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journal - 2000-0831 - thu 2130 Heat, Speed, Guilt Summer's heat persists with unbridled enthusiasm. There have been 16 days in August with temps of 100 or above. Yesterday, it was 107 - the highest temp ever recorded for the month of August. There have only been four other times when the temp has been that high = the last was in the 1930s. When you walk outside, the heated air seems depleted of oxygen. You try to breath, but you only gasp. You feel surrounded by some unseen force pressing against you. You sluggishly canter from place to place; always on the look out for shade. The heat bounces and wiggles the light, and you are constantly catching odd movements from the corner of your eye, as though something had just darted around the corner. Tuesday, I worked late trying to coerce some web pages into presentability. When I left around six, I headed north on Ridgewood on my way to the grocery store. After a couple of miles, I noticed some blinking blue lights in the southbound lane. Then more lights - this time blue and white. My first thought was that there had been a terrible accident. But all the lights were moving toward me. Then I realized it was a convoy of police cars and dark vans speeding to the south. Far too fast for a funeral cortege. If anything, these cars were easily doing 50 or above. And doing it in a very determined manner. By now all traffic had completely stopped - either out of fear of being demolished or out of curiosity. Within a few minutes, they had disappeared and traffic continued. This had happened so quickly that I had only the vaguest sense of what I had seen. Yesterday morning, the paper indicated VP-candidate Dick Chaney was in town for some political fund raising. So what I observed had to have been his caravan on the way back to the airport. Gads! What a nerve-wracking way to have to live! Constantly surrounded by high-profile security, moving at high speed even down a residential street. Yet, given the violence of our culture, it has to be a necessity. A lot of my work lately has involved tinkering with html code; the kind of activity that is not overly difficult, but tedious and time-consuming. The type of repetition in which your mind bounces around tapping into odd recesses of the brain. Several times today, I encountered disconnected fragments from dreams I remember. Also, the electrons seemed especially busy in the area where the "guilt stuff" is stored. Why there? Why not the area devoted to kinky sexual experiences? Or the bundle of gray matter set aside for fantasies of me and the Backstreet Boys marooned on a desert isle? Oh, no, I get stuck with a re-hash of everything I've ever done that I've felt guilty about. Crap! PAX!
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