HAPPY THOUGHTS

While outside taking a walk, as I am accustomed to do for various reasons early in the day, a passerby saw me scowling. There was a black port-a-potty next to where the municipality is digging up the asfalt, for the convenience of the crew. It's already warm outside, that thing is in direct sunlight. By ten o'clock or so it will have become a death-oven inside. Port-a-potties, for people unfamiliar with the concept, are small toilet hutches, completely enclosed, so that the user may do in there whatever their urinary tract or digestive system demands be done.

Think happy thoughts, she said. As her dog did in the open what a hardhat wearer would later do inside the hutch. Which might be an outpost of hell by then.

Okay, happy thoughts. A river, rushing over rocks in a tropical landscape, with green stuff densely thriving on either bank. Same angle to the slope down which it cascades as the dusty urban street going up Nob Hill on which I trudge with my pipe.

Birds and bugs and crawly things in the undergrowth.
Monkeys, and scaled wrigglesome critters.
Puddles, mosquitoes.


Stick to the darkly shaded area where it's coolest. By doing so you won't attract the pesky attention of government troops either, and will be invisible from the main road.

It is crucial in hot climates to wear stout shoes so that you don't end up with scrapes that might get infected or worms burrowing into your soles. These are happy thoughts.

Always have one or two thermos flasks of tea in the kitchen. That way you will have boiled the water and can stay hydrated. A prolonged stay out in the provinces requires a supply of water purification tablets. In Iowa you will also need salt, pepper, a bottle of Sriracha, and a plane ticket out of there, because the natives are wild, tasteless, and profoundly boring.
Albeit very pleasant people largely without tattoos or piercings.

These are happy thoughts.


There are no monuments to ancient civilizations out in the valley, where in some parts it will get to well-over an hundred degrees Fahrenheit today. One hundred and ten. Almost as bad as New Delhi. Where there have been numerous heat related deaths. But some stores are air-conditioned. Linger near the aisle where cold drinks are sold. Also, buy a bag of ice for your living room later. Unless you're staying in a modern motel with all the conveniences and a back-up generator, where there's an ice machine on every floor at the end of the hallway.


A friend needs to go up to Chico two weeks hence. Which will be a treck. Buses to the trains, trains to the hinterland, camel caravans and a line of porters halfnaked and sweating in the hot sun as they hack their way through jungly scrub. Oh wait, I'm thinking of Stanley and Livingstone or King Solomon's Mines.

Still, rattle snakes in the shade, and meth-crazed rednecks.
I fervently hope he comes out of it unscathed.
And that he takes his pills.
Happy thoughts.



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