The Guest Letter #42: Sweating at the End of the World by Jordan Foisy (Patreon)

This will be the final Guest Letter published, at least for now. What started as a one-off idea from John's partner Becca spawned what was a pretty cool series for both us and freelancers/comedians/writers who needed to make some extra cash in the pandemic. With your help, we were able to pay writers over $2500 to write these 42 newsletters for us, and we've received lots of great feedback on them. It just became no longer sustainable for us to source, edit, and write the newsletters and so that's why they're ending, but don't be surprised if we still publish a few on occasion just for fun and as an added bonus to our patrons. We love you and we thank you for your support of us and all these great writers over the last year or so we've been doing these.

Sweating at the End of the World
by Jordan Foisy

Did I always sweat like this?

It’s a question I've asked myself more and more, as I descend semi-gracefully into the pot-bellied ignominy of middle-age. My sweating has moved beyond light misting and has become terrible and monstrous, like a character defect in a Victorian novel that lets the reader know who the depraved villain is. I sweat like I’ve been cursed by some incredibly cruel gods. My sweating is the kind that ruins hats within days of wearing. It’s the kind of sweating that makes your girlfriend ask you not to sit on her new couch.

Surely when I was younger I perspired in a more orderly fashion. I don’t know when I began sweating like a third, forgotten Belushi brother but I remember when it became a problem. I was in a boxing-exercise class — this was after Trump won, when I assumed I would have to fight neck-bearded fascists in the street, not realizing that most of that fighting would be done by punks in shredded, black jean shorts swinging bike locks — I was doing situps with a partner, standing on his feet as he did the exercise, when a bead of sweat--actually bead is too minor a word--when a 2L bottle of sweat came tumbling off my brow and struck him in the face. He immediately stopped the exercise and told me to towel off. Then he took a long look at my glistening face and said, “You drink a lot, eh?” This would not be the last humiliation.

The highlight of my summer this year was playing basketball with a group of fellow comics. My one and only skill on the court is trying really hard. This means I’m running around, jumping for rebounds, and yelling, “Switch,” frequently and without reason. This effort also produces an absolute geyser of sweat. I’m just dripping five minutes in. Once, after a game a friend asked me if I had just sprayed myself with a hose...I had not.  I normally bring four shirts to play, removing one after each game and ringing them about like a pioneer homesteader, before suiting up in one that is, ever so briefly, dry. At a show this summer I met a girlfriend of one of the guys who plays, and upon hearing my name, she went, “Oh, you’re shirt guy!” I nodded grimly. I suppose I was, and am, Shirt Guy.

This was also the summer that the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released another doom-laden report, the newest in a series of increasingly doom-laden reports they are in the habit of releasing. The report let us know with unsparing clarity that we are, uh, fucked. There is still “time” but we have to radically transform our economies now; so uh, yeah, we’re fucked. I guess a new summer tradition for me will be learning about small towns in British Columbia for the first time because they just burnt to the ground.

Usually, the future painted in these reports is almost impossible for me to comprehend. Wrapped in the comforts of my privileged existence, my mind would have to reach for the nearest dystopian movie for reference to compute the terror. I would be reading an article about how dire our situation is and have to think about the fire guitar guy from Mad Max playing a Death Cab song for me to register the appropriate level of alarm.

This summer though was the first where climate change seemed like more than an abstract horror. Maybe it was the aforementioned small towns burning down, maybe it was that weather forecasts started to include “smoky” as a possibility, maybe it was because when I talked to anyone about the weather, even my most conservative friends, we couldn’t help but say things like, “It’s getting a little crazy,” and then give an well-what-are-you-going-to-do shrug.

But most of all it was the sweat. That omniscient, ever-present sweat I spent the summer with. Caked into my joints, staining the backs and arm-pits of my t-shirts like the colour of uncared for teeth, making it impossible to wear a backpack anywhere. I saw my body slowly submerging in itself like a condo on the Miami coastline, the salty seas of my brows reaching unheard of levels and constantly lapping up against my mouth. This is the future that I saw for myself: hot, humid, wet and miserable. There will be no relief; no escape; no material breathable enough; no fanny pack breezy enough; no air conditioner powerful enough. My life will become sweat, all of our lives will. And there will be only so many shirts we can change into before there are none left.

Jordan Foisy is a comedian and writer. He has performed at the Just For Laughs festival and is currently a writer for This Hour Has 22 Minutes. He just released his 2nd stand-up album FRIEND DADDY, and you can follow him on Twitter @JordanFoisy.