My mum used to live in an old farmhouse with a few acres out back that she rented to the dairy farmer next door. He used the land as pasture--his herd would come over for light snacks in the afternoon. Before going for walks I would always check out the kitchen window to see if the Holstein girls were in sight. They pissed me off, those cows. Dropping big pancakes of soft poop in the grass, turning the ground all lumpy with their hooves. The worst of it was the way they would gather around in this slow, knowing, Far Side sort of way, and then start to follow me on the walk, like they were showing me to the damn door already.

I'm sort of afraid of large grass-chewing mammals. I wouldn't call it horrifying, just that, well, they worry me. The long lashes and the sideways chewing. The girth, the weight . . . You could be trampled or gored at any moment. Naturally a place like India isn't a great place for the bovine-phobe. Ditto, the flip-flop aficionado. I am both.

This photo was taken in Rajasthan. It's my friend Dutch screenwriting friend Stephanie. My complaints about elephants were similar to those pertaining to cows above. Only bigger.



A few days after this photo was taken, Steph and I got whacked on bhang lassis, then wandered the back alleys of old Jaisalmer, bumping shoulders with each other, looking for the front door of our guest house. After a few hours of slogging, when the sun had gone down and the brick facades were starting to ooze together, we found our door. It was locked. After having this stoned, loud and, I'm sure, pretty retarded debate about the appropriateness of knocking, the door squeaked open and a swathe of household light fell upon us. It was the proprietor, a very tall old man with two front teeth shooting off at odd angles like the walking fingers in the Yellow Pages logo.

I must say at this point that we were stratospherically high. High to the point of hallucinating, so that this man seemed to grow even taller as we were standing there looking up at him with dilated Mickey Mouse pupils. Like Dad, like God even. He let us enter, then gave us a lecture on walking the streets at night, which seemed extra hilarious given the secret-code, multi-tiered sense of irony we'd been honing to a sharpened point on the walk home. Then he started psychically probing our minds, which really blew our brains out. He knew exactly what countries we had visited and what we'd eaten for dinner a few villages back and even the bored, loopy, traveller-thoughts that had been cycling through our heads like clothes going around in a dryer.

Later, when Steph and I went to bed in our side-by-side bunks, we fell asleep with our eyes wide open, trying to think the cleanest, blankest thoughts possible. It took us until the next afternoon to sober up. And to figure out that the old man had rummaged through all of our belongings--including our journals--while we'd been out getting high.