PERFECT WEATHER FOR SPAM AND GRITS

The weather has been a bit colder these past few days, which makes the streets at night seem unfriendlier and more worry-inducing. It's a blood circulation thing, people from the next generation down probably would not feel that way, being still filled with vim and vigour at their age. Unless they're from a tropical part of the world, in which case they're saying "it's so frigid here, Gringo, how you can live?" Which is why we seldom see Texans at this time of the year. Oh wait, they flee their state in droves when there's a cold spell.
I've heard Cancun is full of them.

In Florida when it's cold the lizards fall out of trees.

No Floridans either. We are so lucky.

Also, we have no falling lizards here. And Cancun is too far for our uglies. The closest we get to either of those are shapeless lumps under scraps of foam and tattered blankets snoring in doorways downhill from the building where I live, or occasionally muttering "got a cigarette?"
If you pass by just after dawn and they haven't stuck their eyes out of their blankets and observed that you are a pipesmoker, and thus considerably less likely to have a spare cigarette than normal people wandering the streets at that hour.

I actually did have a spare cigarette, because I sometimes carry a pack of Camels -- that great advertisement from the fifties with the doctors sharing smokes and coffee after doing housecalls and operations still speaks to me -- but not any extra coffee; that was drunk before I left the apartment for my morning smoke.

Also, I recognize that worry induced by cold is both more extreme than it used to be, due to age, and coffee simply tweaks that a little further. So I do not let anxiety dominate. I am not a tourist from the rest of the country scared that a violent drug-addicted transgendered insane person will throw human faeces at me with no warning if I step outside the hotel, and why are there no sandbags or fat southern sherrifs with guns guarding the perimeter? Where is the machine gun emplacement? The concrete bunker with ice tea? The potted palms so necessary for our discomfort? The nearest Waffle House?

This place is uncivilized, heck and darn it, we want to go back to Alabama!


North of the DMZ, there is almost no homeless poo on the pavement. Most of it is around large chain hotels near Union Square, where it will be replenished daily for American tourists and visiting Fox News reporters; they've grown to expect it. BTW, that's also where we keep the Fentanyl-addicted Midwestern immigrants. I have not seen anyone shooting up or defecating in public in nearly five years, and I actually do get out much.

I just don't go near Macys, Nordstroms, or the tourist zone.

Or wherever they serve California Pizza.



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