We're not in Kansas, anymore

It is hot... Hot heat with extra doses of warmth thrown in for a greater degree of hot. It was supposed to get up to a thousand degrees today but I think we topped that. The trick is to pretend you are a reptile. Move very slowly. For example it has taken me four and a half hours to write this post so far. My brain has also begun to slow down in the heat because the liquid that carries the thoughts around from one ventricle to another has begun to evaporate and thicken. My fingers feel like chubby, over-stuffed sausages. My eyes have begun to move independently from one another.
All the Israelis are like "So how are you doing? Hot?" all ready to mock me for being Canadian and diasporic. I tell them, "No. I find it really kind of disappointing this Zionist heat of yours. I am wearing cashmere underwear so that my private parts don't get chilly. Please, make it hotter." They smile and move away.
I finally finished Amos Oz's memoir "A Tale of Love and Darkness." Holy smokes that was some dark stuff. But really good. It took a while for me to finish it so I counsel patience for those with short, little spans of attention like my own. A friend told me that in Hebrew he gives more of his father's slightly pedantic lectures about language which sounds kind of fun, so I may have to go back and read it in Hebrew. His father for example said that the Hebrew word for a big mess, probably derives not from Russian as is comonly thought but from Persian where something like the hebrew "balagan" was the word for a small porch where you put rags to dry and may also have gone into the making of the English word "balcony".
He also tells a pretty funny story about how he was lost to the Revisionist movement in the early fifties when he went to a lecture by Menachem Begin who, in the climax of his speech, use an outmoded word for "arm" which in the Hebrew of the day -- and today -- meant "to screw". Begin, the fiery orator went on about how the nations of Europe were arming the Egyptians and England was arming the Egyptians, "But if I were Prime Minister, everyone would be arming Israel." Young Amos burst in fits of laughter and had to be taken out of the presence of his idol.
Now I have to get back to reading in Hebrew. I have been out buying books, for the kids and the grown-ups for when we leave the molten surface of the sun.