I assume that when civil rights leaders get to Hell their first concern is about the seating arrangements.
When they are talking about getting on Southern city bus the way Rosa Parks did in 1955, the first thing they would notice would be that blacks sat in back and whites sat in front.
Actually what you would notice is that you noticed very little in the bus. Inside the bus was hotter than outside the bus, and it was HOT outside. The way we coped with that was by going into various states of hypnosis.
We spent the summer in a daze. The extreme heat weighed on us and made us semiconscious. There was no relief.
When we went inside a house there was an exhaust fan going and we were out of the sun and we were covered with sweat. It felt cool.
But I have tried that when the air conditioner goes off in recent years, and it is NOT cool.
Waiting for the bus you just stood or sat there, wrapped in your hypnosis. But what I also remember is that, when I got on the bus, it felt like suddenly walkinginto a wool blanket. Those tin cans absorbed all the sun’s heat and you were sitting in them.
I always thought I loved to swim. We used to go to a pond to swim every day in the summer. But when I moved into air-conditioned highrises that had swimming pools, I never went there.
Swimming was the only relief there was from the heat, day and night.
One problem other old Southerners will remember was getting in the car after swimming. Back then the seats were covered in plastic, plastic that had been directly in the sunlight during the cople of hours you were in the pond. As we came back to the car we always forgot that, though we were wet and cool, the world was still very hot.
“OUCH!” We almost invariably, every day, sat down on the auto seat without remembering, and we got burned. Our backs were actually red from the half second it took us to lean back against them in our bathing suits with our backs uncovered and jumping up.
Another thing I had reason to remember later had to do with being on the streets in South America. The buses down there used the same unleaded gasoline we used in the 1950s. When you are walking along and a bus goes by the smell is, well, distinctive. In fact, you get a semi-high from the gasoline, the kind that gasonline-smellers get.
That is another addiction a lot of people get hooked on and finally die of, smelling gasoline.
But we didn’t notice it because we were used to hypnosis.
And there is also cold hypnosis.
Our drugged-out generation may spend more time conscious than anyone before.
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