My summer vacation felt like a body. Mine felt like a river. It’s generally useful to build up a number of unreasonably applicable metaphors that seem to withdraw profundity from just about everything. It’s the only way you’ll produce what we could call meaning from something as acrid and mercurial as summer. You can best accomplish it with a process that formally resembles titration. 

Here, part of that titration with the metaphor of a body as titrant: I went to India, and I didn’t get sick, even though I took the malaria prophylactic less frequently than I should have; on the train from Jaipur to Delhi, I realized I didn’t have a train ticket, and even for foreigners, the Indian transit police take this kind of offense with moderate seriousness, and unfortunately, I had spent all my cash in the city, so I had no real outs, and a guy I met on the train informed me that I might have to spend a night in the jail in Rewari if caught, but I had work the next day, so that couldn’t really happen, so I hid in the train bathroom for more than an hour, and the squat toilet sloshed with human refuse, and the whole thing felt like a dream; I listened to a lot of The Doors when I went on runs; I sweated a lot. 

And so on.

Charlie Nuermberger, EIC