It has been sweltering, and so I have been resultantly melted in both posture and emotion, a sauntering display of sapped energy, a puppet with no master, shuffling pathetically from sidewalk to side street to wide street to main, where parades of soft-legged dancers swing effortlessly in the sun, sweating in a way that is glistening, swaying by gracefully and standing in stark contrast to my own way of sweating, which is a clammy, soggy affair, soaking through even the thick denim of my trousers to show wetness in shapes more suggestive of incontinence than hotness, or overheatedness, as hotness is a word reserved only for the participants in this parade, who swing their legs so high it makes you imagine their heels pressed against your forehead, shifting their weight onto your skull, testing its strength, seeing how much you can take before you give, before you wetten their heel with that which has so long and heavily plagued you: the frontal lobe: the genesis of all human disaster, bringing acute awareness to its haver of the differences between styles of perspiration, and leaving him waterlogged but still ever-desperate for precipitation, a desperation which leads to fantasies of skies grayer and blacker than he imagines death to be, blotting out the sun which sweats him and shrouding the earth in darkness, before opening up so wide the ocean could pour through and soak his denim, saturate it so thoroughly no dancer could tell what wetness was what, and his and her skin would drown or glisten in very much the same way, and if she stood upon his skull she would slip before he caved, and in the best case land in his open arms, saved and grateful, ready to be placed back into her parade, or even carried home.