It's that time of year again.

Time to watch Constantine and note how the scenes in Hell seem just like the 101 Freeway on a Friday in August.

I've been wondering if maybe my life IS like a movie - M. Night Shyamalan's Sixth Sense comes to mind. Like maybe I've already died, and gone to Hell, but they've just been very busy doing inprocessing because of the war and they haven't been able to schedule my orientation yet.

Any day now Satan will show up with my Welcome Packet and a bag full of coupons for local retail outlets; he'll apologize and mumble something about "understaffed" and "longer wait times than expected". But at least it'll be good to know that I can give up on waiting for this to end; the only real difference between "Eternal Damnation" and a Phoenix summer is that, in one of them, I have to pay the cooling bill.

But Silas has been doing well; he's been riding his bike 15 miles roundtrip to McDonalds, and doing it without complaining or whining (sometimes his mom gives him a ride about halfway, to the Anthem border where cars can't go through but bikes can).  He's gotten into much better shape while doing this, as well.

Ethel seems to be adapting, too - but, then, she only leaves the house briefly, if at all, and then just to give Silas the aforementioned rides to the end of Honda Bow Road. Like Gremlins, we cringe in terror of the big Bright Light outside (and we never eat after midnight).

I'm the lone holdout - I resist the summer. My first year in Phoenix, I tried to fight it by going ahead and trying to live my life as though the summer didn't exist. I tried to go ahead and run and train and live my life just as though it really wasn't 115 Farenheit out there.

This wore me down to a nub by September.

Now, instead of fighting it, I'm hiding from it; I haven't ridden my motorcycle to work in well over a month. I only run out of doors in the wee small hours of the morning. I refuse to go out back and play pool on the back porch - it wears me out, whether I'm sitting or standing.

The monsoon season is here, but the storms haven't happened yet - which means that we get the humidity without the cooling effect, and no water on the ground anywhere. Just big dark clouds in the sky - and they don't show up until late afternoon. If they showed up earlier in the day, then they would reduce the amount of solar loading that we get; it would stay COOLER because of the shade.

Since the storm clouds wait until the sun is low in the sky to show up, then all they do is help to retain heat that would be radiated away from the dry ground. It's a conspiracy, I tell you.

My therapist sent me this quote that she saw at the Botanical Gardens downtown:

"The most significant lesson that desert dwellers can learn...is to regard themselves not as exiles
from some better place, but as people at home in an environment to which life can be adjusted."

                 Forrest Shreve

                                The Cactus and Its Home

I'm in the "adjustment" phase, I reckon.