Late yesterday, I discovered that my first investigation into the required immunizations and innoculations was missing an important piece of information: if you enter directly into Tanzania, you don’t need a yellow fever vaccination card, but if you are entering multiple Sub-Saharan African nations, it is required.

So, I’m sitting in the back of a cab in the mid-wilshire district en route to go get some injections (I’d be on the red line, but there was a gas leak at MacArthur Park).

In any case, my morning was spent on the Gold Line next to a lady named Jewel who spent part of her late teens in Kenya and Uganda. Her parents were in the foreign service. Apparently her father was a teacher who worked in conjunction with the education systems in those respective countries. I guess they actually entertained Idi Amin before his rise to power, when he was just a guy with ideas…not a mass-murdering f$#%head. Much how my dad’s aunt entertained Saddam Hussein in the late 60’s when he was just a wealthy business man looking into trade and economic partnerships with the nation which would one day bring him down – maybe Ruth cooked him a bad meal. Ha, what if?

In any case, this was yet another happenstance, a signpost on this journey, filling me with faith and reassurance. Things have just worked themselves out one after another. All I’ve had to do is just get out of the way.

Shit…again…I just left the clinic after spending $400 on typhoid, yellow fever, meningitis, and polio vaccinations, and the RN administering the shots said she grew up with Malcolm X always around her house – her father was part of the Nation of Islam. (Maybe I’m being lame, but it’s just a bit weird that the first time I saw the movie about the man was in my family’s living room in Zanzibar.) The world is very small today, and my veins are coarsing with life…and a few dead viruses, to boot.