Photo by Michiel Ronde on Unsplash

2026.07.08

Prompt: Write about Summer. Heat. Whether you like it or not, or when do you like heat? When do you desire heat? When do you want it away from you?

Last Yule my brother and sister in law introduced my family to the miracle of the steam room/cold plunge combination, and I have never looked back. I’m someone who is bad in the heat and bad in the cold. During the summer, I am overheated and allergic to everything

By the way, I put drone footage on the television while I write, and I am currently watching drone footage of one drone taking drone footage of another drone, also taking drone footage and I feel like that should be problematic but I don’t know why.

Like, is this two bros flying their drones together, or is this particular mountain range so popular with drones that this is a fancy-meeting-you-here situation? Is this the beginning of a romance? A dronmance? That sounds like a type of magic bees do. Or like necromancy except there’s something even creepier about it than there already is, which is considerably creepy. Are these drones boyfriends? Is what I want to know.

Is that sexist? Can drones, by definition be a gender? Like a ship? Is it sexist that all ships are girls? Like, carry my babies, and my sailors, and my stealth bombers. That’s a woman’s job. Men only want one thing and it’s all of the women to be barefoot and pregnant with stealth bombers.

Drones are agender. Obviously. I’m sorry for misgendering the drones and assuming that they would both want to be the boyfriend. Very regressive. My bad, fuck the patriarchy.

While I was writing this, the other drone disappeared. Did they break up?

Now I’m imagining those expectation verses reality posts where people want to go to Vermont to see the foliage or whatever and they expect a cute little red barn in an empty field surrounded by pretty maples and instead when they get there, it’s 897 Subarus and mud and trash and everybody competing to get that perfect little red barn shot with the three or four maples that are left after they built the visitors’ parking lot and it costs $45 to get in.

Like are people in the Dolomites or wherever this is just standing in line with their drones waiting to do their flight and trying not to crash because there are so many other drones in the air?

Anyway, I’m shit in every weather except 65-75 degrees. I’m allergic to the air except for the one week in August when everything is dead and the one week in December or January when everything is frozen. I do not like being too cold, and I do not like being too hot. Which is why it was such a surprise when I became instantly addicted to the steam room/cold plunge combo.

You stay in the steam room until you feel like your skin is about to slough off, and then you rush into the cold plunge and do a primordial gasp that instantly relaxes every single muscle and nerve in your whole entire body and you feel born anew like a middle aged infant. It’s amazing. I can’t go outside in the winter without covering my neck and chest or I get a lung infection that lasts for months, but I can dunk myself into freezing cold waters after steaming my body tot he point of delamination in a box full of old Russian men.

Because the thing I discovered after literally years of belonging to my local gym, and swimming there also for years, is that, in addition to the steam room that I’ve always loved, they have an amazing cold plunge. It has a waterfall. A freezing cold waterfall, and stairs on either side, so you can walk in and then out. I always thought it was a decorative feature of the hot tub, but no. It’s a functional cold plunge.

I actually just got back from swimming, steaming, and cold plunging at the gym. I’ve been trying to get there more often. I have it on my schedule for three times a week, and I usually make it twice. I wish I went every day, which shouldn’t be hard given that I currently have no clients, no contracts, and no money. Spending hours at the gym every day seems like an extremely reasonable (and already paid for) use of my time. But then when would I wallow in self pity?

I have this narrative I tell myself which is that whenever I have the balls to be honest about what I’m worth, I lose everything. And the thing is, every time I have told the universe, or my parents, or bosses, or whoever that I am worth more than they’re giving me, they do usually abandon me. But that makes sense. Part of what made me appealing to those people is that I never expected them to reciprocate. I would take care of them, earn money for them, do great work for them, and significantly improve their lives and all I ever wanted from them was to be kept around. But when the bare minimum is just please don’t abandon me, and in exchange I’ll be whatever you need me to be, that’s not a basis for a healthy relationship, which is why they always dump me when I ask to be treated fairly, or compensated fairly. That was never part of the arrangement. So… on the one hand, good riddance to bad trash. On the other hand, now I have no work.

But I guess I’d rather have no work at this point in my life than have bad work. I can afford to do that for at least a little while longer. But will I ever be employable?

It sounds lame, but I want to be picked so badly. I want to be told my worth in the world so badly and no one ever seems to know what it is or be able to articulate it for me in any way that I can hear or that I also see or value.

One of the things people are always telling me is that I help them see their worth in the world, and it’s fucking hilarious that I don’t have that for myself, that I can’t even do that for myself. I know what I can do for people, but I get stuck on what it’s worth. I’ve never been worth anything in this world beyond what I got paid to do.

I never used to suffer from suicidal ideation until very recently. Not because I didn’t have it, but because it used to bring me such comfort. It’s probably a good sign that dwelling on my own death is no longer a happy place for me, but from where I’m sitting, it’s just one more coping mechanism that, like me, doesn’t work.

Do you think there’s drone bits scattered all over these beautiful mountains now, or what?