Hydrate the Old People, Heat Wave

Summertime and the living is easy... Silly, easy it isn't. Tomorrow, Friday 22 July 2011 it's gonna be hot in America. Old people will die domani* from being overheated and under hydrated. Sure as shooting. Except maybe old people in the Pacific Northwest. There, old people will die of the usual stuff like strokes and heart attacks and cancer.

Old people, you know, the kind that hang out and do nothing. Old is not so much chronological age as an old state of mind. But I digress. They talk about this and that and they say anything that comes to mind. Old people just don't give a schiatt about what they say. And they like to opine about medications, toilet paper and their doctor visits. And their BOWELS! When the hourglass is about out of sand, well, who cares.

Old people are relatively poor, at least most of them, unless they were teachers or cops or firemen or civil servants. The longer they live, the poorer they become. Old teachers and cops and firemen and civil servants, on the other hand, have great pensions, which last forever. As a result these old people have more money to pay for air conditioners. The poorer old people sit in fromt of heat vortexes called fans. They don't have money to pay for better heat control measures. So rich old people live through heat waves better than poor old people**.

So tomorrow old people, mostly poor ones, will die as a result of the heat wave. Young people related to the old people, who are gonna die tomorrow, could save their lives if they tended to them and watered them before the red miasma sets in. Some young people will indeed do that. God bless them. But as it usually goes with prevention, nobody will know of that kind of heroism. The public will blame the young ones related to the dead, dehydrated old people.

Houses heat up like ovens in hot weather, especially by late afternoon into the evening. The sun's wasted heat energy functions like a blast furnace. Oddly, old people shutter up their houses to keep out the heat on days like tomorrow and in effect assure a good baking milieu. And old people don't drink much because they don't want to piss themselves. What with their prostates aroarin' and their cystoceles leaking, the act of pissing is the bane of old people. Consequently, not drinking cuts down on pissing, which sadly on hot days make a heat stroke a good possibility.

So what should society do. Here are some thoughts

• Give the old people air conditioners and free electricity to run them
• Make all the old people get into the street every hour, hose them down with cool water and make them drink some, too
• Provide old people with light loose fitting clothing, even if they all look like Arabs
• Make the loose clothing crotchless, allowing free micturation at any time
• Have the boy scouts or the girl scouts or the inter-sexed scouts deliver cold Gatorade to all of the old people every 4 hours
• Check on the old people every 8 hours, the neighborhood watches could do this since they don't do much else
• Send the old people back to work (at least those who could work) so they could hang out in cool places like Walmart and Target
• Make the movie theaters run FREE old people movies like Gone With the Wind and I Am Curious Yellow so that the old people will go to the cool cinemas
• Oh, be careful with the free popcorn, it gives them gas and diverticulitis
• Move all the old people to Seattle WA or Portland OR (not ME, it's gonna be 90 there tomorrow), it will be cooler and the northeast and midwest will be free of old people down the road
• Old people will be better off in the northwest cause people who live there are nicer especially to pets, furs, leathers and old people

Well, well. Twelve more hours before the heat wave overtakes America. Get ready. Listen to this.

And then, go out and help the old people. Let them drink. Let them piss. Make sure the piss is clear and not too yellow. Gonna be a heat wave...

H-Y-D-R-A-T-E

E cosi va...

* domani = tomorrow (ital.)


** One issue for old people is that they don't sweat so well. Sweating with subsequent moisture evaporation cools the body. As old people age, their ability to sweat diminishes and hence their facility for cooling. Moreover, many of the medications used in the geriatric set inhibit sweating and sequential cooling as well.