How Did We Do Without AC?

Right now, I’m sitting in a freezing cold basement writing this with a thermal shirt on!

My teeth are chattering and I have to get up to pee every 10 minutes.

And the AC is set to 74!

Every home around here has central air. You don’t nor can’t live without it.
But there was a time when if you had central air, you were considered upscale!

This is no joke. There was a time most of us had to make do with opening a window or putting in a window fan in to keep cool.

Also, if you had AC in your car, people would think that you hit lotto.

Try living without it now. AC is standard. If you’re of a certain age; you probably think AC was ubiquitous!

It wasn’t.

So I wonder how did we live without it.

I mean, the only way you could get cool back then was to either go up on the roof (the song by the Drifters was true for us); or go to the movies, where they advertised “refrigerated air cooled!”

When I lived in Georgia, we lived in a one bedroom apartment in what was a one family house with a screened in porch! Probably about 100 years old, and the landlady was just as old! We used to call her “mama”.

To get cool, we used to go to the Dairy Queen on Hwy 341 in my 73 Catalina with the air blasting.

Yet, as bad as it was, there was a certain charm to it.
It reminded us of how we had it back as kids.

Now I see people around where I live, like the Russian couple that lives next door; and think to myself, “God, how do they stand it, coming from Siberia!”

And by and large, they don’t. My neighbor comes out of the house with a rag to her forehead, moaning in a coarse Russian accent, “...ohhh, eeets so hshaaaattt!” (By the way, I love the Russian accent. It’s so “Boris and Natasha!”)

But for all my BS about how quaint being without AC was, I still turn up the air and see my breath down in my personal dungeon.

Living with AC has spoiled us, and is probably a drain on the ecosystem.

But if Al Gore can cool his fat ass with AC down in Tennessee, then why shouldn’t I.

How you staying cool this weekend?