This article was written by Heather Mallick and was published in the Toronto Star on July 31, 2023.

Last week I was in a tiny Toronto restaurant that was struggling terribly with its air conditioning while placing small tables too close together because it was struggling terribly with its financial survival.

In the era of broken social norms, two massive bros were at a table inches away trying to impress their increasingly fed-up dates by getting drunk and competitively roaring at each other so loudly that eventually the other tables emptied and people left, looking grim.

I didn’t want to leave because I was childishly excited at being out at all — when you have long COVID, restaurant meals are rarely a thing — and enjoying the unfamiliar unpleasantness of other humans.

I was considering people out in public and Fran Lebowitz’s view of them. “I think people have forgotten what the word ‘public’ means,” she wrote. “‘Public’ means you’re going to be irritated. It’s a natural consequence of leaving one’s home.”

Although she was writing about smoking in public, so she lost that one.

Also I was eating Tacos Shrimp Diablo and thinking that as the oceans boil, it might be the last time I ever ordered seafood with a clear conscience. What I would normally do in a loud stifling restaurant is move to a table outside. But it was too horribly all-consumingly hot out there.

Indoors was baking, outdoors was burning and there lay the dilemma. Most of the world has no choice between the two. Nighttime heat is said to be the killer and climate change means that it no longer gets significantly cooler at night. This spinning planet’s got no time.

It is always going to be like this. The question is what we do about it and you know, we may do nothing. Like me. It was my birthday and I got to decide for all of us. I didn’t complain, just quietly watched and savoured the chaos, perking up when some new diners started getting seriously annoyed. We wished them good luck.

Human beings are peculiar creatures. We are passive. The biggest problem we face at this moment in July, which may be the hottest month in human history, is that we know the heat will vanish. Fall will arrive, likely hotter and later, but inevitably. And we will forget.

Christmas is less than five months away. We may serve smoked salmon.

We forget about heat for the same reason that we feel instant pleasure when we enter an air-conditioned building after shuffling along a Toronto sidewalk with damp skin and a bad attitude. Air conditioning is a painkiller.

The agony melts away and so does the urgency.

We will also forget about overheating oceans. This month, water off Newfoundland’s coast was 5 C to 10 C warmer than normal, the kind of hot-tub statistic that had made me think that shrimp could vanish, in-person or as a concept.

On the other hand, hotter oceans mean worse storms coming up, which will trouble us again but, again, fail to remind us to prepare for the summer of 2024, which might be a bit awful or mightily horrendous.

The clever human brain got us to this point but it forgets too easily, especially when it’s too hot to think clearly.

When leaves begin to fall in October or eerily earlier than that, I will not be advising you to buy a family heat pump for Christmas.

You won’t be interested. Sadly, neither will I.

I will be writing about flooding, high winds, blackouts and possibly more tree limbs falling in Trinity Bellwoods Park in a city that can’t afford park maintenance.

We live in a Doug Ford world, unable or unwilling to envision dark possibilities. We’ll wait and watch it all happen to us. We’ll be passive. I do not understand.