If you're asleep all the time.

Days like these make me think of films or pictures where people go mad from the heat. Shirts are sticking, kids are running around with ice cream cones and hula hoops, dogs are in closed doorways with their tongues hanging out their open mouths. These scenes with, remember, those faded old Coca-Cola signs. Everything is a yellowy pale grey. And I don't like a sweaty brow, but hot skin is something so good you can't just imagine it. Maybe to another it's thought best to stay inside where the air is conditioned for comfort, when outside you can see how your eyes change. It gets so hot you can't touch anyone or anything, so I just stand up on my toes, as if either about to reach for something higher up there, or to step quietly enough to avoid a disturbance.

Some boats that are not steered.

I have been thinking about how strange it is, really, that some of the things people are held responsible for are not ever of their own accord. Our names, our birthplace, our meek bodies that we are gifted with and all of their wavering attributes, are not anything we had to do with. Yet people are looked at by others, and they by still others, with some sense of conviction that is, however it came, mutually understood. I wonder, though, how these roles are assumed, and how a person might shape their characteristics, the things they do have control over, around those attributes that happened to have fallen face up when cast upon the reverent dirt.