I remember poking my grubby little girl fingers in. When it was hot enough to boil the pavement, I would risk permanent stains on my shorts and the soon-to-follow maternal scoldings to pick pop puncture the tar bubbles with my grimy miniature finger nails on the Dead End street where I grew up. My five year old mind thought I understood something about being a dinosaur. I'm pretty sure I didn't.

The asphalt is boiling in Santa Fe today. I can smell it. A black toxic perfume trapping me in the heat, like a dear in headlights, like a lizard in hostile consideration, like a white skinned human in the high desert, 7,000 feet up, experiencing lack of oxygen, sun stroke and heat exhaustion as record highs are recorded at 94 degrees Fahrenheit and she pauses, still ... unable to move for fear of a relentless climate's demise.

To peril by dehydration. Oh, to have the life sucked out of you. The water is the life and I am a bored, rebelling teenage raisin huffing chemical fumes for the sheer headache of it. I drink more water again and my skin splits open in various places - a washed up movie star with plaster of Paris cosmetic foundation and flakey glass shard lip implants. Maybe I do understand dinosaurs after all.

I entertain myself on this New Mexican sidewalk curb by observing heat waves making optical illusions on the horizon - bending light - literal time travel. Can you imagine the visuals we will get if global warming continues, or if we were suddenly in the lava path of an active volcano, or if some kind of Bikram Yoga class went arry: Standing Bow like a dish of Jell-O, gyrating yogis and fun house mirrors. Hallucinations based on the retina. Upsidedown and hitting the back of my parched desert brain.

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