Infamy! Infamy! They've All Got It In Fa Me!

I wonder why things so often look more beautiful when in parallax, is it the excitement of a contemporaneous revelation and concealment, creating an object grasped by the mind in multiple intimacies smoothed in motion rather than the asperous edges of cubist pastiche? I look out the side window of a grand taxi, the hills the clouds the ocean. The clouds cast their insupportable shadows onto hills folded like fabric or skin, trod over the ocean and sunset, but lightly, somehow. The clouds are habitual, they inhabit your sense of the sky and disappear into themselves. The hills are habitual, the ocean is habitual. The horizon wanes, you are full of forgetfulness, and the world becomes like a thin sleep over you, eyes, skin, fingernails and all. Indulgent prose perhaps. I've found myself slipping into this decadence with some frequency as of late, as if my mind is trying to enchant itself and swallow the intellect. I am conscious of this lullaby, but am mesmerised. Feels like underwater fits and starts. Hoping the trip to the Spanish border this week will do me some good, that the movement will provide a revitalizing parallax of consciousness. Ran back and forth between cities North and South of Mirleft, trying to renew my visa without leaving the country. Too many kilometers, 200 dirhams in bribes, 3 days, several dopey motherfuckers and 2 upholstered doors later, I succumbed to the bureaucratic hope-vacuum. In fact, there was a hotel just next to the gendarmes station, called The Crazy Hope--should I have seen it coming?

The past week the hotel was filled with men of less than average height, the women were unremarkable. I met an aspiring novelist and an actress, both of whom upset me with what I perceived to be a lack of magic. A more likely source of my dismay was that they both seemed preoccupied with the practical outlying territories of their respective arts, which thus invested our exchanges with mediocritization of the sublime and infected me with this same preoccupation. Now in recovery. I have been making a bit of headway with the project I'm at; believe I've got a handle on one organizational thread, which should be enough to suss out the others and weave it all together.

Oh yeah, and here's a little story Youssef likes to tell sometimes when on the subject of religion:

a muslim came to a jew and it was ramadan. he needed a loan and his friend the jew next door could probably help him out of the bind. knock, knock, went the muslim at the door of the jew next door, his neighbor. the jew came to answer the door and was wondering who could it be at the door. it was the muslim looking for a loan and he said so, asking the jew. the jew said come in neighbor muslim and share a meal with us my family, and then we can sort out whatever needs sorting out, on a full stomach and with a clean mind. it is not yet sunset, said the muslim from next door, and it is ramadan, and therefore i cannot eat with you. i will eat with you after sunset, but the loan i need now, my friend the jew next door. the jew said, no, just come in and eat with my family, my wife has prepared a sumptuous meal plentiful enough to nourish the russian infantry. but it is ramadan, and so i cannot, replied the muslim. just share our table with us and i will give you your loan. and so the muslim ate with the jew family on ramadan, desperate for a solution to his financial crisis. when the meal was cleared from the table, the muslim asked again for the loan his friend the jew neighbor next door had promised him the muslim who broke his fast on ramadan. the jew took him to the front door, next door to the muslim's front door, the house's threshhold, and said goodbye. and what about the money, the bewildered muslim demanded. to this the jew replied: if you are not fearful of your god, how will you be fearful of me when i come to collect my recompense. the end.