it's so hot...

With the wind-heat temps roaring over a hundred and twenty and inside the car my fingers burned when I turned the ignition, my breath lost, I closed my eyes for the first seconds out of the lot and drove slowly in pain. Look at my back seat upholstery, it's all peeling. What the hell, this feels a little early, what awaits us in a month, hell in fifth gear.

Father pigeon is pitching in with the incubating while mother seeks what?  Food I guess, or shade.  Maybe sitting on the eggs in the sun prevents them from frying.  Fried pigeon eggs, nah, I’ll go vegan before I have to eat them little oval ping pong balls.

I’m reading student papers and one student didn’t use any punctuation.  Another student copied word for word from another student and yet another one was tipped off somehow and wrote his from his mobile.  Ya, buddy what does this word, obfuscate mean?  Why weren’t you more strict with those darn things, aside from showing disrespect, I mean the use of these brain stunters would have been less disrespectful if we were in a big auditorium and they weren’t ten feet in front of me.  Sheesh, because they are adults, in manner of speaking. 

Forty days and 39 nights to go.

I’m drinking a single glass of red wine because it’s supposed to help with an upset stomach which I’ve had all day and, I’ll let you know if it helps.  Can you imagine what life will be like in Kandahar, I can’t simply.  I think there will be a lot of work to steal away the days and that is good. What have I got to look forward to in life, a place to sleep under a tree when I can no longer work.  And to find that tree I’ll have to buy a tree and build a small room next to it when it is cold or it is raining.  Rain, I can’t remember what rain is like.  Good to know Kandahar’s winters bring the rain, sure I’ll welcome it until there’s too much but it will be nice.  I am so looking forward to this job because there’s nothing in San Francisco.

The moon looks pretty damn full outside my window but the almanac says tomorrow.  Howling winds raise the sand, why do they say dust on the news, it’s sand, we live in the world’s largest sand trap for crying out loud, which is a good thing for asthmatics.

In the ‘Sixth Extinction’, down in Brazil’s Amazon forest, less than one percent of invertebrates become extinct every year, invertebrates that have yet to be discovered.  That is a thousand species gone, gone but never known.  Are we simply in a cycle that is accelerating because of man, yes, does it mean mass extinction, well, according to this book, it’s a slow slow extinction, one our children’s children may not see.  Scientists have data but they still fall to speculation.

You sound like you’re beginning to doubt something.  I’d like to see snow in Muscat, falling snow, six to eight Detroit like inches.  I’d like to see a hundred degree temps in Alaska, ok, I wouldn’t like to see that, that would be scary. 

I get the feeling the local faithful aren’t exactly jumping for joy with the approach of Ramadhan this year.  Fourteen hours of light, temps in the hundreds practically all bloody day.  I think I’d have to sequester myself with books and the most comfortable bed to suffer on and under the sheets.  I like the idea of submitting to a higher power for a month by fasting but really, if the higher powers want you dead in obedience, I don’t know if I’d like that higher power anymore.

At the end of this week our director flies to Baghdad and will be there for three weeks if he isn’t blown up.  God speed and be with Dr. Ali, oh great and mysterious benefactor, for what reason would you not keep him from harm’s way, oh indiscriminate reaper, you got free reign to pick us off at will.  Job was protected wasn’t he, God told his half brother (you believe that?  I don’t know but sometimes ya gotta wonder if the cosmological collusion is still happening)  do anything with this fine godly man except take his life, which is the one thing Job wanted.  See, you can’t always get what you want.  

It's so hot 'Stairway to Heaven' is 24 minutes long.