Mood:
on fireTopic: "Hot Tamale" (3)
It is extremely difficult to be funny when it is hot.
The greatest Southern writers were sometimes narrators, and sometimes participants. They were often gothic, but mostly populist. Occasionally they were entirely asexual, but usually they reflected every kind of sexuality in one form or another. With the partial exception of the works penned by Mr. Clemens, the characters wore seersucker suits or cotton dresses, drank bourbon on the rocks or lemonade, smoked, and sweated a great deal. Mr. Clemens of course, wore a seersucker suit, drank bourbon, smoked, and probably sweated while he wrote of Brother Huckleberry and tramps abroad. The tales produced by Southern writers were dramatic and involved, but rarely amusing. Mr. Clemens, it is noted, wrote much of his work in Connecticut and in travel status.
To the best of his knowledge, Frodo has no latent sexual issues. Frodo's relationships with his mother and his father have been traditional and unspectacular. Frodo's personal appetites tend to chocolate, peanuts, and root beer (albeit in a frozen mug). The result for Frodo's tales is that with these traditonal gaps sealed, and the record-setting temperatures coupled with expected levels of humidity, there is only sweat. Bead-like, it falls upon wooden floors and lies there until a passerby decides that it needs to be removed from view. It is very, very hard to be funny when the only thing one can produce is detritus.
On the morrow, after the Braves game of course, Frodo will sit in the gazebo and begin his gift book, "In Search of Willie Morris," and whenever he stops to contemplate a page past, he'll perform the annual task of fan design. Revivals and funerals alike at this time of year require and inspire ornate as well as practical fans. Anything pliable can be used to direct a breath of air toward those who endure days that remain in memory and experience long thereafter. Days such as these do not inspire humor or creativity, just that which is necessary. Frodo's words are proof, it is hard to be funny when it's this hot.
