Air Conditioning and Apple Pie

Sometimes it seems like the generation who grew up without any air conditioning, at all — once sweaty kids, grateful for an Italian ice, who couldn’t even know it would be invented — are the least willing to do without, now.

Not that many of my age peers will actually go without. But they might pretend that they do. “I only turn it on when it’s really hot*.”  (* translation: any day that Hell didn’t freeze over.)

But my parents’ generation, they have a strident sense of entitlement to the fucking thing. It’s like they think, “We fought Hitler and the Communists so we could have air conditioning and apple pie. Good men died so that we could have freon and shiver in summer! Over my dead body will you turn it down 2 degrees!”

Yeah, it’s Christmas in July, in those houses.