cool

Yesterday, D and I went on a (blessedly rare) trip to the land of Big Box Stores. Although our errand was fruitless, it did provide us with an excuse to spend ten and twenty minutes at a time in wastefully, profligately, despicably chilly air-conditioned blocks of concrete, only to goggle at each other in genuine shock when we stepped out again into the brain-cooking heat radiating off the blacktop lots.

The cold felt good, but returning to the brutal reality of the heat was almost worse than never leaving it.

Just as I started slumping bonelessly into the truck's bench seat, D surprised me with our last stop: an ice cream parlor. He has a milkshake; I have a float. We both chose orange sherbet, recent determined by an independent panel of coolologists to be the coolingest of all the flavors.

D is full of surprises, roughly five percent of them involving ice cream.