Dog Daze

I associatie summers with sweat.  Not hard-working, out-of-breath, honest-labor sweat, but unearned sweat, windfall sweat, the kind of sweat that appears on a milk glass when you pull it out of the fridge.

You step outside.  You stand perfectly still.  And you sweat.

Maybe it's not even sweat, just a kind of genera summer effluvium, like dew on morning grass. 

Or it's freedom, not sweat, a byproduct of the chemical reaction between your life's routines and warmer weather, the customary gone liquid, wetting the back of your neck and knees, running in rivulets down the small of your back.

I love these sticky days.  The cicadas swarm and the crickets chirrup and every hour lasts longer than you think it can.

Powerless

The power was out for 62 hours.  During that time, the full extent of my weakness, my mewling softness, was laid bare.  During the day, the sticky heat of the house sapped my will; at night, it stole my sleep.  And instead of flowing smoothly, the hours lurched and heaved their way forward like something out of a second-rate zombie film. 

 Or maybe the something out of a second-rate zombie film was me.

With no refrigeration, no stove, and no microwave, meals were sad: peanut butter sandwiches and takeout.  There was no coffee. There was no tea.  The dirty dishes multiplied and the mounds of laundry grew.  My work- Internet dependent- piled up undone, rendering me both restless and sluggish.  There were no movies.  There were no crosswords.  The only unread book I'd previously downloaded to my Kindle was a turgid legal potboiler of astonishing joylessness.  

Yes, my forebears walked sixteen miles in the snow to draw well-water, bearing their chilblains with good grace.  Yes, there are worse things than a dearth of reading material.  Yes, yes, yes. 

But I don't don't want perspective. Let there be light.