The heat has affected my dreams

It seems the heat has broken today. It's only supposed to be in the mid- to upper-80s. How's that for a cooldown? Should be nice baseball-watching weather, then my plan is to head to the pool when I come home. I've been criminally negligent of the pool in our complex this summer, especially considering that I work at night. I've been to more baseball games -- and more games out of state -- than I've spent days at the pool. (I've also fallen off my workout schedule, but that's another issue I don't want to deal with right now.)

But I'm off tonight, so after an afternoon in Trenton, I'll add the sunscreen to my torso and grab a New Yorker or two and settle into a chair. The New Yorker is going to be the end of me. I haven't picked one up since we came back from California in April -- 12 issues await me, not counting the one that came yesterday, and two of them are thick, glue-bound issues rather than the standard staple-bound ones. Though one is the summer fiction issue, which I usually enjoy, the theme is "Life During Wartime," so I'll probably be able to skip most of those. In fact, my plan to breeze through these is to gloss over most of the "Talk of the Town," which is usually more timely stuff, flip through page-by-page only in order to read every cartoon, and require that feature stories hook me within the first five or 10 paragraphs before I move on.

I also woke up from four interesting dreams last night/this morning. Two were rather frightening, one was moderately disturbing and another was typical. Taking the last one first, I was walking along 9th Avenue or some short block off of it and ran into Hilary Swank, who had a younger brother or someone (too old to be a kid of hers) who wasn't feeling well and I got wrapped up in helping her. Not much else to it, except that she actually had some meat on her bones and looked good. The moderately disturbing one sort of flowed into the Swank one. I was watching cars trying to cross an intersection, perhaps one on Dyer or one of the weird hidden streets up around the Lincoln Tunnel, but they were fording a river of water halfway up their car doors. That one probably stemmed from the torrential rains we had last night, though I don't know of any streets flooding near the the tunnel.

The two frightening ones involved baseball and my job. In one, I dreamt I was leaving my currently enjoyable gig in baseball to go back to the soul-sucking -- to borrow a phrase from Jessica -- world of celebrity "journalism." How I ever got stuck in that cesspool for four years I'll never know.

And the worst dream of all, the worst I've had in some time, had me watching a Yankees game. In it, playing in what I think was his first game in the Bronx, was "former" Mets shortstop Jose Reyes. I found myself deeply disturbed, upset and feeling betrayed that Reyes had chosen to switch sides, leaving Sunnyside (literally; he lives in that part of Queens) for the Dark Side. (In a departure from reality -- as if Reyes in a Yankee uniform wasn't enough -- he had also made the move mid-season, as if players signed monthly contracts and became free agents in July.)

At least I can take solace in the fact that Reyes should still be a Met long after Derek Jeter has finished his run with the Yanks and, if Reyes were to make such a jump and perhaps replace Jeet, it would be after the Mets had gotten the best of what he could offer -- and hopefully a few World Series rings to boot.