Heat exhaustion:

The heat wave that has gripped Victoria is getting bad - so bad that, even with all my windows open and my fans working overtime, I'm slowly dying of heat exhaustion.  I wake up in the morning, my muscles spasming, while a cheerful meerkat I've affectionately named "Simon" sits on my chest and tells me that I need to get more exercise.

(I'm pretty sure Simon is a hallucinatory response to my over-sized coconut brain slowly roasting in the dutch oven that is my skull, but I like him nonetheless.  He's nice, and he knows all the lyrics to "Johnny B. Goode" - including the ultra-rare version with all the cuss words.)

A few nights back, I was lying naked on my bed, my body gushing sweat while I prayed for my ceiling to collapse... killing me instantly.  It was 1:30 AM, and I had been in my bed for almost two hours, wondering how it was humanly possibly for it to be nearly forty degrees celsius in the middle of the night.  I was pretty sure God was playing some sort of Cosmic joke on the human species, with the punchline being "burn, motherfuckers, burn". 

With the thoughts of a fiery apocalypse in my mind, I finally drifted off, and had this lovely dream in which Simon was brutally murdering me with an ice pick.  We were in a meat locker, and Simon was humming "stuck in the middle with you".  It was a nice dream, because at least I wasn't hot. 

I woke up to someone shouting my name - "Dave!"  over and over again.  And then someone else was yelling it, too. 

I bolted up in bed, only then realizing that I was wearing my pillowcase on my head, and my medic-alert necklace was looped over one ear.  Every time I heard my name, my body shook and I frantically flipped around, looking first towards the window and then towards my door, unsure of which way to go.  In my groggy, sleep-addled hallucinatory state, I was sure these shouts were dire.

In reality, it was simply an argument between two teenage girls in the basketball court below my window, fighting over some guy named Dave.  A "Dave" that was most assuredly not me... but then, law of averages says that most Daves are not, in fact, myself.  There are a lot of Daves out there, after all.  I guess one lovely lady was poaching some other lovely lady's territory or something. 

While I was still groggy and sleep-addled, I had half a mind to walk downstairs and attempt to offer myself to both of them in some sort of offering of peace.  The other half of my mind had already cooked, and now resembled nothing less than a tuna melt.   

When I realized what was actually going on, my offerings of peace changed to wanting to lean out the window, shouting "shut the hell up!  It's two in the friggin' morning!".  But even as I considered this, laying in bed, sheets clinging to my sweaty body, I decided that was probably a bad idea.

Besides, Simon had already loaded my shotgun. 

"You know what you have to do," he said, handing it to me.