It's the middle of July. It's summertime. Of course it's hot. In fact, it's the hottest ever since we started talking about hotness and keeping records.

Still, nobody wants to hear that it's hot here in New Mexico. It's hot everywhere.

How hot is it? Hot enough to burn people's brains.

In the last couple of weeks, crazy shit has been happening around here--with deadly results.

Near Taos, a young man killed a couple of teenagers in a parked car by shooting them in the back of the head. He was in the back seat, left the car running and then took off. When asked about it, he said he just lost it. He apparently has a history of just losing it.

In Santa Fe, one teenage boy shot another because he thought the guy was trying to move in on his girl. The girl tried to stop him, so he pushed her out of the way, shot the guy once to take him down and then unloaded the gun into the body lying on the parking lot. This was at a shopping mall. The gun was the property of the shooter's mom's state cop boyfriend.

Last Monday in Albuquerque, a man went to where his ex-girlfriend worked (and where he had worked previously), shot her and five other people before killing himself. Two are dead. His ex is still in critical condition.

This was national news on Monday. On Tuesday, something equally sensational happened somewhere else in the country, so the national media eye moved away from us.

But as the week went on, we found out more and more about this shooter. He was crazy. He thought his former employers had put chips in his head and could hear his thoughts. So, I guess, he was out to prove his hypothesis. Of course, there were no chips in his head. If there were, I think there would have been much less carnage. And, somewhere swirled in his twice-baked head, was a bit of revenge for the mother of his twin boys. Luckily, the boys were not part of his plan--if you could call any part of the bloodbath a plan.

A few days later a mother of four left her two-year-old in the car for a few hours while she was at a clinic for an appointment to deal with her oldest son. The two-year-old died from the heat. The mother forgot how many kids she had and that one of them wasn't with her.

It's freakin' hot out there.

We broke heat records in mid-June. And, while July is always hotter than June, we haven't quite passed those high bars. Yet.

It rained one afternoon a few weeks back. In my neighborhood there was hail along with the hard rain. It brought down tons of leaves and branches. It also opened up a new hole in my roof. But it's all been cleaned up now. And the roofer has been by a couple of times to seal up different patches.

The water hose to my swamp cooler blew up on Wednesday night, causing a bit of a flood on the roof. I think the roof seals are holding so far. But we still haven't gotten any relief from this heat.

I'm just hoping we can all hang in there until the heat breaks.

Find ways to keep cool, everyone.

Matt Worley needs to make more ice.