After Saturday, the monsoons sort of subsided here, but not before stranding us in summer, or something very like it. Deaths and more deaths in Hollywood and Iran and an upswing in school's-out-for-ever gunplay in the 'hood and a mad, loose-at-the-pins sensation that is breezy or tense, depending on location and day of the week, and a persistent smell of garbage and Bernard Madoff's prison sentence and bad sleep and then funny dreams and also the beach and the future--