So there I was, perfectly documenting the race, the Corporate Challenge, for Middling City U in the swelteration and the good people under the tent gave Yours Truly a nice straw cowgirl hat for sunproofing. I asked Laura, who works at MCU, if, with my bitchin' shades I resembled Kid Rock. Her reply was a weak affirmative. Saddled with approximately 30-40 pounds of gear, trekking to the start, course and then finish lines I nearly faded out. Me + Heat = Bad. Memory drifted to the sun stroke I'd had in the Phillipines, when I hallucinated that I saw a man's head where the pig's should have been at a roast one beautiful evening. The daytime found me splashing in the South China Sea, and then hiding in the shade - with SPF a gazillion all the while. Then I nearly passed out in a bathroom but not before spotting one of the planet's largest cockroaches and then was put to bed for a day and a half in the bedroom of the family I stayed with, wealthy enough to have a generator-powered AC situation despite brownouts. And, once I drifted back to non-dream land, the fever dreamscape, I discovered the Qu'ran on her bedside table and read much of it. She, a Muslim, despite the sweltering Catholicism of the island Luzon, and the family she was in. Like many of the rooms of the wealthiest Filipinos, the walls were mahogany, restive mahogany left to its primal coloration, like the walls now of the room where I dream at the edge of the Middling City. Time for volunteer biz, to help Jon et al set up for Music Is Art Fest at the edge of Allentown's own, history-saddled fest.

Edgey Love.