When I tell people I enjoy muggy, sticky, sweltering, Über-humid days, they look at me like I’m crazier than when I tell them I don’t believe in universal human equality.

I have always loved hot weather and been far happier in the summertime. I am reasonably certain I could live quite comfortably on a lawn chair perched on the sun’s surface.

Cold weather’s another story entirely. Once it dips below 40 degrees, I start screaming like a female baby seal being clubbed. Growing up in suburban Philly and walking to school on January mornings with the bitter wind pecking at my face like a flock of hostile magpies, I wondered why on Earth anyone would settle in such an inhospitable climate. I can understand pioneers and explorers getting stuck in such a frozen meat locker one winter, but to this day I have no idea why they wouldn’t pull up roots and move south at the first sign of le printemps.

But it’s not only the heat I enjoy. I’ve been in Bakersfield when it was 110 and in Vegas when it was 117—and the latter was after boiling my skin in hot mineral springs outside of Death Valley. Still, there was something missing.

I saw that special “something” while moving back East in 2005. Right about when you cross the Mississippi, you can literally see the wall of humidity as if it’s another dimension.

For me it’s like an airborne aphrodisiac. I like it when the air’s so thick and sluggish, it feels like you’re walking across the bottom of a swimming pool. To me it brings an extra element of drama—a je ne sais quoi if you will, because even using a French term feels less gay than saying it makes everything feel more “sensual.”

Down here in Georgia, you can feel it in the air starting sometime in mid-April, and it hangs low like a hot damp blanket until sometime in October. But even the lifelong locals look at me as if I’m out of my dented gourd when I tell them I actually prefer humidity.

But surely I’m not alone on this. Anyone else with me?

—JIM GOAD

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