SON OF A BITCH​, there’s a cold snap and I do this number where I leave all the faucets running because my house, and most houses out here on the West Coast, aren’t “real”—they don’t have windows that go up and down, or basements (which protect the pipes in a way that a crawl space can’t), or sidewalks out in the front with a nice pair of towering oak trees or a couple of elms, which a real house will have, one of those good old Midwest houses. Out here the windows go side to side. You get no basement. No sidewalk and no real trees, just evergreens, and when it gets cold and snows, nobody knows what to do. An inch of snow and they cancel school and the community is paralyzed. “Help me, I’m helpless!” Well, it’s cold for a change and I guess that’s not so bad, because all the fleas and mosquitoes will freeze, and also because any change is something, and maybe it will help snap me out of this bleak post-Africa depression—oh, baby, I’m so depressed—but I wake up at three in the morning and think, Oh, no, a pipe is gonna bust, so I run the water and let the faucets drip and I go outside and turn on the outdoor faucets, which are the most vulnerable. Sure enough, they were caking up, and I got to them just in the nick of time, which was good, since in my condition there was no way I could possibly cope with a broken water pipe. I just got back from Africa, where I was playing doctor to the natives, got hammered with a nasty case of malaria, and lost thirty pounds, but it was a manic episode I had that caused Global Aid to send me home. It was my worst attack to date, and on lithium I get such a bad case of psoriasis that I look like alligator man. You can take Tegretol for mania but it once wiped out my white count and almost killed me, so what I like to do when I get all revved up is skin-pop some morphine, which I had with me by the gallon over there and which will keep you calm—and, unlike booze, it’s something I can keep under control. Although I must confess I lost my medical license in the States for substance abuse and ended up with Global Aid when the dust settled over that one. God’s will, really. Fate. Karma. Whatever. Anyhow, hypomania is a good thing in Africa, a real motivator, and you can do anything you want over there as long as you keep your feet on the ground and don’t parade naked on the president’s lawn in Nairobi and get expelled (which I did and which will get you expelled; okay, I lied, you can’t do anything—so sue me). On lithium, while you don’t crash so bad, you never get high, either, and all you can do is sit around sucking on Primus beer bottles, bitching about how hot it is when there’s so much work to do.