1. Martha Reeves' Heat Wave

I've never seen an egg fried on a sidewalk. I've imagined such things, like today, where the sidewalks were cooking and I was kicking dust and rocks up against my calves like a fine spray mist, to be washed off hours later during a midnight shower. Those Weber grill sidewalks could have poached an egg just fine.

It was too hot to run successfully, so I walked mostly, baking, cloaked in heat, toeing an imaginary line drawn between a stroke and a stumble. Since my jog had effectively doubled in duration, I had time to think - and invariably I think about two things and two things only when I jog: money and love.

Well for some, money is love. Hard-driving suits with lined faces and yellow teeth, scotch whisky, unhappily married and cheating, driven by wealth. Those men are too easy, too caricatured, too emblematic of an old way of life. I don't have it in me to know that sort of love.

(What an ugly word, love. Obscene, distasteful, histrionic, dangerous, unseemly. Love.)

So I'm not a suit. I'm a dreamer. Do you know that Nicolas Cage movie, It Could Happen To You? On a whim he promises a lottery ticket fortune to a beautiful waitress in place of a tip, and well...you can imagine the rest. I think about that movie 4 times a week. I think about puffing out my chest and raising up one corner of my mouth in that sly way I like to do, and declaring, "Well, its been a tough go for the past few years. Things are going to change forever now. I've won the lottery, and I'm going to be everything I've dreamed of." The details may change - unpaid loans, cars, vacations, a soft white leather shoe - but the moral remains ironclad. Money as catalyst for fantastical fork in the road.

Love is not so easy. It's an idea, a centerpiece really, around which the accouterments, hors d'oeuvres, and aperitifs of the opposite sex sit. What a spread - the colors and sounds and smells a nauseating carnival of which we have no hope of escape. Every detail, every text message, every glance, every missed connection a gastrointestinal laundry cycle of acute agony - but vital, as vital and wonderful as anything can be. Does she like me? Why haven't I heard from her? What does X mean, and how does it affect Y? Like my lucid money dreams, I fantasize about every possible direction a love connection could take. Every new girl is a Choose Your Own Adventure story, the kind that had you flipping pages as a kid. Go to page 47 if you kiss. Go to page 96 if the feelings are ambiguous. Sometimes, a particularly enterprising youth would cheat, and read the myriad directions before the actual prose. Maybe the trick with an adventure story - with love and girls and dating and that buffet spread of overindulgence - is to be honest, and read the story in earnest. Twenty-six years later, I'm still trying not to peek.