OK, I admit it.  I love my air conditioners.  I have two window units, one upstairs and one downstairs, and they cool my whole house to a comfortable 70 degrees, no problem.

On a day like today, 95 degrees Farenheit and humid, you’ll find me huddled around the AC, whether it’s in my home, car or office, or out to the movies or a restaurant.

Even though I know full well that my AC addiction is part of the problem of global warming, am I going to go without?

Hell no!

Why should I swelter while everyone else who can afford it, and especially the fat cats who got us into this global warming mess, are sitting cool as cucumbers and pretty as you please?!

Thus you have the tragedy of the commons playing out all over again, all the time.

It will take a crash—a blackout, a total system collapse—to make us give up our creature comforts here in the heart of Empire.

Some people say that crash can’t come soon enough, and I guess I agree with them.

Certainly for the rest of the life forms on the planet, the sooner human beings get lost, and take our asphalt and our AC and our combustion engines with us, the more chance there will be for the planet to recover without turning back the clocks to zero and starting all over again with bacteria and plankton and the other very basic building blocks of life.

But am I going to commit hari-kari right now to speed this process along, playing martyr for the benefit of the songbirds and the orangutans?

No, I am not.

I am going to keep living, keep cranking up my AC and bopping around in my car, until there’s no juice in the wires and no gas in the tank.

***

Trying to keep cool, I just went to see PROMETHEUS, a bizarre movie if there ever was one.

In it, human beings go to meet their Maker, and discover that their alien progenitor is an impatient, violent, sadistic psychopath—at least by human standards—who, immediately upon being revived from an eons-long sleep, greets his human rescuers  with murderous fury and sets course for Earth with a full payload of biological weapons.

As I complained to my son afterwards, why is the human imagination always so dark and destructive?

Why couldn’t the screenwriters have imagined a happier scene, where the Maker showers the Earthlings with stardust and thanks them for waking him up?

No.

We are, it seems, an irredeemably violent species.

We deserve whatever violent end awaits us.

When it comes, we should bow our heads and acknowledge that we totally brought it upon ourselves.

In the meantime, it’s getting hot in here.  Time to crank up the AC.