The temperature went up to ninety today, so I thought it wouldn't be utterly retarded to wear a heavy black T-shirt and walk two miles from a random place in the city to the train home. I really do love my urban hikes, the way hiker hikers let nature into their private mind-world, it's the same for me, except with paved roads and less poison ivy. They're great for thinking journeys, where I'm just a bit too active to be bored senseless and still on autopilot so I won't be distracted... except that it's ninety-degrees, garbage day on the Lower East Side, and Fish Day in Chinatown — but everyday's Fish Day in Chinatown and that's part of its charm cause, you know, fresh fish should smell sweet and not at all fishy. It is a bad day when the bubble tea shops, jewelry dealers, and hairdressers all reek of rotting eel, too.

My only problem with hiking, or exercising in general, or often just sitting in my car, is my integumentary system and how it could easily keep a couple acres of rice paddies irrigated. If my glands also produced soap, I'd never need to shower again, and one of these days I might just inject myself with lye and emollients to save myself that trouble every morning. Instead, I keep plodding along, pretending I'm that guy who the Discovery Channel drops in the middle of nowhere and he has to walk back to civilization with only a half-empty water bottle and fifty pounds of camera gear. It's exactly like that.

I shouldn't bitch — well, I wouldn't bitch — passing by the courthouse complex, where everyone wears a dark suit, dark pants, and a tie. I tried that shit once, and I left the wardrobe moist and overwhelmed with the sense that if God wanted mankind to wear three thick acrylic layers He would have kept the ice ages going and the woolly mammoths alive. "At least they'll be drippy and shiny as I am," I figured that if they're going to be young, attractive, rich, and lawyers, at the very least they could be oozing saltwater and cresols. But they're not, probably because — cheap lawyer joke coming — they're cold-blooded.

Hah! Maybe I should've been more straight-forward and gone with "lizards?"

My urban hikes are good times for thinking.