Some kind people have asked me to return to posting Thoughts for the Day, but because of time constraints I can't. I thought that "occasional pieces" might fit the bill, in part because the TFTD became more like prose pieces, and less short quotes. I will do these when the fit strikes. Anyway, a piece for today:

There are cities that have learned to live in the heat, but mine is not one of them. A Canadian city, it stutters between building for winter and summer, and satisfies neither well, but it is particularly bleak now, in the hottest of Augusts. Abandoned by the cottagers, and the rest huddled around their air conditioners, it has no life. I walk out in the baking streets, and my mind turns to scorching hot days in other cities, where they handle these things differently. I particularly remember one incandescently brutal summer week I spent in Toulouse in the south of France, when the desert wind, the simoom from Africa, late for the year, roared over us like bitter flames.

The city seemed to be almost made of the dust of the sky, the red Romanesque cathedral of St. Sernin appeared like some beached sand fantasy, and the only relief was that through the howling heat we could often see lemon and orange trees tucked away behind white walls, like momentary oases. Shutters crashed everywhere.
The heat never let up, but the wind would come and go, and one evening, while dust lay heavy on everything, the wind died down for a moment, and as if on signal, the entire populace came out for their long delayed stroll around the central market, greeted each other, and remarked as if nothing were out of the ordinary, on this and that, while above hung a blood red moon. "Autan" the waiter at the outside cafe informed us, brushing sand off our table. "That is what we call it here. Not simoom, Autan."

A small erudite crowd gathered around us. "Yes, and the dust is the dust of the heretics, the Cathars mudered by de Montfort, blown back in the face of Christendom," another, professorial type, said. A third said, "Have you read Dante, Dante, the Inferno, he came here you know, and the burning whirlwind of the desert where the betrayers are, this is where he got it from." "That is just legend," said another, "don't lie to the tourists." "No, no," said the Dantist, "it is true." We bought them all drinks, and then the wind began to pick up a bit. But still the elegant citizens walked and talked in the stifling heat, some with umbrellas, some just walking, hats off, swirling dust everywhere, but determined to make the standard evening show of it.

We walked back to our hotel, the wind rising, and I said I was going for a bit of a walk, it was so stifling, and she said I was crazy from the heat, and we had another bad argument, and I went back through the hot wind to the cafe in the now screaming wind, beating like pepper spray in my face, and asked to use the phone. And I phoned the other woman longdistance, the woman I was not travelling with, but the one I would soon leave the one I was travelling with for, and I shouted through the sandstorm to the amused delight of the patrons. And I put down the phone, and went out into the night wind, the vicious particulate quintessence of heat, like being bombarded by sparks and flakes of fire, and I walked around in it for an hour letting it strike me as hard as it could, pitting me with sharp pain, letting it get into my eyes and clog my nostrils and mouth, because I had been in hell for a long time, and was about to become a betrayer, and it seemed like the right thing to do, and then I went back, through the choking hot sandstorm, to our hotel.