I really need to get more sleep. Between the heat (which broke this weekend, thankfully) and the pollen count and stress, I've been coming home and going directly to bed, do not pass go, do not update journal. I'm somewhere in that twilight state between awake and asleep now, somewhere between stoned and Undead, able to type but not so able to think.

Those passengers continuing on from my last entry may recall that I was whining about having to get my car inspected (after getting sixty bucks in tickets) on a day forecast for extreme heat (Friday, and 100° according to the readout in the car). I can handle cold well enough, but heat makes me wilt. Something about it just rings my bell and leaves me alternately dazed and bitchy. (Don't say it. I heard that.) I was not optimistic.

I wore my little blue sunglasses to make myself smile, and lo and behold, the world smiled with me. Even the inspection was painless. I took the car to a different (closer) station near Fenway Park this year. These guys do it like a valet service. You pull up front and they take it from there. Fast and friendly. They didn't even give me shit about having the seat up so far.

From inside an air-conditioned car, the weather was gorgeous on Friday, too. Nice day for a drive along the river, which I did until Micro Center's tractor beam yanked me in off Memorial Drive and set me drooling before a Titanium PowerBook in the Mac department. By the time I got through the checkout line, I had about five items of varying degrees of necessity. I'm dangerous in computer stores and hardware stores.

One of the things I picked up was a little silver-gray Acer scanner. Remember the situation with the old printer? Same problem with the old scanner. The new computer doesn't have a SCSI port for the old scanner. An adaptor costs around sixty-five bucks. A new USB scanner is under a hundred bucks. And the Acer is so tiny, so cute. Sold.

But (and you knew this was coming, right?) somewhere along the line some crucial communication was missed in my conversation with the salesman and subsequent purchase of the scanner. Like it doesn't come with Mac software. And I didn't tell him that I have a Mac. It didn't occur to me that a scanner appealing to the iMac crowd wouldn't come with a Mac installer. What's kept me from being pissed so far is that I can't figure out how I got so complacent as to do something so stupid.

Some friends and I went up to New Hampshire today to check out America's Stonehenge, a 4000-year-old archeological mystery site. Like Stonehenge, Mystery Hill (an old name for the site) is astronomically arranged and made of enormous slabs of rock by a people we know nothing about. But this is practically in my back yard.

Relatively speaking. It's in the mountains of rural southern New Hampshire, pretty and forested but just shy of Deliverance. The road to the site is marked with only a few small signs; you'd have to be looking for it to find it. And yet, the restroom in the America's Stonehenge gift shop bore a sign reading "For Customer Use Only." I spent a little time trying to figure that one out (who the hell else would be up there?) and finally decided that I didn't really want to know.

Once out of the Tacky Gift Shop, though, the place is beautiful. I love the mountains of the northeast. (I just can't live there.) And the site is mind-blowing. Whole rooms and passageways made entirely of huge flat slabs of stone. A point at which markers in each direction show the summer solstice and true north. And, interestingly, an enormous flat slab of rock with gutters cut (using rocks, mind you, think about that) all the way around and leading to a complex drainage system down the hillside. It's known as the Sacrificial Table.

This whole center of the site must have been essentially a theater for ceremonies. There's a ledge above the table where spectators could gather. And under the table is a system of rock passageways and chambers which allowed the priests to create some mad cool FX, including pumping out smoke from a hidden fire and speaking from a hidden room just under the table, as if an oracle were speaking.

A friend said they probably did hallucinogens before ceremonies, which, given (1) the human tendency toward mind-altering substances and (2) the prevalence of psilocybin mushrooms in the woods, was entirely possible. I don't know about you, but the last thing I want to see when I'm tripping is an animal -- or a human -- getting slaughtered. At least these days it's fake and on movie screens.

We crawled around the tunnels and theorized until the bugs and the allergies drove us out. As we were leaving, we paused by the stone marking the summer solstice, a chunk of rock almost as tall as I am, carefully shaped like the center of a sundial. "Touch it," Risa said, smiling, her hands on the stone. "It's warm."

And it was. As though warmed from within. It was inexplicable and wonderful and primeval.

And two car rides and two train rides later, I'm home. I'm thinking about the stone, and I'm thinking about what I know of New Hampshire geology, and I'm wondering whether the warmth was from the same radiation that gives that state its radon problem. Man, I need some sleep.