Sultry ? Ha. This isn't some kind of lazy-ceiling-fan-twirling kind of relaxation regime. This is every fan on full, every chugging air compressor working double overtime and all that happens is that the soup is stirred with a bit more speed. This is constantly asking if the air conditioner is actually on. Peeling off your seat at the desk. No cuddling. Please.

The vapors, stickiness, a warm wet blanket on a Tuesday morning. One doesn't sweat as much as one feels as persistently sweated, like a cookbook author wants you to do with a panful of onions and carrots. Choking weather, cottony air that hugs you like a psycho friend with boundary issues.

Simile-inducing, in a big way.

These are the real dog days of a New York summer. The mangy, ill-tempered, soaked-in-expired-flea-bath dog days. The air-conditioning in the subway cars has been set at cryogenic levels all summer, and the overtaxed machines are, one by one, giving up the ghost. Routinely now, a transfer from the F to the A or the reverse means that one is suddenly trapped in a torture chamber both oven-like and clammy. Each human body clinging to the overhead bar is a hyper-efficient radiator, and close proximity to a big banker dude who just did a quick seven-block hike to catch the train is the daily nightmare.

Don't think about the underarms.

The wind came up this afternoon, a hot strong wind out of New Jersey like an enormous leaf blower had achieved carnal knowledge of the world's biggest wet-dry vac full of a nameless effluvium, and had been aimed by its lethargically malicious cosmic master at a beaten-down city.

It's been like this every year of my life, come some point in September, for about as long as I can remember. By birth and birthright I hail from the wide-open West, where no such suffering exists or at least lingers beyond a freak weekend. It's wet in Oregon, where I was born, but rain-wet, greenly cool ten months of the year. And both lines of my family hail originally from the fabled "Mediterranean" climate of Northern California.

But I grew up in the swamp-reclaimed suburbs of Washington, D.C. and the sea-level frontage of the Gulf Coast. And then I moved North to New Amsterdam, only to discover that the miasmal climate of Washington is only slightly ameliorated by the change in latitude achieved by a few hours drive toward the top of the map. In Colonial times, the entire coastal region was dubbed hardship duty for British military officers. Secretly, I know I'd wither in the desert, and probably even shrivel up in the paradisal sunshine of Berkeley. Still, this wetsuit of a climate sometimes makes one wonder.

Given what's happened and goddess-forbid maybe still to happen down in the Gulf, thanks to unlovely Rita, I've really no place to complain about the weather right now. But bad form or not...I've been beaten down by it today. It's not just muggy. This is The Mug.