georgia July, imagine if you will, wrapping yourself in tin foil for a nice long sitdown under the French fry lights at Hell's local McDonald's...and you'd be in the general vicinity of this kind of heat.

I know, I know. "It's summer everywhere and it's hot all over," you're muttering to yourself. True, I'll give you the fact that it may be a bit stifling where you're reading this from right now. But I'm telling you, I'm imploring you to be thankful that wherever you are...you're not here in Hotlanta.

Growing up here, I knew heat. I laughed at the New Yorkers and the New Englanders that withered under the Southern sky because I understood what it really meant to be hot. I was a native, and was born and bred on this baked red Georgia clay. Too many times I've stepped out of the shower and felt clean only for that briefest of moments before the sweat bubbles back up and breaks through the skin, leaving me reaching for the Speed Stick again and again.

That humidity, that blasted moisture that hangs in the air so thick you can cut it with your daddy's pocketknife, that muck that turns the whole confounded region into one big sauna just creeps up on you and sticks parts of you to other parts when you know damn well those parts should not be stuck together...that my friends is heat.

After a few years out in breathtakingly beautiful Colorado, and then a few more in heartbreakingly hopeful Ukraine...I had grown accustomed to not only lower humidity but shorter summers and delightfully long cold winters. I had relegated just how sticky this South of mine can be to the corners of my childhood memories along with lightning bugs and lemonade stands.

Inexplicably in this regard, and for reasons I still can't quite comprehend...it feels good to be home.

pleased to meet you...hope you guessed my name.