Record Heat.

Yesterday they broke the record high temperature by five degrees in Raleigh. We broke it by eleven at PTI. We're twenty-six degrees above normal. I need not report that it is not raining.

Today I was bitten by a mosquito.

At Pete's Grill, the old men at the bar can't believe Michael Vick's sentence is what it is. In a booth behind me, a woman held that 'generosity of spirit' was important to something, but I couldn't hear what, because a man named "Flat Jack" walked in, to the great delight of the old men. A damaged man on crutches came in behind Flat Jack, but he got no greeting. Specials today included both white and pinto beans, yams, mac and cheese, and cabbage. Cornbread pancake, of course.

I've got a spot here at 27244 where I tend to sit in fair weather to hold office hours, but they're running some kind of tractor-tugged leaf-sucking monstrosity back and forth across it right now. There are dudes with blowers blowing the leaves in the general direction of the tractor. Great cloud of leaf dust pluming across the campus, Don Delillo-style.

There are two days of rain in our forecast right now. We're also supposed to give back our twenty-six degrees, and then some. I am having a terribly hard time believing in science this afternoon, though, and Voyager 2's recent discovery that the universe is bent is not really helping matters any.

On the dogwalk I just couldn't quite get past the notion that everything had maybe died: that the temperature was correct, that we'd come through the seasons, but that the trees just hadn't made it, that nothing had leafed back out.

I can't quite tell what it is I need today, except maybe to go back to bed and try again, to sit out in the back yard with the dog, look west, wait for something to pile up on the horizon out there. The vista's gotten better: earlier this fall, the kids who live behind us took down their old freestanding treehouse with axes and a chainsaw. Right before it went down, one of the kids yelled out, Run! Then it went over, nobody got killed, and they started back in on it with the axes, with the saw.