It’s the heat and the humidity; also, the fascism

“It’s not the heat, it’s the humidity” isn’t as much an aphorism as a punchline, as people point out—often with an unwarranted hint of smugness, as if nobody else had made this observation before—that 95° F is too damn hot no matter how humid it is.

And, I mean, sure, but imagine these two scenarios:

• Tampa: The high today will be 95° F. The low will be 75° F and the relative humidity will be 70%, for a peak dew point of 74° F and a peak heat index of 123° F.
• Sacramento: The high today will be 95° F. The low will be 59° F and the relative humidity will be 40%, for a peak dew point of 67° F and a peak heat index of 99° F.

Is the hottest point too damn high in both cities? Obviously. But in Sacramento—my favorite underrated California metro area—it only sucks for the afternoon hours; the morning is pleasant, the evening is warm, and the humidity stays basically comfortable. Here in Tampa Bay, you wake up to warm, muggy air that turns into a sauna before noon. A sauna with a blistering UV index.

In theory, I knew all this when I moved back to Florida. I grew up here! I understood what I was signing up for, right?

Again, I mean, sure, in theory. But it feels worse this time around. In part, that’s simple reality: it really is hotter now than it was a quarter-century ago. Summer gets here earlier and leaves later. The storm season lasts a little longer and gets a little more violent.

And, some of it’s subjective. I didn’t travel at all, not even a staycation, from July 2023 through June 2024, the longest stretch I’ve gone without a single night somewhere other than home in decades. I’m not actually in Tampa proper—I’m in the rural exurbs, so I can’t even go out for lunch breaks except to a handful of places. The net result has been a level of stir-craziness I haven’t felt in years. (It hasn’t helped that I gave up my “remote work Thursdays” since I moved back, where I picked up my work laptop and relocated to some entirely new place for the day.)

Even so, my first two summers back in Florida—2023 and 2024—didn’t engender the kind of restlessness I’ve been wrestling with this summer, the lack of focus, the sense of frustrated wheel-spinning. Last summer was a summer of burnout for me; this is a summer of…well, whatever the nervous energy version of ennui is.

But, I know this year it’s not just the heat or the humidity. It’s the sense of helplessness. Fascism is here, a third of the country is greeting it with thunderous applause, and neither the legislative nor judicial branches seem motivated to provide either check or balance. The industry I fell into thirty years ago is in the midst of another bubble, and its leaders are more insistent than ever that it is not a bubble, it is in fact either the greatest invention since fire or an existential threat, while they’re also either providing direct support for American fascism or just sucking up to it. The Venn diagram of “techbros who have gone MAGA” and “techbros preaching the gospel of AI” is more or less a perfect circle, and this is something we, as a society, need to face in a way we’ve been doing our damnedest not to.

I am much closer to traditional retirement age now than not; when I moved from Florida to California in 2002, I figured I would be out there for most or all of my working-for-someone-else career. Even as I fell in love with northern California and the Pacific Northwest at the same time Florida became just a little more hot, a little more humid, and a lot more politically antagonistic, I carried that around in the back of my mind. By 2020, though, I couldn’t.

There are still places in Florida that, taken in isolation, I’d be happy living in—some neighborhoods around Orlando, some towns in Pinellas County—but the politics aren’t getting better any time soon. Also, despite what our mini-Trump governor claims, Florida is no longer cheap: housing costs here have climbed so fast in the last five years that Sacramento, Tacoma (a suburb of Seattle), and even Portland, Oregon are now cheaper to rent in than either Orlando or Tampa. That’s based on a spot check of rents in April 2025. Just before I actually did move back to Florida, I wrote, “it’s hard not to daydream of moving back even though I haven’t left yet”; I’m still daydreaming of it.

I can’t—won’t—leave my mother behind, but even setting aside the Herculean logistics of moving an 80-year-old with chronic health problems (and a cat) cross-country, the places I want to live aren’t places she’s attracted to. On top of that, the house here is completely paid for, on an acre and a half of wooded land that has, so far, proven resistant to flooding. For all the mounting problems with Florida, those are compelling reasons to stay. For now.

So that leaves me in a holding pattern, the one I’ve been in since July 2022. I don’t know what breaks it. The uncomfortable spectre with me for all that time has been that I am, in a real sense, here to take care of my mother until she dies, that considerations of where to move to next—where to retire to—are, for the indefinite future, moot.

Increasingly, though, the heat and humidity are getting to her, too, and the still-rural community we’re in is getting a lot of house farm development happening. In a year or two, we’ll have the traffic of suburbia while still having essentially nothing urban—or even suburban—around us, the worst of both worlds. Add in two bad hurricane seasons in a row with a third (and fourth and…) likely, and we may hit a practical limit together. I don’t know what happens then, where we’ll end up, what it will mean for me when she does pass. Will I be somewhere I want to stay, in a home I want to keep?

But for now, we persist here, together, and watch to see what the next year brings.