July 9, 2024. It is the morning of what will be the hottest day of the year so far. I would have liked hot weather a lot more if I’d ever learned how to swim, but as it is I dislike everything about it. We got the occasional 100+ day when I was growing up in Virginia. We dealt with that by playing in the sprinkler, sucking on ice cubes, and lying on the kitchen linoleum with our arms and legs out in front of the little black oscillating fan. As an adult, the only thing I found good about real hot days is it usually meant my friend Linda was coming for a visit. We don’t know how Linda is meteorologically hooked into high pressure systems but she has always been a powerful spirit, and I’ve stuck her in a scorching hot bedroom more times than I care to admit.

These days the advent of super hot days is much more ominous. We’re not merely uncomfortable; we’re terrified. It was one thing to note the number of record hot temps and watch the trajectory over the last twenty years—zero, zero, zero, two, six, ten, eighteen, thirty. The thing about the heat dome of 2020 here in Portland, when it reached 118 here, the thing that chills the very soul and nothing else, is the certainty that it isn’t a one-time deal. It’s just the hottest it’s ever been, by a lot, but not the hottest it will ever be. This little experiment in atmospheric fuckery our feckless species has been carrying out for a hundred years? This thing has legs.

The heat dome killed trees. Not the way our rising temperatures have stressed trees and doomed all our Western Redcedars, projected to be gone within ten years, which is quickly enough. No: killed them in a day. Fried them right up. Across the street is a tall, mature tree that hosted breeding crows every year, and it went brown overnight and lost its last bit of green at the tippy-top this summer. It’s gone.

Watching this thing unfold in real time is only slightly less shocking than day-after photos of Hiroshima. We know what we did; we know what we must do; we can’t seem to do it. And in the face of that bleak future, there’s only one question left in our minds:

Where did the phrase “Screw the pooch” come from?

There are so many phrases we use that don’t make sense. “Fly off the handle” means nothing to people who’ve never swung a loose axe. “Cut the mustard” doesn’t mean anything we can figure out today.

Phrases have a way of insinuating themselves into our speech in odd ways. No one blinks if you say someone went to the bathroom in his pants even though nobody has a bathroom in their pants—at best, a small lobby or a closet. So, apparently, around the turn of the last century, if you were loafing about, you were “feeding the dog.” Who knows why? In this house we call the same thing “reading the fire,” because we could never get the wood stove fire started because we kept finding something to read in the newspaper we crumpled up.

So “feeding the dog” became “fucking the dog” after a few decades even though vanishingly few people engage in that sort of activity out of a lack of something better to do. And, borrowing from some old joke about a drunken man and his wife, a few years later came the expression “fuck the dog (and sell the puppies).” That little chestnut was with us for some time before it was sanitized sometime in the ‘60s to “screw the pooch,” and popularized as NASA slang in the book “The Right Stuff,” and now means to really mess things up for yourself in a humiliating way and beyond all reason. Plus, “screw the pooch” sounds nice. Sometimes things catch on just because they’ve got rhythm. Alliteration. A nice assonance. Which is why we have “fuck a duck,” even though only a tiny subset of humanity wants to do that.

All we know now, as the thermometer threatens to explode, is that whatever we do, we must not vote for a party with its collective heads in the ever-expanding sand. And especially not entrust our world to a man who would totally screw an actual pooch, if it was blonde.