Ahhhh, a real summer heatwave, a real July monster, the kind we haven't seen in a few years. When the asphalt gets tacky and sticks to your sneakers, and the moment you step out of an air conditioned car, you can feel sweat pouring down the inside of your shirt. Air so hot it seems to cling to you with a physical force. It's almost like a liquid at times, not a collection of gases.

And then there's all the other heat, the heat radiating off the cars and buildings, reflecting off the glass windows and office towers, so that it becomes almost painful to walk across a mall parking lot or just down the street.

There's something amazingly powerful about this level of heat. Just raising the ambient temperature about twenty degrees above what we're comfortable with and it's too hot to do anything outside. The thought of pulling weeds in the garden, or just walking a few blocks, is horrifying. It all seems impossible.

If you've been inside in the air conditioning all day, maybe you should step out for a moment and savor that incredible heat. Look at the waves of reflected heat shimmering up from the streets; enjoy the impressionistic look of the smoky, white heat haze that covers the hills. Feel the way that heat gets into your shoes, travels up your body, and starts boiling your brain.

Funny to think that the photons that just smacked into you at the speed of light, and warmed you up even more, left the surface of the sun eight minutes ago. Those photons derived from energetic events, deep in the sun's heart, that took place on average a million years ago, when hydrogen atoms fused into helium. That energy was absorbed and re-radiated again and again, as it slowly worked its way up through the outer layers of the sun, all made of hydrogen gas under colossal, crushing pressure, due to gravity's massive fist. And then, at last, it reached the surface and was released again as photons and flashed out across the emptiness of space at the speed of light and hammered into you and your shirt turning from light to heat, just as they warmed up the concrete and the asphalt, and the cars and the trees and everything else that surrounds us.

So many of them, so much energy, it's mind-boggling to think about. And in heat like this, the mind boggles pretty easily.

And as we stand there, feeling that heat soak in, we're glad that we have comfortable surroundings to go back to, where the air conditioning is purring away and there are ice cold drinks in the fridge and all the other comforts of the modern world. Because, really, after a few moments, feeling that heat, absorbing its message, we are so glad to go back inside, to the coolness and comfort of our artificial world.