The colder the temperature, the easier it is to think, the easier my work is. I can not communicate effectively — send me to re-re school — in hot, muggy climates. Writing in the summer, therefore, can be one rough ticket, a struggle which verges on Sisyphusean. Often when I read what I produced during a hot spell, the pages can look foreign, as if someone else wrote them. In a way, somebody else did. A madman. Or at least a not-very-happy-man.

As a preventive strike against the heat wave this weekend, I cranked the AC in my little office to maximum this morning. It is now 11:15AM and the sweater, jeans and long sleeve shirt are not cutting it. God, it just doesn’t get any better than this.