IT'S A BEAUTIFUL RIVER, BOB

Every year at this time on certain forums the plaintive cry is heard: "it's freezing out there, the heater in my garage is buggered, my wife won't let me smoke my pipe inside, I have relatives visiting for the holidays and I have to get away dammit how do you guys stand it?!?"

Indeed, I know how the poor fellow feels. Yesterday I smoked one pipe on the way back from the curry place, and another after teatime fully bundled up on the front steps mere inches away from the frigid downpour.

So I'm sympathetic to the suffering of that man.
Oh boy golly gee yes.


Naturally I do not show it. Instead, I respond with a statement much like the following: "yeah man, the wheather is unseasonable here too. Over eighty degrees. I usually have a pipe on the veranda of my bungalow looking out over the slow-moving Hooghly early in the morning. Distantly a peacock screeches. Probably on the river's opposite shore where the fields come down to the banks. The air-conditioning is out, electrical grid problems. Drongos and mynahs are foraging several feet away, they have gotten used to my presence. Lazily I lift the glass with sabja biji jala and take a sip. Mmm, quite refreshing. I am looking forward to mustard seed fish and rice for breakfast."

Hooghly river, river full of fish, and river of the eastern dream. Teeming with carp, and trout, and hilsa, and perch, and bream.
------ M. Python

It's a lovely fantasy. Warm weather, cooling drinkie, nice spicy shorshe ilish, a muddy tropical river. I'm sure that Bob in Michigan can sense my deep fellow-feeling for him stuck there in the horrible blizzard just south of the Canadian border. Where there's five feet of snow, the gas heater is on the fritz, and his relatives are super-swozzled on extra-strength egg-nog and holiday punch, setting fire to his comix collection to keep warm and yelling at him to stay the heck outside with his stinky dang tobacco, you heathen!

Today I'll be mostly smoking indoors. Admittedly in the same building as a bunch of odious Trump voters with stupid opinions, dammit, but inside, away from the rain, and reasonably warm. I'll ignore the senile gibbering. And the smells they generate.

Did I mention the drongos and mynahs?
Those are common there.
tropical birds.



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