Fever Dream.

Woke up from this dream: I'm on a bus/boat, touring some part of the world with a large group of folks, including an ex-girlfriend, who's asking me how my life is, and I'm saying it's fine, that I live with my colleagues out at the puppet show in a tower that overlooks a waterfall/spillway, that I've got a new baby and a book out, and I ask her how she is, and she looks around the bus/boat, where people are eating little European sandwiches that we've all just bought in some giant mall, and she shakes her head, rolls her eyes, says it's all so big, says she can't tell me now, not like this, says she'd have written it all down but she didn't want to waste the pencil/it would have taken too much pencil to do the job. And in the dream, I thought, oh, for fuck's sake. Then I woke up to the crying Toad.

A heat wave will I think damage even your dream life. Those sandwiches sure looked good, though. I got out of bed wanting one.

The plumbers were here pre-eight to drop the shower in, and when I went out to talk to them it was so nice—well, it was so much nicer that it was last night at midnight—that I saddled the Toad and the dog and headed for the park, which was a fine idea in the shade, but an increasingly terrible idea in the sun. There was a point early in the walk when all seemed well. Later in the walk, though, it started feeling like it was all going to take too much pencil.

Hot. It is hot. Oppressively so. Atlanta-circa-early-eighties hot. Open-the-door-and-get-pushed-back-inside-the-house hot. Nashville hot. If we try, we might hit 100. If we don't, we'll just wallow in the mid-to-upper nineties. Maybe a storm. Maybe one tomorrow. Later in the week looks better for sleeping, for framing writing sheds, for saddling dog and boy, for porch, for anything. Right now I just want to get inside this shower and run the water cold.