My brief stint sporting a mohawk garnered me the nickname Afuloos, which is either chicken or cockerel or ambiguous; a mohawk doesn't look so as great when you've got dead skin peeling from your dry as a dry log scalp. A bald head, however... I've been enjoying my oddly shaped skull, it goes well with my sunken sternum and lanky limbs, the resulting gestalt being a prescient look at alien life. If only I could make a low-pitched droning sound with my brainstem.
Epiphanies: 1- Be a person. 2- Enjoy. 3- Stop explaining yourself to people and instead begin telling them why, or at least how, their expectations are fucked.
More naps mean more opportunities to remember dreams. I woke up quite unexpectedly, at 6am, following some 5 hours of what must have been magnificent sleep. This awakening was neither startled and insistent upon the waking world, nor gravitously pulling back to the pillow; and so I slowly and noiselessly, like climbing an easy case of stairs, let the conscious mind trickle into my blood and the dreaming leak sandlike out. This part of the day, and it's inverted return as you float into sleep, is another of the reasons why I write in bed and generally tend towards spending time in or on bedlike places--the comfort of a bed admits some portion of malleability and magic into even the mid-day mind. I did not remember my nightdreams, no conscious direction for my jelly melon head aside of a few presentiments of the day to come afforded by my travel alarm clock on the nightstand, standing atop several notebooks and nestled between a book I'd put down the night before and my folded glasses, and the thin light paled through the windowpane. I had no intention of exercising before the time I could get breakfast once I'd finished. My muscles were and still are sore from the past days of willful action. I stretched in my room before walking up to the terrace and stretching, and then running back and forth. Why I don't run along the road, there is a sense of despair knowing you'll have to return the distance run, and fatigue in returning, calculating and again the proximity to the end, allowing yourself the irresistible stupidity of imagining repose, having finished. Treadmills, terraces, and other directionless apparatuses provide less inhibited spaces within which the will to will, the will to surrender, and the common sense to realise you're about to break something important may battle for the favor of the gods. Exercise is a masochistic exercise: the punishment and destruction of the self is supposed the means to constructing the desired self, a self which will accept ever more destruction, the teleology of which is, in theory, one of infinite deferral and thus even more attractive to our masochist. Then I ate breakfast and went back to bed. The second time I woke up, threads of dreams were still streaming from me. And how valuable are one's analyses of one's own dreams? Same as as regards others, I suppose: insights, blindspots, tint.
That evening I was talking with Youssef during one of our now nightly gin-and-tonic-on-the-balcony sessions, when he said something about Jews being the most powerful race in the world (not intending to compliment their strength of character), puppeteering governments the world over; the Jews have (had) a strong bond with God because they were sent many prophets, though they have a predilection for killing these prophets (going to have to fact-check that one), and so their refusal of Mohammed is an especially grave affront to God. Christians are simply not in possession of the Knowledge, and are therefore merely misguided; whereas the Jews, people of God, know the Truth and reject it, making them, ipso facto, blasphemers. This is not the first, nor the second nor third time I've been delivered this sermon, though in all fairness to Youssef, he was less preaching than presenting the case he'd been given. Jew seems to denote oppressor and conspirator in much of Morocco (and I can only guess much of the Arabic world subscribes to this image as well, given Morocco's religious and cultural lassitude in respect to, say, Qatar) as Arab means muslim means terror in a frighteningly large number of US households. I try to explain that what he calls Jew is Western Gov. and Co., and that Israel does not control American, English, European agendas, but that it is (if anything so clear-cut (fat chance)) itself the agenda of these organizations. We do make some headway, seperating religious jew from cultural jew, extremist nutball jew from jew like you and me, but how far can you get with the person sitting next to you on the bus or the café owner or the young man in the souk, when they are so sold on their framework and you on yours--so much so that we all begin to resemble members of different chapters of the Gideon Society, handing out our codebook to dressers in vacant hotel rooms.
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