Dear September Bill, Please Sit Down

Dear September Bill,

At 4:40 this afternoon my air conditioner made the noise. Not the hum. The other one, a long grinding exhale from a compressor that had been running since breakfast and would now like to speak to a manager. I was standing in the hallway with my hand flat on the thermostat like I was checking a child for fever. It said 81. It had said 81 for three hours. The unit outside was giving it everything and holding the line, the way a guy holds a door shut in a horror movie.

Outside it was 107. That's not a joke and not an exaggeration for effect. Austin hit 107 degrees today, one of the hottest days of the summer, which is a little like being named one of the worst headaches of the decade.

I'm writing now because you won't show up for weeks, and by then I'll have cooled off and gotten reasonable. I don't want to be reasonable. I want you to know exactly what you're charging me for while it's happening.

Re: Where I was when it peaked

I was not doing anything heroic. I was in the kitchen, eating cold leftover rice straight out of the container because turning on a burner felt like a hostile act. Every blind in the house was down. The cat was flat on the bathroom tile, giving off the energy of a rug that had been through a lot.

Around three I went out to the mailbox, which is forty feet from my door, and came back feeling like I'd been briefly microwaved. The mailbox lid was hot enough that I used my shirt hem. The asphalt on my street had gone soft at the edges and smelled faintly of a road crew that wasn't there.

The hardship I'm describing here is my own comfortable indoor one. Anybody who spent today on a roof, a route, a job site or a sidewalk is having a different day entirely, and they deserve every cent this letter is about to complain over. My complaint is with you and the people who designed you, not with anyone on the receiving end of the sun.

Re: The meter

When I was a kid, the electric meter on the side of my parents' house in Hyde Park had a little aluminum disk behind glass that spun. You could watch it. On a July afternoon my father would walk out there, look at that disk turning, and come back inside like he'd seen a ghost. Then he'd shut off the window unit in the back bedroom and announce that we were going to the movies.

That was the system. The theater was the air conditioning. You bought a ticket for whatever was playing at four o'clock, and for two hours somebody else paid to keep it at sixty-eight degrees. I saw a lot of movies I was too young for that way. Nobody was watching. They were all just cold.

The disk was honest, at least. It showed you the money leaving in real time. Now the meter is a gray box that talks to the utility over the air and tells me nothing at all. The first I hear about this afternoon will be you, opened at the kitchen counter with the slow dread of a biopsy result.

Re: The grid

Every summer we perform the same civic ritual. The temperature climbs, the phone starts buzzing with suggestions, and a statewide power system that Texas built mostly as its own island, so that it could answer to as few people as possible, asks me personally to please not run the dishwasher until after eight.

I want to be clear that I will do this. I always do this. I'm a good citizen. But there's something rich about a system that spent decades insisting it didn't need anybody's help suddenly leaning on me, a man eating rice over the sink, to get it through the afternoon.

It's like a landlord who won't fix the roof asking you to hold an umbrella over the bed.

Every new tower downtown is a glass box facing west, a greenhouse with a lobby. I keep thinking about the poor compressors on those roofs going through what mine went through at 4:40, multiplied by forty floors, all so somebody can pay four figures a month to look at a view of other glass boxes. The marketing calls those floor-to-ceiling windows. The compressor calls them a personal insult.

Re: Your tiers

As I understand the way you work, the more electricity I use, the more each additional unit costs. In theory this rewards thrift. In practice, in a month like this one, it means the first chunk of power I buy goes toward the fridge and the lights, and the expensive power at the top goes toward the only thing that's keeping my house from turning into a kiln.

So the most expensive electricity I buy all year is the electricity I have no choice about. I don't know who to make that check out to, the utility or the sun, but they both seem pretty comfortable.

I'll give the system this much: at least it's predictable. I know you're coming. I know roughly how bad it'll be. What I resent is the tone of the little bar chart on the back, the one comparing me to "efficient neighbors." Who are these people? Where do they live? Do they have a house, or did they move into a cave on the Greenbelt and run a single fan off a bicycle? I'd like to meet them. I'd like to know what their cat thinks.

Re: Everything else 107 costs

You're not the only bill. You're just the one with a postmark.

There's the ice. I bought two bags at the gas station this afternoon, one for the cooler and one, honestly, to hold against my neck in the truck. There's the water bill, because the tomatoes in the backyard are on a level of life support that would make a hospital administrator blink. There's the fifth set of wiper blades, because the old ones melted onto the windshield like a cheese single left on a dashboard.

And there's the bill nobody prints, which is the whole city adjusting its afternoon around a number. Errands get done at seven in the morning or not at all. Dog walks happen in the dark. The neighborhood goes quiet at two o'clock the way old Austin used to go quiet on Sunday morning, except nobody's in church. They're just hiding.

This town has always been hot. I'm not one of these people who acts like summer was invented in 2023. I remember 1980s Augusts that would curl a cassette tape left on the seat. What's changed is everything we built on top of the heat: glass walls, black roofs, parking lots the size of counties, trees taken down for a better street view of a leasing office. We paved over the shade and then sent ourselves the invoice.

Re: What I'd like from you

I'm not asking for a discount. I know better. I'm not asking you to be cheaper than you are, because you are exactly as expensive as the system that produces you, and that system has a lot of lobbyists and I have a cat on a tile floor.

What I want is the disk back.

Give me a little window on the side of the house where I can watch the money spin. Let me walk out there at 4:40 on the hottest day of the summer, look at it whirling, and feel something. Fear, mostly. But clarity. My father knew exactly what that afternoon cost him because he could see it turning. I'll find out in September, all at once, with a cheerful little graph.

At least back then, when the number got bad enough, we knew where to go: the four o'clock show, the back row, a jumbo popcorn, and somebody else's thermostat.

I checked. The ticket costs more than the movie used to gross.

Yours, sweating, The 81 in the hallway