Summer? Wait just one red hot minute there!

You're up? Can you rustle me up a snack then?

90º? No. Really. 90!? 'Scuse me – this is Boston, New-fucking-England and it's early May!

Yesterday, without much of a spring at all, we hit full blown mid-July summer. The heat felt great until I tried to go to sleep. I’d not put the AC in the window because, c’mon now, spring had, until yesterday, been très cold – no need. Right? April just took her last bow – we won’t have AC needful nights until mid-June, earliest…right?

Yeah well…NO.

Because I was oh-so-tired and didn’t realize until way late that chilled air was a mondo necessity, I didn’t excavate down to the closet’s inner core, where my AC spends most of the year. I didn’t carry that heavy mother into the bedroom and stick it in the window. Nope, I did not.

Ya see, I know myself quite well. Each year as I install that beast I’m rippling with panicky fear.  I’m certain that, any second now, I’m gonna lose my grip and the damn thing’s gonna tip out and plummet downward. I know it’ll crash through the porch roof, (killing poor, unsuspecting visitor cats and possums) and fall to the yard where it'll leave a vast, Tycho Crater-rivaling hole. Next big storm, this will assuredly become a permanent great lake. We won’t, then, be able to escape flooded basements and, of course, the possibility of drowning increases exponentially.

Hypnos and Thanatos – John William Waterhouse

Installing the AC, as you can see, is a life and death business. I need to be fully awake and at peak strength. OR I gotta get Oni to do it.

Which I will today because it’s gonna be steamy again.

Meanwhile, I lay abed last night, hopelessly, fruitlessly attempting communion with good old Mr. Sandman. Around 3AM I gave up, thinking Sheesh, had I known Sandy would be a complete no show, I would’ve gotten up – wedged some clay, started a new painting, paid bills, cleaned! Nah, more likely I would’ve just read. I’ve got a stack of new titles that I’m psyched to dive into.

I’m nearly done with Sherman Alexie’s memoir You Don't Have to Say You Love Me. WOW! It’s not just a story of his difficult and complicated relationship with his mother. In poems and prose he talks about his childhood bullies, brain surgeries, bad acne (I can SO relate!), his bi-polarness, language (his mother was the last fluent speaker of the Salish language), urban versus reservation Indian-ness and more. It’s messy and beautiful. I feel inspired to pen a fan letter which, if I’d know Hypnos was gonna duck me ALL NIGHT LONG, I could’ve done hours ago.

Sleep. It’s like sex. You know it’s good, but you don’t know just how good until you’re not getting any.
~ R.J. Keller, Waiting For Spring