Baby, it’s hot outside!

Or so I’m told. I can’t go out on account of being in a deeply committed relationship with my air conditioner.

When I was a teenager, we spent the summer baling hay in weather like this. I haven’t been a teenager for a very long time. I’ve had plenty of years — decades, even — to wise up, and the wisdom of the gray-headed says hug your air conditioner. Or burrow into the cool of the basement.

The old adage proclaims if you can’t take the heat, stay out of the kitchen. When this heatwave is over, I’m going to need a map to find my way back to burners. For now, I’m content to gnaw on frozen peas and carrots.

For all of you people who complained about freezing last winter, I don’t want to hear a peep. You wanted it to warm up; I think someone forgot to specify when to stop.

In the winter, you can layer on more and more clothes. In the heat of the summer, there’s only so much that you can shed without grossing out the person next to you in line at the ice cream stand.

It’s not like you can unzip your skin and sit on your bones and hope for a breeze to whistle through your rib cage and cool your innards.

At least if you do strip to the point of public indecency or just plain grossness, and you need to flee an arresting officer, the chase will never heat up above a walk. Or a waddle. It’s too hot to run.

How hot is it?

I consulted a few great philosophers, and this is what they said:

“I saw a chicken lay an omelet.”

“The chickens are laying hard-boiled eggs.”

“The hens are picking up worms with potholders.”

“By the time I got home from the grocery store, my bacon was cooked to perfection, and the vegetables were already soup.”

“Not only is it hot enough to fry an egg on the sidewalk, but you can use your mailbox as a toaster oven.”

“It’s so hot that polar bears are wearing sunscreen.”

You get the idea. It’s hot, hot, hot. And ugly.

The great philosopher Ray Bradbury once wrote, “More murders are committed at 92 degrees Fahrenheit than any other temperature. Over 100 — it’s too hot to move. Under 90, cool enough to survive.

“But right at 92 degrees lies the apex of irritability, everything is itches and hair and sweat and cooked pork. The brain becomes a rat rushing around a red-hot maze. The least thing — a word, a look, a sound, the drop of a hair and — irritable murder. Irritable murder, there’s a pretty and terrifying phrase for you.”

Or as the great philosopher Jane Austen put it more succinctly, “What dreadful hot weather we have! It keeps one in a continual state of inelegance.”

And the great philosopher Walter Winchell once observed, “It’s a sure sign of summer if the chair gets up when you do.”

One person said, “Thank goodness it’s finally hot enough to justify my laziness.”

Another complained, “I got home and wanted to take a shower, but my wife used up all the cold water.”

And a third moaned, “Dear summer, stop showing off. We get it. You’re hot.”

The great philosopher James Dent proclaimed, “A perfect summer day is when the sun is shining, the breeze is blowing, the birds are singing, and the lawn mower is broken.”

Well, Mr. Dent, the mower isn’t broken. It melted.

That’s OK. Not only is the grass wilting in this heat wave, but plastic plants are wilting, too.

How hot is it? Hot enough to elicit fond memories of shivering in January.

For all of you who wrote, “Stay cool,” in my high school yearbook, I didn’t. It’s too sweltering for that. Let’s meet up again in December.

It’s so hot that Cool Cole might even learn to drink iced coffee even though he dislikes coffee. Tell him to chill out at burton.w.cole@gmail.com or on the Burton W. Cole page on Facebook.