It’s not the heat, it’s the stupidity, Mary Karr jokes in The Liar’s Club. This cleverly updates the commonplace trope uttered by myself, uttered by everyone, here in this godforsaken hellscape of the modern South. It’s the heat and the humidity and the stupidity. I’m writing this on October 1, where the high temperature in Jackson is forecast to be 97 degrees. The humidity has slackened somewhat over the past couple of days so that it it’s not as face-punchingly hot as it has been, but it’s still terrible: no rain, no wind, a Lynchian stillness, a kind of weather paralysis that lasts way past sunset. Even the bugs are too stoned by the heat to make much racket. The only sound is the intermittent industrial donkey kick of compressors. It feels like a kind of plague — a heat that passeth all understanding.

The internet is for complaining and here I am complaining about the weather.

Life circumstances put me in the Midwest last weekly for a brief 24 hours, and it was blissful: 73 degrees with low humidity and a breeze. Though my meager anecdotal memory is no significance in light of the statistical evidence and projections for climate change — or what we called in my childhood global warming, which was never considered a hoax — it does seem hotter now here in my homeland as a middle-aged adult. When I was growing up, summer was of course a brutal slog, but there were regular afternoon thunderstorms. The humidity went somewhere, was up to something. The heavy clouds rolled in every afternoon, a cumulative resentment, and waited until about three o’clock to enact their revenge upon the morning. A dry August was a rarity. But now it’s a regular occurrence, and the pestilence drags on through September, half of October. It’s a song that never ends until, perhaps, November. What this means for future inhabitation in the ArkLaMiss is a question for people smarter than I. I know all the azaleas and hydrangeas and Japanese maples are going to die. The prospect of a well-watered lawn will become that much more extravagant. Perhaps it will turn to desert. In Absalom, Absalom! Quentin talks about the wisteria vine outside Miss Coldfield’s house blooming for the second time that summer. But now nothing blooms for the second time. It just hangs on, wilted, desperate for a little axial tilt.

Meanwhile the interiors of the buildings hum along at 72 degrees. It’s a class distinction universally applicable throughout the South that the more prestigious and wealthy a building and its inhabitants, the more intensely cold the air conditioning will be inside. This is always most conspicuous on college campuses, where the business schools Yeti out in their super modern digs while the English departments grow mold from all that trapped wet heat. They’re always the buildings slated for renovation one day. (Separate but related: At one school the English classes were held in rooms where the acoustical ceiling tile hung bulbous and stained, allegedly supporting decades of guano. In another, the science departments were literally underground, kept out of sight like a weirdo uncle.) I am of course grateful for air conditioning, but I still keep a sweater handy year-round.

I keep thinking I will adapt, that I won’t walk outside and panic at the level of heat, and scuttle quickly to my car, moving from one industrial oasis to another. But each year I must work through my shock, collar strangers at the post office, try to talk out my anxiety. Some intensely serious daily heat we’re having out there, huh? It seems like as one enters middle age, one should be less concerned with the weather, not more. And yet I’ve got three weather apps on my phone, and I’m eyeing a fourth. I keep thinking I should get one of those special radios. Don’t even get me started on tornadoes, which at this point in the distended summer would offer a welcome breeze at least. Even without the apocalyptic premonitions of global warming, I am a weather worrier. What will the next change be, and for how long, and should I have cleared out the gutters more thoroughly? But here, now, instead, in the roadkill days of summer, the lack of change is its own kind of terror, a kind of heat feedback, an overhead hair dryer from hell. It feels trivial to discuss yet there it is, everywhere and always.