More Julyness

I forgot to water either the lawn or the sourgrass plants last night. They both need it badly. It's best to get the irrigation done by night, to minimize evaporation. I suppose I could go out and roll around on the ground for a minute or two, or even just wring out my shirt over the flower bed. In fact, my personal consumption of The World's Most Popular Beverage has gone so high in recent days that I probably constitute a threat to the local watershed all by myself. Perhaps the Paradise Irrigation District would find it beneficial to subsidize my temporary removal to some other place, where I would not be putting a strain on their supply. If they offer to put me up at the Fairmont in San Francisco, I don't see how I could refuse. But there's no way they're getting me to stay at any place like the Fresno Holiday Inn!

Ah, my brain has surely been damaged. I'm having more and more of those moments when I space out and lose track of time. I go to do something and forget what I was going to do. I start a sentence and then

My spider is still missing. I've had a slight irritation in my right ear for two days. I hope these things are not related.

Eggman

Sacramento's high temperature today was 107^o. Gazing in the valley's hazy direction, I saw that rippling of the air which one sees above a conflagration. If the wails of the dying were visible, they would look like that. One hot day, when I was about eight years old, my mother said that it was hot enough to fry and egg on the sidewalk. I sneaked an egg out of the house and cracked it open on the cement walk in the back yard where the summer sunlight had made it so hot that it was painful to walk on with bare feet.

I was greatly disappointed that the egg failed to fry, and my mother was quite annoyed when she discovered that I had wasted an egg. When I pointed out that frying an egg on the sidewalk was her idea to begin with, she told me that it was only a figure of speech, and she made me wash the egg off the cement with the garden hose. I remember the egg residue clinging to the stems of flowers in the adjacent bed. Some of the water evaporated as it came in contact with the cement, and I watched the vapor drift and rapidly vanish as it was absorbed by the dessicated air. If my thoughts then had been made visible, they would have looked like that.