Still Hot.

Sweet baby Jesus in an ill-fitting onesie it's hot. AMR, on the heat: it's standing outside in Gainesville in 1997 pouring sweat and drinking beer hot. AMR on the heat again: it's sitting on the porch on Mendenhall with RLF and BCF and taking our pants off hot. AMR a third time, recapping that first assessment: it's Florida hot.

The dog is hot. I let her out into the yard around 6:30, and she went back into the shadow of the outbuilding and stood and stared at me. Then she quivered some. She actually quivered. It's dog-quiver hot.

It's 11:01 p.m. and the thermometer on my front porch says 86 degrees.

The upstairs A/C can't keep up. We're lucky if we ride four or five degrees higher than it's set. It finally catches back up around three or four in the morning.

I had to take off my baseball cap. At the baseball game.

And it's still. The stillness hangs out on the edges. Fist you register how hot it is, how continually hot—the electrician who'll pull the permits on the outbuilding next week came by to offer advice on some of the prelim he's letting me do to save money, stood in the sun of my driveway, squinted, pulled a hand through his hair, said, God, it's hot—and then once you get hold of that, get the edges of that drawn in, then you register what else it is, which is still.

About that baseball game: we rode the Toad out to Burlington to see his first game. He loved it: loved the noise, the lights, the cicadas in the rafters, the music, the woman singing Green Acres, even the cheering post-solo home run, which caused him first to cry but then to continue loving it. He was hot, but who can blame him? We all were. It was hot. It is hot. This is ten years ago hot. TLK, a couple of days ago, when it was still hot, or first hot, or just hot, said it was as bad as it's been since we first moved here. And you'll love this, friends and fans of heat: it's meant to get worse before it gets better. The ten-day doesn't give us a break until Tuesday. Hot as it is, it's hard to believe even that.