Martin Sheen in Apocalypse Now (1979)

As the monster heat wave continues, I keep thinking of the opening scene to Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now. In it, Martin Sheen is lying on his back in a Saigon guesthouse room, sweating as he hear the sound of a loud fan. And we hear the lyrics of The Doors singing “The End”:

This is the end
Beautiful friend
This is the end
My only friend, the end

Well, it’s not quite THAT bad, but the continuing heat and humidity is something I have not experienced in the sixty years I have lived in Southern California. The heat has never been THIS relentless, with no cooler days to break up that monster high pressure cell that has been perching on the American Southwest like a vulture from hell.

It seems as if the climate news from around the world is all bad. High winds. Flood. Drought. Wildfires. Earthquakes.

There’s precious little we can do about the weather. I say: Make like a lizard. Wait and see what happens. Change is coming, but what the nature of that change is, no one knows.