It’s one hundred and ten goddamn degrees out here in Tucson. High noon. The sun isn’t just shining; it’s a hammer. A big, stupid, and completely honest fist, beating down on the asphalt until the whole world shimmers and sweats. The air is so thick you could chew on it. The kind of heat that cooks the bullshit right out of you, that leaves you with nothing but the hard, ugly, and beautiful truth of your own sweating, stinking, and completely mortal body.
And then you see them.
Walking down the street, right in the middle of this beautiful, ugly, and completely honest inferno, like it’s a cool autumn day in some forgotten corner of New England. A man in a wool sweater. A woman in a long-sleeved blouse and a pair of goddamn jeans.
And I’m telling you, right here and now, you can’t trust them.
Never trust anybody who wears a sweater in the desert in the middle of July.
Now, the easy answer, the one you’re all thinking, is that they’re junkies. That they’re hiding the track marks, the scabs, the quiet, ugly evidence of a life spent chasing a dragon in a dark room. And maybe that’s it. Sometimes, the easy answer is the right one. A man with a secret on his skin is a man with a secret in his soul.
But it’s more than that. It’s deeper. It’s a fundamental, architectural flaw in the whole goddamn building.
I’m a project manager. I spend my life looking at blueprints, at systems, at the way things are supposed to work. And if you’ve got a piece of machinery in a hot engine room that’s running cold, you don’t just ignore it. That’s not a quirk; that’s a goddamn warning sign. It means the internal thermostat is shot. It means the whole machine is out of sync with its environment. It means it’s just a matter of time before the whole thing seizes up and takes a piece of you with it.
And that’s what these people are. They’re walking, talking, and completely unreliable pieces of machinery. Their internal thermostat is broken. They are not in sync with the world. They are living in a different, colder, and completely imaginary climate.
And you have to ask yourself, if a man is capable of lying to himself about something as simple, as honest, and as completely undeniable as the goddamn temperature, what other lies is he telling?
If he can walk through a furnace and pretend it’s a cool spring morning, can he look you in the eye and tell you he loves you while he’s fucking your best friend? Can he sign a contract with you, shake your hand, and then stab you in the back for a few extra bucks? Can he watch the whole goddamn world burn down around him and tell you that the fire is beautiful?
Yes. Of course he can.
Because that’s the real sickness, isn’t it? The quiet, creeping, and completely modern disease of being disconnected from reality. These are the people who live their lives in the air-conditioned comfort of their own bullshit. They’ve been raised in a world of pretty, comfortable, and completely soul-crushing lies, and they’ve forgotten what the real, honest, and beautiful heat of the sun feels like on their skin.
They are not just weird. They are dangerous. They are an unknown variable in a world that’s already full of them. They’re a ghost at the poker table. You can’t read them. You can’t trust them. Their whole goddamn existence is a quiet, polite, and completely infuriating lie.
So you give me a choice. You put me in a room with a loud, ugly, and completely honest bastard who’s sweating and swearing and telling me the truth, and a quiet, polite, and completely respectable man in a wool sweater who’s telling me a beautiful lie.
I’ll take the honest bastard every single goddamn time.
Because in a world that’s trying to sell you a constant, unrelenting, and completely soul-crushing stream of bullshit, the sun is the only honest sonofabitch left.
And any man who can’t feel its heat is a man who can’t be trusted with the truth.
