The sun is high and hot. The coffee, left over from an earlier aborted attempt, is cold and separating between the actual coffee and creamy additives. I drink because it still has the tingle I need. Somewhere inside that tingle is the juice, the thing I can grab onto and ride for a few hundred words.

Something happened this week, but I'm not sure what. Nothing seemed as important as anything else. Summer has set in and beats down with relentlessly numbing heat. Thoughts either linger for days or are gone on the wisps of the hot breeze. By the time I can grasp something, it means nothing at all. Nothing that can help me move through this lethargy into a state of actual movement. Hours blend together and only register change by the amount of sweat coalescing in my shorts.

There is something here, but it does not want to be identified in any usual fashion. And so the unnamed continues on without drawing attention to itself. It will wrap itself around one of the nice shiny poles of candy, rot out all the sugar and fall to its death without signaling to anyone its existence.

Maybe that something knows where the missing intern is. The missing piece is really just a typo. We will find that the answers have been here all along, but they were covered by an accidental x for a g.

It all came into ugly focus late on Friday afternoon, after a frustrating morning of saying "There's nothing here. Stop looking. We're never gonna find anything," because I had to get off the train. I was only partly wrong, and the part I was wrong about didn't solve the problem. What fixed everything was a mixture of bullshit and innuendo, and none of this came from me. I couldn't do what was done to make everything right. And it was this realization--that I wouldn't ever be able to pull all of that out of thin air--that sent me drifting.

Turn the stereo up, take a few puffs and try not to move so much. Glean as much cool from the fans and open windows. Let it all drift away. Someone can pick it up downstream cause I've got no use for any of this at all.

From the vantage point of a mouse, everything is so out of proportion it becomes fantastically sci-fi.

But I can't really blame all of this on the heat of summer. This was a pause week. One of those times when nothing is really supposed to happen except for loud drunken conversations over the top of popping firecrackers. Much ado about nothing, as the old man said. We're so happy to see you, come again next year. Back slaps, hand claps and those little pussy crackers that make a loud enough sound to freak out the old ladies.

All I need is a good cleansing. And I pray to the skies every day for the clouds to bring rain. But I don't know the rain gods anymore, and they're pissed about this. Nothing like a forgotten god to really put the veng back in vengeance. Eventually they get tired of holding it all in like a night out when all of the bathrooms are either broken or full, and I become the recipient of back alley rain god pee.

Luckily, it'll be god pee, which is much better for you than regular pee (although, I've heard pee is good for your skin or fingernails or maybe it just brightens up the leather in your shoes) as far as cleansing goes. And I'll drink it in, feel renewed for another day, week, month...maybe. But I always want more than they'll give because I feel so good when I get it that it must last forever to really work.

The spigot gets twisted off because you can't water between the hours of 10 a.m. and 7 p.m. because half of the water evaporates instantaneously. And I'll crack and boil and fall into the little hole that has been home for the last couple of weeks. I'll stick my neck out again soon, but only when I feel safe. Only when it all becomes clear that the drift is over, I'm stuck in a bank of weeds by the rocky outcropping and the only way to get going again is to untangle myself and push off into the world again.

Matt Worley is dirty and sweaty and tired and wonders if you can smell him from all the way over there.