Southern Man.

May, and eleven-thirty at night, and it's hot out there—summer hot. Eighty degrees. Upstairs and downstairs A/Cs both at it, and not just because we've had windows open to ventilate the two different greens we tried on Edward James Olmos' walls. It's truly hot. With a wind, which seems wrong, or off, or bent, or mangled. Storms coming. Those same storms dropped nearly twenty inches in some places near Memphis and Nashville today. Here's hoping those folks had buckets handy. And boats. Here's hoping ours tomorrow aren't quite as damp. Here's hoping the temps back off, and the oil doesn't come onshore, and the risen creeks fall back mid-Southward and then here, and here's hoping all else that needs hoping for: we're six weeks plus a year and a half away from bedtime that anybody can remember or process, away from god bless Mommy and Daddy and who knows who might also need be added to that string, and let's just say I'm glad I don't have my brother's two-year-old to put down tonight, to lead through the ablutions to the deity of his choice or ours, to explain what it is we've done to the Gulf or to Tennessee or to our very own back yard. The world seemed complicated enough before we blew up the ocean. And now look.

We're hot for a week, say the fancies. I don't like it. Don't trust it. It always warms up in May, and last night saw the first mosquitoes of the year, and the irises are blooming, and the hydrangeas—what more summerlike than the hydrangeas?—are coming in, but still. Still. I don't know. Feels like it smells wrong. Or half-wrong.

Hang on in Tennessee. Hang on in all those Port St. Place-names down there Gulfward. It seems hard here. It is not hard here.