--I COULD USE SOME GOOD ADVICE

…If you have a phobia, say, an intense phobia as I have when it comes to heights, well, in many ways, to others without said phobia (or perhaps any phobia), you will look once and forever like a wimp, if not even a fraud.  Fraud, because at first these phobia-free stallions can’t grasp what you’re fretting over.  But once they sort of relegate themselves to the consideration that your phobia might be authentic, if even only partially so, they reason and conclude that you’re something of a milquetoast. 

Thus, picture me yesterday, ¾’s of the way up the Notre Dame towers, having unwittingly climbed all that way, now standing quite literally at the very edge of the tower (yes, there was a cyclone fence, but still it was SCARY AS ALL HELL) with rambunctious French toddlers dancing between the legs of adults, everyone taking long-range photographs with the cell phones, saying “Oh my, doesn’t everything seem so tiny from all the way up here?”, me clutched to an ancient marble sphere while the GODDAMN BELLS or Notre Dame are not only ringing, gonging and clanging as if Quasimodo’s pissed off about something, but shaking and vibrating the very frail lattice I’m standing on…

Needless to say, I spent two of the most horrifying hours of my life in a foreign country, in an ancient, alien building.  Maybe I am a wimp.  Maybe I’m some other unflattering things, too.  But what I’m not is ever going up any tall tower steps again.  So help me God, I’m not…

…More on Paris later.