Welcome Back To Weekly

the middle of a sentence! There aren't many other ways to go about that, now. Last time we saw each other, I left abruptly. And so today I woke up in Paris, a habit I picked up a few months back. I haven't been speaking much French lately, which I'm hoping means I've improved. During Daniel's visit, we spent most of our time in an apartment that would make my mother cry––walking through the red velvet curtains at the bottom of the stairs leading up to the front door is your first introduction to the Paris you always wanted. Daniel put it best, describing the expectation felt while sitting in the salon, that Gertrude Stein was bound to pop out of a dark corner and begin professing a doctrine having something vaguely to do with the upholstered walls and at the same time sprouting cauliflower from her fingers and toes, completely unawares. There are paintings everywhere, carpets blanketing the floors, windows looking out on postcards. This is the kind of environment that makes you feel you deserve it.

Fitter. Happier. More Productive. (It's True...)

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.

Twice-Converted

One of the first things you'll notice driving the highway from Agadir to Tangiers is that there are cops holding what look like 19th century cameras at right angles to their eyes while dressed in their pretty suits and standing in the bushes. They only pop up every half hour or so, thus greatly reducing the chances of actually photographing one of these marvelous creatures in their newly adopted habitats when speeding by at a whopping 80km/h. Thanks to the French plates on Emilie and Sliman's camper, we didn't have to bribe our way out of any bullshit. The first night we stopped in Marrakech, I ate brain and slept in a tent just off the highway. Wasn't too keen on the sleeping situation, but the camper blocked my tent from sight, and I have strong enough lungs to wake up Emilie and Sliman 5 feet and one metal door away, if need be. I was refreshed in the morning (think it was the brain) and ready for another day of driving and music played too loud. Being on the road is almost a surefire bet to spark a rash of optimism, and it did...more or less.

The second night we camped in a mobile home lot. The most precious memory of this place was walking into the public bathroom and watching a guy combing his hair in the mirror; nothing particularly odd, it just struck me. Next day Emilie and Sliman dropped me in Tangiers as they made way for France. Took a bus from Tangiers to Ceuta/Sebta, a Spanish city on the Moroccan mainland. Whoever says Spain isn't part of Africa, I'd like to give'm a knuckle sandwich. At the border I was approached by a Moroccan with immigration forms, proffering his pen, telling me what each line required (It's okay, I can read English. French, too); I knew where this was going, but for some reason or other, allowed the drama to play out. After the form was filled I got the money hastle, responded with a reprimand (pliantly accepted!), gave the guy 5 dirhams, and was called a good man by an on-looker (couldn't tell if he was mocking me by playing the Uncle Tom). And so I went through the border and explored Ceuta for about three hours before heading back from "Spain" into Morocco. Three hours was enough for me to get a sense of this border town--everybody looks like they've done something wrong and they're trying to blame it on you. The people who live there know what they're doing, and the people who move there do, too. Also, I stopped by a gas station convenience store to pick up some Christ of the Sea mussels, fruit juice, a fun-size can of Pringles with which to scoop aforementioned Christ of the Sea mussels, an ice cream sandwich, and a 70 centiliter bottle of Gordon's Special Import Gin.

With my booty in tow, I walked toward the Moroccan border. This time, instead of letting the immigration slip get out of hand, I just took it from the guy offering them, said thanks, and walked on to the line ahead of me. He attempted to explain the sheet to me and I told him it was in my language, so I didn't need his help. He went back to his perch and muttered something in Arabic I could tell was directed at me, and so I asked him --What? --what? --you said something and I didn't understand --you didn't understand? --no, I didn't (everybody in line is looking over their shoulders despite the cordial affect we've both taken on) --oh, I said thank you --hmm. That was it, I filled out my form in peace and waited in line until this man was moved (good will? resignation? respect?) to tell me I could find a shorter line for non-Moroccans around the corner, and indeed, I did. The Moroccan immigration officer gave me a bit of grief, but stamped me through in the end. Then it was a bus to Tangiers and the night train to Marrakech. Then the bus to Tiznit. Then the grand taxi to Mirleft. And I'm back. Hard travel turned me into a grump for a day or two, made me want to make someone cry so I'd cry. On the up and up, now; finished a poem (though I don't believe it is finished with me) which is over on The Euphemist, enjoying not having to do anything I don't want (to do) or my body doesn't require (from me), playing at various virtual personalities. Narration is an ironicization of the self. Is that even a word?

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.

Let's Assume (X) Until We Have To Assume Otherwise

The other day Phil, an Englishman who's been travelling for the past 9 or so years, and I walked up a hill to the ruined old Casbah. Why was it ruined? Well, the damned thing seems to be built of sandstone. Kids take ten minutes with a rock and they've carved their name a quarter inch deep into the old barracks. As we walked back into town, Phil wanted to stop by a work-working shop and pick up a present for one of his grandkids. And so we did. A young man and woman received us, Phil bargained for a trinket, the deal went through. And out we--no, wait. The man tells me the girl wants to know my name: Jacques. He says she wants to give me her phone number: I take it. Do I have a number: Well, alright. She wants to make me a present I can come by to pick up tomorrow: No, too kind, don't want to put you to any trouble. No, it's no trouble... Boils down to me saying I'll come back to receive my present from this girl who has yet to speak two words, let alone allow an expression to pass over her face. We left. The next day I played chess and did not visit, though at one point the man from the wooden-things shop walked by and asked if I was coming: yeah, later. And so the next day, I returned, alone. Salaam Aleikoum... Nobody in the shop, hurrah! Oh, here she comes. I'm brought to the back room and sit down with the family as they finish their lunch and coerce me into eating with them. Jacques, from America, not married (shit, why didn't I lie? curiosity, I suppose), travelling alone, no, he's not my father, staying in Mirleft for a while, from America, Chicago... You get the point. The two of us get sent off by the rest of the family to go back to the house and get the present she's prepared for me. I'm suspicious, not without reason, of everything going on. They could be sending us off so later they can claim I took her virginity and have to marry her--two things of which I will not be having a part. We go, she speaks French poorly and asks me about France. I attempt to get it across that I'm from America, not France, and the furthest I get in this endeavor is instead being asked about life in Mauritania, but this only lasts the length of a goldfish's memory and then we are back to France. We arrive at the house and knock to be let in. No answer for some minutes, and I say pas grave, I don't need the present now (or ever). We are permitted entrance shortly thereafter. Zahara goes into a room and pulls out a diamond-shaped wooden block with the initial J inlaid in silver. She asks for my e-mail, we exchange e-mails. She suggests a walk to the beach. Oh no, alright. It takes about half an hour to walk to the beach, the sun is strong and she's wearing a parka over her sweater without complaint. She talks to me in fragments about money and Morocco being no good and France is the promised land and how I am pretty and we could get married. I respond with the opposite tack, parrying and feinting for each thrust. I say I don't believe in marriage, that it is a form slavery, that France is a hellhole and Morocco is paradise, that money means nothing--laying it all on as thickly as I can, while trying to remain in her good favor so that she wouldn't go along with attempts to defame and marry me against my will should such events come to pass. At the beach, we come across Crazy Ibrahim--I have a witness! No, but he's Crazy Ibrahim. We sit and talk about more of the same nothing, her scalp is greasy and she's wearing a parka over her sweater in the strong sun while trying to make conversation which is obviously floundering. I feel bad for the girl and am slightly upset with myself for being in this situation. She teaches me the Berber word for rock: azrou, and we go back. I say goodbye, as does she with a tint of defeat, and hope this to be a story without sequel.

Another the other day, I passed a dead dog in the dust, repassed it some hours later and it had lifted its head to pant some pants and I thought how could this not mean something, how could this not be shouting at me to listen up. Then another day there was a baby donkey outside the internet
café pushing its snout at something in the dusty right angle where street and sidewalk end one another. And some other day I came across a litter of new-born pups in a cactus patch. Just thought I'd share that.

Brief example of how to reread this blog: The other day Why was it ruined? with a rock and they've wanted a young man wait, the man phone number. Well, don't want alright to tell you she wants to make me to give me no trouble...

The things we save for people about whom we care less.

How Do You Tell Your Good Days From Your Bad Days

Two new poems posted on The Euphemist, one of which might be very good. And I've still got a mild case of cold feet for a mohawk. The maids make my bed every day and the room smells good and not like me. Found peanut butter, but it needs a slight honey modification. I feel as though I've lost the capacity, or just the will, to express myself in coherent narratives. Have become fond of (or trapped by) ambient, enigmatic expression, as though my words are the expositional section of the fugue of my consciousness, sounding out the subject and it's false answers. I demand a synthesis from the dialectic between the comforting solipsistic thesis that the richness of life is more important than that speculative inference which leaves no room for living, that steps make the path and living is the frontier of life, and the paralysing historico-objective ideal antithesis. Synthesis or dissolution. Many people and flying daylight. A German photographer took some portrait shots of me; it was uncomfortable to think myself the object of our attention, the disjunct between me as a face and me as a me, and don't get me wrong, and attention, and management. My god, always the same face, hair, body--I'm surprised people don't get bored out of their minds looking at each other. Uncomfortable until I realized myself art object and collaborating artist. Playing a few games of chess a day and finding this same fugue-like interface with the world keeps me from caring too terribly much about much other than constants imminent and eminent. Respectfulness and deference) are oftentimes avoidances of interaction. People are different on vacation, I think. I'm getting more sensitive to enjoying people, so that when they leave it is as if I'd attached a little piece of my heart to them, feeling the pinch of pain and regenerating tissue. Phil, Mehdi, Marie, Hussein, Chase, Norbert, Megan and others.

A non-feeling like white cow in a snowstorm occasionally; of sentiment a wall discovering, others.

Allah's Inbox

Hit Essaouira--bust. Some beautiful sights, but it smelled and was too windy. Windiness begot coldness. Touristicness begot overpricedness and unloveliness. Bad sewage treatment begot smelliness and smelliness begot queasiness and queasiness begot discomfortness and discomfortness begot dementianess and dementianess begot departureness. Genealogies of knots and dissolution. It wasn't all bad, however; I met a few people, rode over a meter-wide stream on a camel's back, realized how much I actually do love long walks on the beach, climbed among the ruins of a palace once inhabited by royalty, then Jimi Hendrix, now goats, sand dunes, and brush. I began outlining the novel and was met by disastrous disaster, which was mitigated by a small influx of ideas the following morning--what wonders the sleeping mind. Not to mention another book idea, which I had already started before having the idea of it. I was struck severally by whole stanzas of poetry. It was good, but felt too easy, as though I'd reached a plateau and now need to find the next sheer face of rockish headspace.

The bus to Agadir was driven by a madman who made the baby behind me cry and the kid in front throw up. I nearly lost my lunch, too, and I hadn't eaten yet. One more bus and I'd arrived in Mirleft.

Simply gorgeous. Even the ugliest thing couldn't help but feel beautiful, or part of something beautiful, here. I've already met about half the population of the town; on the whole, they are the most welcoming and sincere people I've come across in the Maroc. The only drawback being that once you step onto the street, you are immediately hailed to 3 different cafés and have to be a person, or at least person-like (personesque?). It is unfortunate my photos aren't registering when I try to upload them to this blog; imagine the pastoral shots in "Brokeback Mountain", only with the Atlantic to one side of the rolling hills and Italian clouds. Getting along swimmingly with one dude in particular, Rachid; it's nice to click.

Right off the bat I rented out an apartment, which I have now left for the social scene of a plush hotel on the cow-and-pumpkin main strip. And when the cow eats the pumpkin, eveybody goes home. The mother who owned the apartment I'd rented for some few days tried to guilt me, frenchlessly, into staying and then proceeded to foist a gold ring upon me. I fought off this gift for ten minutes and did win out (out of which I did win?). Firstly, I didn't want to be indebted to her, as she was almost surely going after, or after which she was most surely going (but where? and before which?). And then there is the little piece of information I'd read in Lonely Planet and retained for some reason or another about the Berber people thinking of gold as evil, in which case, I was trying not to accept a cursed gift. Curses and tricks aside, the family was hospitable to a fault.

With some luck, I chanced into a few good people I'd met around Morocco--Aliya and Josh from Chefchaouen from Canada and Dave from Essaouira from the UK (uk?). Funny little town it is. Rachid told me of what he called the Tradition of marrying a French girl and moving to France. Then somebody else said Crazy Ibrahim went crazy after theiving in the mountains for some time and the villagers across the board all prayed he would stop. Then he was crazy and everybody witnessed the quick turnover period of Allah's incoming messages. That being said, the empiricist in me would counsel you that if your prayers aren't answered quickly, don't hold your breath.

He Was Drunk And Everything Seemed Hilarious

Last week in Marrakesh was my last week in Marrakesh; this week was Rabat staying with Noel, a Cameroonian soon-to-be kinesiotherapist who reminds me of Henry Miller. Noel's taken me on as a little brother of sorts, and is one of the few people I've met in Morocco with whom I feel I can interact as a whole self. And tomorrow I leave for the windy beaches of Essaouira and Mirleft.

Went to a bar with two Germans I'd met in Marrakesh and who were passing through Rabat. A Moroccan who apparently lived in the States for some 25 years began talking with us. It was hilarious--I understood where the Germans were coming from, where the Moroccan was coming from, and where I was coming from, while each of them appeared to be in the dark concerning anyone else's take on the interaction. The Moroccan, Mahjoub, told us his cousin owned the bar and that it's for, surprise, prostitutes (not surprise prostitutes (I think)). He bought three or four rounds for us. I went to the bathroom and some drunk walked hunched out of a stall, telling me, "oui, vous pouvez entrer, et soyez le bienvenue au Maroc":yes, you can go in, and welcome to Morocco. I filled three hands worth of notes that night. Wondering, though, if this note-taking is vampiric, like photography; an admission of impotent neglect of the moment, where the place is absent from the self and the self from the self and the place. Still chewing on that one--if you don't like the answer, ask again.

Met back up with Sabir from Chefchaouen, he studies here in Rabat. Was treated by him and his friends as a philosophy faucet to spew out conjectures on various prompts. Didn't do much for the ego, as I didn't greatly value those objectifying me as teacher thing.

In Marrakesh I accidentally ate a semi-rancid eclair after having left it out for two days. That afternoon some guy starts up a conversation with me and I talk to him, as he doesn't seem bad, per se. He invites me and the Germans (Andreas and Laura) to drink a coffee with him, okay. He wants us to buy hashish, less than one gram for 150 dirhams--ridiculous ridiculous ridiculous. The going rate is 20dh/g is what I tell him. I make it known he is not on my good side, moreover that I do not like him and tell him he can leave us. Just then, Laura comes over and suggests we all go to the alcohol market together. Laura and Andreas are new and have not caught on to the fact that this guy is no good. We go. It occurs to me that Laura looks like what I'd imagine Emma Gerstein, Ruth's childhood best friend, to look like at her age, 21. We have the same birthday, I think only the second person I've ever met with the same birthday as me. We go to the alcohol market down the stairs of an unmarked door with a man standing watch. It is mayhem down in this cramped speakeasy-like place, people coming and going as fast as they can, trying to escape the eyes of God or the king's police. I tell this dude who has tagged along with his cousin that he needs to pay for his beers if he wants any. Of course, he has no money on him and promises reimbursement, he just needs to go by the post office on our way back to Djemaa el-Fna. It is nearly 8pm, the post is closed and we know this. Things are confused, we all leave. He starts telling me to translate to Laura how he wants to spend the night with her and how she is beautiful and stupid shit. I do translate in hopes that she would understand this guy is an ass. No definitive luck. The guy tells me I don't trust him and I sat yeah, that's how I am. He responds by saying he hopes we become very good friends. I say inshallah--if God wants. We go for dinner and beforehand I ask him if he has money to eat, since he didn't have money for beer. Beat him to the punch so there's no oops, I have no money or oh, I thought you'd invited me. He says he's not hungry. We eat. We go back to the hotel and he is still pushing hash at Andreas and dick at Laura. He drinks 3 of their beers without asking, spills by my bed without saying anything about it, and I find the puddle upon coming back to my room at the end of the night. Didn't see him again and all the happier for it.

Rabat has been good. Looking forward to creating a new space for myself. Over and out.

What Comes Of The Idiosyncracies Of An Unwitting Solipsist?

I picked up a poem I'd started one night in Fés, it's now on The Euphemist. Just a little thing. Now revising a story about which I don't know how I feel. It's been happening a lot with narrative lately, my own and others--I just don't seem to have that discriminative faculty to the same extent as I used to. Easier with poetry, but not hugely. It's as though, paradoxically, the more I look, the less I see--the more perceptive, fewer borders drawn--enchanted by language rather than any particular usage, everything being good as what it is. We'll see, I guess. It is both disconcerting and exciting to be mystified by even myself, to fall into formlessness or habit and not know into what degree of either one falls. The joys of particularity are envisioning imperfections as perfect, or at least as radically uncertain (joyously arbitrary). Either I have lost some assumptions or they have become invisible.

I feel sane, and in a good way. There are a few gnats in my room with whom I've been trying to figure out how to make friends, but I keep forgetting this and blowing them away when they get close. Not that they are substitutes for humans, or even for pets, but curious presences. Curious presences which I can personify while zoomorphing myself. Still, there is sanity in this.

My words are leading my thoughts, unsteady ground of intuition does not belong to the order of trust and accountability. Words coming before meanings, the watery movement, easy and

I met Jalal 2 at a café and he said I was only two minutes late; I pulled out my watch and it said I was on time. I showed him and said perhaps my watch is off, I can change it later. It was very Moroccan of him to tell me I was 2 minutes late and not give a thought that he may have the wrong time. Perhaps there is something implicit in making a rendez-vous that one must arrive early to avoid being late. I do not care. A man passed by in a three-wheeled wheelchair-like contraption appearing to have some degenerative muscle disease. Watching him and imagining how much he must rely on others, how decimated his independence, I reflected on how ridiculous was the man strutting by in his leather jacket that he walked with what appeared to be so much self-importance or so little fragile humility or such misplaced values. This I read into/projected onto twenty seconds of some stranger's day. I feel very human.

We went to see some tombs, there was a room for children. All those little unknowing bodies. Then we saw two palaces and waited to meet up with Jalal's girlfriend. I accidentally drank tap water, but it was fine (which reminds me for some reason of someone's story about arriving in Delhi I think during a flood and seeing dog carcasses being swept off on the tide). The girlfriend arrived and was cold cold, clearly upset with Jalal for something and not willing to humor anybody. Jalal was dopely trying to pull her hand onto his thigh and she pulled it back again and again as he lovingly told me several times how she was his "puss" and asking isn't she pretty. I should have gotten up and left, but instead I left my body at the table and refused to take on any awkwardness.

That same night I went with Jalal 1, Premier Jalal, to the hookah bar, Audisia. He and another worker, Mustapha, and I walked in the same direction as their boss, who was on his way home. When our path diverged from his, we waited about 20 seconds and turned back around to hail a cab. As we turned onto the club's street, the cabbie asked if we were going to mosque. We entered an unmarked door to the side of the main entrance where the Italians and I had entered the week before. Apparently the downstairs is for the older crowd, described to me as a livingroom. We ascended a staircase and came into a room of benches, music, and smoke. Neon lights outlined the moulding and strobed slowly all night. It seems as though the drinks are half as expensive if you come with your own Moroccans. Everybody was having a good time together, not trying to prove or judge anything; I was relatively at ease. A girl named Selma sitting with us began smoking a cigarette with her navel. Another girl picked me out to dance in the crowded space narrowly afforded by the benches. Reticent at first, I danced and began to enjoy myself, getting compliments on my dancing and then another wave of constriction. She looked at her watch while dancing and I was loose enough to freely be myself in the midst of whomever, so I took her wrist and pretended to study the watch, mockingly approving of the time. I sat down and the girl continued dancing at me. Jalal remarked approvingly, "look at the waves" of her butt. Her eyebrows were very precise or painted and not very expressive, her face was some mix of uncertainty, thoughtlessness, and boredom. She bent over to tell me something. Give me money. I laughed and said what? She repeated for me and I laughed again and she talked to Premier Jalal. He told her to knock it off, we hung out a bit longer and then called it a night. I have resolved that the next time I am propositioned by a hooker, I will tell her she can pay for me.

One does not learn to dance, but unlearns what keeps one from dancing.

Peeing in the Bidet and Other New Developments

I have fallen in love with Bollywood. Let it stand at that.

The best reason that's been invented for why not to do something is, in some capacity, "other people". Awaiting the approach of an obligation only to watch yourself not attend to it, as you knew you wouldn't, one feels the terrific feeling of not being reliable, a reclamation of self. I have let many of my relationships in Marrakesh fall into silence because I recognized I did not actually care to nurse embers. I am glad of it. Apologies and excuses make us overly sensitive and violently obsessive; we lose our good faith in no hard feelings.

The aquifer of self-possession has been replenished. In thanks, the hard laboring migrant workers of The Fragmented Beings of Personland have erected a new shrine to the inchoate Muses of Possibility, as stipulated by contract. In sum, everybody is very happy for not having to starve this season.

The other night, I went with Daniele and Alex, two bright Italian guys, to an alcohol/hookah bar. There were paintings of leopards on the walls. One practically had to walk on table tops to get to an empty, yet somehow still crowded table. Heinekens cost 5 euro, as much as a nargila for the three of us. Occupying one corner was a keyboard player enamored of ethereal sound patches. The other corners housed speakers through which burst the voice of the man walking through the backalleys of chairs and striking earnest Star Search poses with his cordless microphone. The smoke was sweet and the walk back to our hotel was wholesome fresh air. On the taxi ride over to the bar in the ville nouvelle, we talked about the origins of the shift from matrilineage to patrilineage, on the walk back to the medina we discusses whether the women at the table next door were hired by the men with them or what. A brief encounter with an unintelligible man who seemed to be claiming he was Bob Marley and knew Jimi Hendrix and wanted a cigarette. We walked by Club Med Medina and into our hotel, where Daniele and I had a discussion about ethics and metaphysics and Alex fell asleep with his socks on.

It has become foolishly easy to spot hash peddlers. Notice, without looking, the man who has begun to walk ten seconds after you've come into his field of vision, setting a trajectory which will lead him just in front or behind your own path. He will hiss "hash" or "good stuff". It used to be I would stop, smile, say no, and attend the rebuff; now, I softly bark no without breaking my gait, without moving a single disc in the spinal column. Making a phone call at one in the morning, I watch eyelessly as the trickle of men to and from Djemma el-Fna pass by, each man stealing at least a glance in my direction. The night is degenerate, and I'm not just saying that.

After reading the Autobiography of Malcolm X and listening to The Sacred Harp Singers, I have decided to become a black firebrand and singer of hymns in the Sacred Harp and Shaped Note style. On my road to these lofty goals, I have begun peeing in the bidet rather than walking down the hall to the toilet. I wonder if anybody ever thinks --hm, did somebody pee in this? Or in sinks, even. Not me, but it isn't unimaginable in a room without a bidet.

Happy Birthday Ma!

Experiments in Friction (Part 1)

There is a man who walks blindly (whetherhe is blind or not, I do not know) down one of the streets joined to Djemaa el-Fna, proffering a palm and tapping a cane infrequently as he grinds out from his mufflerless larynx, "Ana! Ana!" That is, "I am! I am!" Another mutters "Allah! Allah!", and another prostrates himself before the multifarious assembly with one hand in the road and his head to their feet. I stick to the lesson I learned in Florence to give only for the sake of giving and pass by the beggars with the rest of the crowd.

Our hero finds silence only in the vampiric hours, a great din being had by the orgies of coin and paper skin 5 hours into moonlight. Luckily, he sleeps like a grave. Certain bands of the natives have accepted him into their hunting parties rather than make of him their prey (and what a strange powdery odor he has!). The blood is making its slow return to their veins, sanguinity is arriving.

The initial stage of calibration passed, I'm looking more towards the possibilities of this space than its limits, feeling more confident in my abilities to act and alter. I know better now than ever what it is to be alone, to wake up for your-self and know the day ahead will be had only through your-self. The boundaries being established, there is an infinity of pointnesses in the field.

I take a walk and get stopped every hundred meters with offers of hashish or to have mint tea in an antique shop with the salesman or to ask what it is I'm looking for. I'm just trying to walk, man. Can't it be that simple? I meet up with Naoufal, a young Marrakshi painter I met in his friend's spice shop. He is monomaniacal, speaks of his idea of "la ville qui bouge" (the moving city), which he claims holds the key to life for whomever views his paintings. He is not interested in other ideas than those to which he has laid claim. Experiments in friction, I try to deflate his head by way of gently critiquing his theories and practices. Not much short of a blow to the skull with a blunt object with a sharp object poking out from the end of it seems to have any hope of registering, so I direct the conversation elsewhere and the night swims on.

Late the other night I went out to use the bathroom down the hall. A few Moroccan guys were talking outside of one room, one of them was very drunk. Drunk Moroccans say "I'm sorry" over and again as an apology to God for drinking, this drunk did not. He invited me to come into his room and have a drink with him. He was insistent and I have a penchant for giving myself to others simply to feel to what shapes their wills will bend me. We drink some wine, there is a woman in one of the beds he calls a whore. She is not a whore, but a secretary with whom he's been having a fling for his last ten days in town. The drunk says he invites me to watch a film with him and I submit. He ruffles through papers and discs in the night table drawer, inserts a dvd, and comes back to sit with me. It is hard-core porn, the kind that looks like the sex is being performed with mechanical efficiency and eroticism. The drunk laughs, the woman laughs, I laugh. He points to the screen, declaring "There is Italy and Morocco--no visa! no visa!" He asks if I want to pay for the woman in the bed and then points to the screen again, "toutes les routes!" I've seen this behavior before, playing porn for uninterested parties, and understand it as a warped assertion of masculine dominance. We drink some beer and he calls up his ex-wife for phone sex. The woman in the bed says he's crazy. I take my leave and get a knock on my door the following night. An invite to drink. A kiss on the neck? Is this Moroccan affection or a come-on? Though I do appreciate the practice of extracting myself from unattractive situations, of giving my will a shape of its own, I don't need this tonight.

Fragments of a Month's Time, pardon my not tidying up

Oh boy, there's a lot of time to account for. A month according to my calculations. On the nose. Suppose I can start wherever I damn well please. Suppose I'll start from where I left off. Suppose that'd be simple enough not to get lost, though there seems to be no subjects of these sentences to be geting lost anyhow. anywhere. anywho?

One day Grey, a funhouse mirror from the alma mater walks through the door of my hotel, a figure that looms large in my mind as a subject and practitioner of the intimidating discourse of academia horrifyingly prostrate before it. This image is what I am working through in my plotting out this book project, it is my attempt to master rational discourse enough to lay it to rest, or at least assuage the terror of its embrace. He came and went, leaving me, if anything, in a slightly elevated mood, a little less fettered by the insistent domineering analytic mode.

Farid was starting to get on my nerves. I saw how he used me as the occasion and audience to play out the personality he wanted to be for himself as well as others; he was no longer just trying to fool me, he was trying to fool himself into another self. After having waited several hours for him at a rendez-vous point from which we were supposed to walk over to a lawyer who owed him money and yadda yadda yadda, I told his wife Bea I was ready to go to the police. I am no good with grudges. Thinking of Farid panicking over being sent to jail filled me with a slow remorse. What's done is done. Steam lost. I wanted so badly to believe Farid, my head is too hard wanting too much to see good, too much to remain open to possibility--to hard to be soft, pliant, malleable, giving. Soon after my proclamation of having had enough I got a small bit of money from Bea and the next day the whole family skips town. Two, three days later, when I'd come to terms with my optimistic hopes being dashed, Farid returns with more promises. We chased the wild goose one last time for old time's sake before he asked me for 80 dirhams. I said no, he went off to search for the money and I was supposed to wait for him. I waited a bit. A handicapped guy came and sat down beside me, and after the initial niceties and settled comfort came the hash offer. He left after a while of silence following my declining the advance. I waited. I left without seeing Farid again.

One day I begin reading very extra slowly, attempting to enter every word and phrase--it was gorgeous, your head, it simply swirls. Akin to walking down the street at 1/4 speed, you notice other things, perhaps deeper structures, become filled with a sense of beauty. Slowness is maybe also a path to the useless and enchanted being towards which I have been inclining. Some time that same day or another proximate, my thoughts started coming to me as sensations. I felt the thoughts as exterior as sense perceptions, exterior to a void (The Void? Atman? Self? Whateveryouliketocallit). The thoughts are things that call themselves a "me", and with a sort of mental sleight-of-hand self-alienation, the I is emptied. It is different and difficult to maintain, another sort of meditation I began to intuit on Elba, which has consequently gestated and returned to me in a more mature form. I think it leads to non-consumed fascination and agreeableness, at least that's the vibe I get from the Buddhists.

As much as there is a satisfied feeling of an additional weight of meaning when conversing in a second language, de temps en temps je me sens comme une fountain of homilies. It's good to find a native English speaker now and again.

Oh yes, no more worms. More vomit and other health annoyances, but I seem to be in what resembles one piece of Jake.

One evening on the way back to the Hotel Andaluz I passed two guys killing time standing against a wall at a three-way intersection. One o of them asked if I spoke English. I replied in the affirmative without a hesitation in my gait. He then asks for an explanation of the word onomatopoeia. What?! I explained, we got on to talking about reading and writing, introduced ourselves and planned to meet up the following day. Locals on my wavelength. How strange. Yay! Mehdi and Patience (I didn't remember his name for a few days. It is Sabir, which means patience. That much I retained.) and I hung out and then ran into some musicians from the South with whom I ended jamming well into the night and from whom I was given my Moroccan name Jelali. The next night the guys from Kenitra and I went to the main square and then up to a sandwich shop where they got into a drunken confrontation with some Chaouenians later exlained away as being due to an offhand racist slur from one of the locals. There was hot speech and close crowding but not much in terms of blows, although one of the guys from Chaouen moved top chase out a Kenitran with a stone or ashtray in hand. To brain him was the thought, I surmised. There was more argument in the small square adjacent to Uta Hammam (the central square) which somehow got diffused. Only ten, fifteen minutes later in the main square more words are had, but with whom I do not recall (could have been the guys from the sandwhich shop following or completely new customers. A turtle gets mugged by two foxes. The police: what happened? The turtle: I couldn't tell, it all happened so quickly.). Words, headbutt, melee. One of the Kenitrans gets knocked over onto the guitar on his back and 5 or 6 people run up to give him a kick to the ribs, nobody viscious enough to aim for his head. I interceded here and there, but wasn't about to do anything where there wasn't ample space to get out of dodge or time to be recognized as a tourist. In fact, I felt strangely safe being Jacques who had been around for nearly two months; some of the Chaouenians recognized me and we talked about whatever it was that was going down. "It was a good fight," said Aziz's friend Ahmed when I gave him the story. Why was it a good fight? Because no blood was spilled, and moreover, they were all good men. And why were they good men? Because nobody brought out a knife; a rock, that's normal, but there are guys who walk around with knives already set to get into it. Everyone I talked to about this had a remark about how in America (or Canada for those under the impression) it would have been guns. The Kenitrans beat a retreat and went looking for the police. We got seperated and I went to get a shrimp and egg sandwich before going to sleep, the image of men rushing up to kick a fallen man still vivid and harsh in my mind.

Tangiers was all bustle and machines and somber light, a real clusterfuck town. Bought a ferry ticket for a boat on its way out just as they were handing me the ticket, some 500 meters away and before customs. I ran for it as best I could after 2 months of little physical exercise to speak of and now two very heavy bags of property. Through customs, to the ramp, a young man helped me with a bag and I offered him a hand full of coins out of which he picked the metal pieces rapaciously, cawing "yes, yes". The ferry had departed by the time I reached the quay, he probably knew this. I showed my ticket to the dock guys who hemmed and hawed for a minute and then said I could use my ticket on the next ferry to Tarifa. Somebody came by and asked from where I hail, again with the nicities and then the pitch--now that you're past customs, do you want any hash? It's from Chefchaouen. I figured he was the duty-free shop until later a man carrying decorative knives and mirrors walked past, looked to me, and I motioned for him to keep walking. Some men from the port came by and asked me from where do I come--America, unfortunately. Pourquoi malhereusement? Too long of a conversation, that, and you already know why. One guy kept saying to me Texas, Oklahoma, and chicken kebab over and over, this man was the head honcho. They started chiming in on how people from America are welcome, but how Bush is not, punctuating this with a gesture of slitting the throat with the thumb. I told them how I got thrown into jail for protesting the war and got several hearty handshakes. Chicken kebab. Mr. TexasOklahomaChickenKebab helped me get to the next ferry and on my way.

On the ferry a man from Guinea struck up a conversation of no real import that lasted most of the hour-long voyage. The bus he'd counted on taking that night was not running, so we split a room at a nearby hostel and split paths in the morning. Bus to Sevilla it was still dark at 7:30am I bought a bottled water and sugarice stick limon and hoofed it 200m or so to the station. Light rain and the bus came; in and out of consciousness;hills with lumps of bushes, thick cloudheads wedged between mountains; field of windwills pinwheels ballerinas save the stayed ones like machines ominously. Arrival and heavy bags. Canadians stupid asking for me to ask directions for them asking to follow me I lead the way not knowing where and nobody on the street seems to know the plaza I'm after. I decline their jocular offer to help carry my bags out of pride or instinct. We walk, heavy bags, heaving chest. Get bad directions that send us in opposite directions and I wish them luck not getting hit by a runaway boulder. I find new directions for myself and walk sweating hot heavy walk for maybe 3/4 hour before finding the hostel which is full up in the beginning of February?! As some consolation, I get invited to a cheap dinner and directed to another hostel. I check in, take a shower, send off a package, and go in search of peanut butter. Success! Nap and go to cheap dinner where I meet and hit it off instantly with a guy from San Francisco with a slight lisp and accent like cousin Eli. Unfortunately, he leaves for Lisbon in 2 hours, so we exchange information and he says "son of David" when I give him my e-mail. How strange.

It is rainy and moderately cold in Sevilla, I spend most of my time indoors trying not to spend money. Around dinnertime the next night, I headed out to find something in my price-range that was not fast-food and happened upon two street guys (read homeless or long-term travellers without steady funding) who spoke English very well. Jonas (pronouned Yonas) and Dragan, born in Sweden and Croatia respectively. At first I thought Jonas was asking for money, but then he said no, a smoke? and I said I don't smoke and that is how it started. Dragan thinks Americans are stupid for calling people African Americans and Latin Americans while whites are just plain Americans. Jonas love Americans because of the 1st and 5th amendments of talking and shutting up. They soon saw the outline of my character and we got along quite well. They were talking about why they give to other beggars or anybody else walking down the street who asks them for a cigarette when they're asking for money. They should give just as soon as receive, Jonas says, life is a circle. Yeah, chimes in Dragan, life is a fucking circle and I know it very well. I write this excellent phrase on the back of my hand and am found out, which I gloss over by explaining it as my way of appreciating things. From this they take it that I want to know about street life, which I do, and so set out to teach me how to beg and how to make people smile and how to make a buck without so much as conventional respectability. The world's a stage, now you try. And so I have to beg until I get something from anybody, even one centime will do. I learn quickly, they say, have great potential and could be living on the street in not but a few weeks' time. I start off timidly and become more playful, finally coaxing some money from a young French guy when I asked him in French for a bit of change for the next beer (I hadn't had a beer, but this was one of Dragan's favored approaches). 65 cents--good score! The guy thought it wasn't much, and apologised for it. You're (becoming) one of us now. At what point are my motivations to be ascribed to novel kicks and when to sincere and deep appreciation? The question is especially difficult because I have a deep appreciation of novelty, as the newness itself pushes at the boundaries of my experience and ideation, allowing for a broader and more profound self. In any case, they treated me as a person, not an observer or source of money. This made me feel good about them and suspicious of myself. Jonas had a slight actorly disconnect with himself, monologizing once in a while. He called himself a Buddhist and speaks 8 languages, his English with a hippyish lilt to it. Probably about my height (impressions of this sort are so difficult to gauge after being mediated by the passing of time), with a shaved head and blond clumps of dreads hanging from the back end. I asked why he was living on the streets, to which he responded with a laugh, saying he hadn't chosen this life and that he'd been looking for jobs in over a handful of countries. I didn't fully buy into this explanation, but let it pass. "People can be hard," he said, "But also people appreciate it when you don't steal and will sometimes give to you because you are honest and non-threatening, sincere and human." Dragan has none of Jonas' theatricality, speaking pointedly, simply, and in a tone, rhythm, accent, with a choice of words that make his astuteness seem cute or comical. He is so matter-of-fact that any unpleasant situations or messages lose any overtones or posturings with ends beyond those presently expressed, they become palatable, even, because they are so devoid of ill will, like something unhuman. He isn't without feeling, just honest. He is a man of about 5 feet 7 inches with a swarthy Eastern European complexion, a swirl of balding scalp at the point from which the grain of the head's skin begins it's spiral outward (seems like an important part of the body, like the point to locate 3 feet backor something where some people say the soul resides and oftentimes referred to as a point from which people see themselves during out of body experiences), a full but not overly full beard, and hands I don't remember but can imagine as being stout. Dragan's mode of begging is asking for 500 euros or, alternately, just a bit to pay for the next beer. He had pictures of when he'd written on a cardboard box something to the effect of "help me pay for a vacation" or just "vacation", and drew a picture of a little island half-circle sticking out from waves and with a palm tree sticking out from it. Here is a link to a site that belongs to some of Dragan's friends, might be worth checking out www.lazybeggers.com. The average passerby wouldn't think of 5 centimes as being worthy to give somebody anybody, butit does make a difference. Other things as well--Dragan sported a furby creature somebody gave him, and Jonas a flag pin with green and white stripes; he didn't know or care for the significance of the flag, just liked it for the colors and the fact that it was a gift. It may be that so many "street people" own dogs because they were strays, and the humans take the advantage to take and receive love from them, as strays themselves, in a way, become benefactors. Dragan lives with a small dog, the kind with short legs. Some month and a half ago he had seen this dog passing by, too skittish to come close, obviously a stray. One day as Dragan was eating, the dog regarded him from a distance. He beckoned it over, it did not come. He threw it a piece of food, it ate, he threw closer, it ate, and closer, it ate, until it was close enough to--LEASH! He threw a leash around it's neck and kept it with him for 5 days, feeding when hungry, petting when in want of attention, wrapping into a blanket when cold. In sum, he took it's freedom to teach it trust and love (Hello birth of governance!), and after the 5 days he let it off the leash to do as it pleased. It has not left his side since, and despite it's learned dependency, it is never physically tethered to anyone. As I am starting to think of leaving their company, I slip some money into Jonas' hat,hoping nobody will see. Jonas sees. He asks if I'm sure. I say that it is for the two of them to share. He says are you kidding? I don't know what that means. He says of course. Dragan isn't party to any of this, he later asks if I want to come with them to a house in which they're squatting and drink and smoke. I decline, then accept, then decline. Jonas invited me to stay in Sevilla and join them, which brought on a slight crisis of identity--insider or outsider, am I ready to do this, do I want this, now, why not, what about my things, what about other things. I did not stay, I was not ready to accept, I was also worried about getting consumption, I did not want to abandon my plans just yet, plans meant to be, built up to be, the hurdle I make myself jump before accepting another life, before uselessness and honesty, the uselessness and honesty of Dragan. But before the night is over Jonas and Dragan got into an argument and Dragan declared their friendship over, suspecting Jonas lied to him about a great sum of money shared between them in the past. Dragan went one way, Jonas another. I went towards my hostel, Jonas' direction. He said maybe he should give me the money back to give it all to Dragan the next day, and quickly rescinded, admitting he did not want to part with his half. He was acting all torn up, I asked if it'd be alright, he responded that it wouldn't be alright, but to have a nice life. Overdramatic and he walked off as I went into the hostel, but first watched him go off without a backwards glance--he was acting for and within himself, not me.

The bus back to Tarifa from Sevilla was accompanied by a soundtrack of mass produced lovesongs for mass consumption. The ferry was quiet. Back at the Tangiers port, I got picked out by a faux guide who told me there was no way to Marrakesh that night because it was the birthday of the king, Mohammed VI (lie). We do the dance for a while and another guy ends up picking me up and bringing me to the bus station (what's your name? Abdel. Abdel what, Abdel Malik or... Yeah, Abdel Malik, you got it on the first try, ha. Gee, what a quick-witted hustler you are Mr.Abdel Malik), getting me a good price for a 1am bus, and hustling me out of a wad of cash, and then asking for a souvenir of me (you will always remember me, but give me something to remember you). As he leaves me to attend my bus, he says "don't talk to anybody, watch your bags, and don't trust anybody." He must've been chuckling with that last one, thinking himself so clever to be telling me implicitly that I shouldn't have trusted him. I wait in the station, finish Ulysses, and am approached by two young men. They sit down and make nice, par for the course so far. I am Canadian. What color is your passport? Blue. Blue?, I've never seen a blue passport before, can I see it? No, it is with my things, I don't want to take it out here, no offense. Wow, a blue passport. More making conversation. I live in France and am looking to buy a European passport or a Canadian one. Buy one? Yes, for 2 or 3 thousand euro, are you interested? No, nice offer, but not for me. Yes, it is a good offer. But not for me. More talk. Say, why don't you come stay with me in Fés. Already bought my ticket to Marrakesh, thanks. Here's my mobile number, do you have one? No, what would I use it for, I'm from Canada. Do you have SMS, hotmail, yahoo? I have gmail, another e-mail provider. Period. No, I'm not going to offer it to you, chump. They exit stage right. I catch my bus and figure out how to get the seat to recline about 6 hours into the trip.

Now in Marrakesh, I've got a nice room to myself and the hotel has a terrace cafe that overlooks the main square, Djemaa el-Fna. There is no traveller scene of which to speak at the hotel, just tourists. A couple days of running around the city and I got bad food poisoning from which I'm still recovering. There is something rotten in the city, something malignant. Less interaction than transaction. You can see it in the swarms of people around Djemaa el-Fna in the evenings, people passing one another huddled in their own night.

It's Alright Ma, I'm Only Reading

Number one I found a worm in my poop. Number two I've got insect bites over my fingers that hurt and feel as thought I'm wearing gloves if I make a fist. Other than that, things are pretty peachy. I'm not dealing with the pains I had before and I just took some stuff to de-worm myself this morning. I maimed a spider the other day and am hoping that it was the culprit of the finger biting and that he'll fucking stop it.

There was a fire across the way a couple days back and everybody gathered into the alley and waited for the firemen who got screamed at by some woman for taking 20 or 30 minutes to respond to the call. I had some bread in my hand and offered it to Bruce who said who could eat when people could be dying inside. I went inside and made myself an egg sandwich and mounted the terrace, where Ian and Neville were watching the fire while listening to the Sex Pistols or somesuch punk. Ian said he'd videotaped some of it, I asked if his camera had audio to get "God save the Queen" in the shot.

I've been hanging out with Bruce lately, he owns a shop just next door to the Hotel Andaluz and is a curious mix of Moroccan and North Atlantic mentalities. He is especially Moroccan in regards to gender relations, telling me how "we" (men) are better than "them" (women) because "they" cheat on "us" more than "we" do on "them". His support for this arguement? Men can't go home and have sex with their wives after having affair, because if you "sleep really good" with a woman one day, you can't with another, and so he would be found out by the wife. He'll say a lot of things and respond to questions in such a way thay you can't tell if he didn't understand, he's dodging the question, or he just wasn't listening.

Farid just told me how he got a letter from the police saying he has to pay 200 euros to stay out of jail. (Aside to the audience: What Farid doesn't know is that his wife Béa told Jake about this piece of paper one or two weeks ago, and that it is false. sshhhhh.) I directed the conversation to the money he still owes me and put the squeeze on him a bit. He goes off for a few minutes and comes back, the while I've been thinking about which angle to take if he outright asks me for more money (Incredulous anger and proclaimations about going to the police? Cool reference to the paper as a fake?). So he comes back and says, get this, you know when I first looked at the paper, I thought it was saying I was going to have to go to jail if I don't pay this amount, but it turns out it's for my marriage certificate, it has to do with that, so I was relieved. Good, I said, good for you, it's much better that way. And it was.

The metaphor of earth is persistent in my mind. Digging for earth being an acknowledgement of the object of search/desire/movement being the search/desire/movement itself; and then this newly articulated desire of mine to "go underground" or "subterranean" seems to be one of yearning to realize this narcissism in living it out, desiring desire. Immersion in "earth," here, is to be consumed by consuming, an end inquiry unless inquiry is its own end. The odd turn in this metaphor is that it is one of the deathwish, living underground as burial and surrender which throws this eros/thanatos paradox (being completely subsumed by life, the dissipation of the self in life itself) into divine lighting, where one can be the medium through which life/God moves by becoming becoming (both passive/closed in being a medium, and active/open in becoming into becoming); but this modality is already in place and is already recognizing, dissimulating, and mistaking itself in life performing itself, so what am I whining about? Practically, the metaphor I desire means for me to leave be all striving and enjoy being as being, be useless. Useless, my own end. But I am not myself, everything is more than it is, nothing is just what it is; that is to say, not enjoying being as being is part of enjoying being as being, and second-order thought is a false divorce from the immediacy of narcissism. This motion was an appeal to aligning interests and for self-presence and immediate (unmitigated) experience to desire themselves unknowingly and without further reflection. What it seems to me to be at present moment is the easy flowing logic of acceptance making a bid for more headspace by allying itself with my desire to discover and experiment with ever more modalities of desiring/becoming, the effective ends of which being the creation of a space both internal and spatiotemporal to pursue this logic further, a space specially suited to the logic of acceptance in the presence of as few obstacles to acceptance (including acceptance of obstacles of acceptance) as possible--like a monastary. Going subterranean and useless as disavowal of responsibility to anything other than living immediate life immediately, in the here and now moment, where it can either vanquish protracted and deferring time-life, or, what is more likely, accept a compromise in which it finds greater expression in the web of logics through which I operate than it does at present moment. This project wouldn't so much be running away from difficulties as an attempt to purchase the timespace to further develop the capacity to willingly submit to life, to appreciate it for what it is. I suppose I'm already working on it, but not to the extent demanded of me by the metaphor. Not yet, if ever.

With Death And Togetherness

Getting casually laughed at for wearing my djellaba, I considered the hosteller's diagnosis--my attatchment to Farid as a mild case of Stockholm Syndrome--love of your dominator (kinky, ain't it?); which if this is the case, I hope to be instilling in him Lima Syndrome (the obverse "disorder"). It occurs to me that the psychoanalytic Father and the impersonal authority for which he stands (thematized in Law, Science, Language, etc.) is the object of the SS, just as it is suggested the LS is an evolutionary sleight of hand by which babies, children, engender the love of adults. The hosteller was Chris, a smart guy who knew he was smart and that's what ruined him for me. He was a funhouse mirror, close enough and far enough to my self to make me hate him. No, I didn't hate him, but I could have with some time, recognition of more similarities between us two, and less pity (pity which would evaporate with the growing identification of our selves).

Chris, his girlfriend Kat, two anglophoniques girls working in Spain named Tasha and Sarah, two Israelis studying in Holland named Eliev and Yinon, Shane, whom I'd been calling Shaun for days without being corrected, from Ireland who had just quit his job as a corporate lawyer after biding his time and saving his pennies, and a smattering of Toronto Canadians with thick and bathetically dopey accents all had begun hanging out together and soon became enthralled by Mao. One night Tasha had a panic attack and it was unclear whether that was in fact the case or if she had food poisoning. Shane and I stayed up with her until 6 in the AM, playing Mao and listening to her taking off the dressings from the wounds of her selfhood. We could only be there for her, as ugly, pathetic, awkward and sad as it was, it was alive and worthy. After all this she seemed to vaguely attempt to insinuate herself into my bed for the night, and upon not receiving encouragement she went back to her room.

Something about the sound of horror movies being scarier than the visuals, closing my ears instead of eyes at tense moments, supports the gross generalization of vision as objective and the other senses as more emotional. There is a TV in the common room, a channel which plays American movies with Arabic subtitles 24 hours a day. If you want to be close to the fireplace, you often have to accept the TV with it.

Walking through the crowds in the narrow medina streets is like making your way down a river of people, the spaces between them, the rocks shifting positions under the currents of persons. The medina is Disney World Morocco, the spoils of imperialism and post-, while the Ville Nouvelle is New Moroccan, which is not so Moroccan save for it being Morocco. Here in the medina, all the restaurants "do Moroccan" and the markets "do the past", but it is an unsure division between the set and the auditorium's stage.

I can sometimes see my breath in my room, and steam often rises from streaming urine in the mornings. Suffice to say, it is cold. I've got something going wonky with my body and walked down to the hospital after putting it off for a week. I don't trust doctors or medicine in the States so much, so I wasn't keen on seeing the inside of a Moroccan hospital. The doctor I saw at about 9 post-meridian on New Year's Eve was likeable. We somehow got on talking about how everyone finding the grave sometime, and how this is reassuring in regards to oneself and to one's enemies. He was commenting on the gluttony and sheer rapacity of humans as he wrote me a scrip for what turned out later to be a suppository pain-killer. Seems like he's got a sense of humor, no? Just picked it up today, so soon enough I'll be finding out the poop on that. Couldn't help myself. I'm sorry.

Had a bout of mania, overwhelmed by ideas and projects. Then there is the feeling as though I'm approaching something, not on the verge, but can sense closing distance on it. I am excited, confident, anxious, panicked. I realized myself hunting for ideas and phrases and other little memes while talking to Ian, my current next door neighbor, as I listened to him talk and encouraged him to continue, captivated and then shifted my focus upon this realization and attempted to take him in whole, not just committing to search for useful things, which happens to open onto a whole new set of useful things. I need practice and my work is not theory or math, so I am trying to get hip to this.

Living life as though in a dream seems one entrance to indifference and fascination, the continual consumption of the senses, sense, and nonsense. Gluttonous being on the grounds of not needing to be gluttonous to experience glut.

An example of the Moroccan gestalt: The kids in school help each other cheat on tests. If one gets caught, he will appeal to the teacher as a human, saying "Well, it was just one question I didn't remember the answer, it's no big deal...Surely you can't say you've never cheated on anything in your life, so give me a break." And the students will laugh, and so will the teacher.

New Year's Eve Day is celebrated in Morocco by each family slaughtering a sheep in their home. Mohammed, the waiter at Restaurant Haji, one of my hangs, invited me to his home for the ritual. I waited for Mohammed in the morning, watching people walking by leading sheep so alive they could have been pets, mammals alive and real breathing muscle. Everybody who passed shook my hand, it was a holiday. Later, I would see the main avenue outside the medina filled with Moroccans shaking each others hands and talking jovially; I thought in the States that this happens mostly during blackouts and fireworks displays, and is very localized to a certain time and place (who kisses or hugs on New Year's except for during the 10 minutes to half and hour after the ball drops?), otherwise it is sponsored into a commercial event where the emphasis is shifted to individual gratification from the communal consumption of community identity. I watched people pass, clean, greet, and I waited without having to wait, no impatient stasis. Mohammed arrived and we walked to his house. I went to shake one woman's hand and she proffered (what is this that it is so natural to write "proffered", but it wouldn't come out of my mouth but once in a blue moon?) it reticently and limply. Mohammed's father gave a more willing handshake, and I didn't even bother with the woman who was turned or had turned away from me. I sat down with them and ate a bit of goat cheese, olives, pastries, and bread. We drank warmed milk with sugar. I played the child in hopes of warmer treatment. And this is perhaps one root of my agreeableness or malleability--to get others to open up and show their insides to me, which I consume and the act of which consumes me. It is the power of knowing and observing with the vulnerability of trespassing passivity and stupified awe. There were two sheep out back, and one was led around the corner of the house and pissed on the ground and its shit pellets scattered. They put out a chair for me to watch. Three men turned the other sheep on its side and held it down. One of the men cut the throat, it did not bleat. The sound of blood gurgling out in spraying pulses. A bright blue light in the eyes that was not there before or after. No joking, no thought of jokes, it was ritual. Hack the spinal cord, twist off the head, I am the spectator and the spectacle is metamorphosis, the disappearance of the life phenomenon. One man slit a hole in its back leg and, inserting a straw-like tube and blowing, inflated the headless thing into a balloon. The head was in the bucket sitting next to me, it didn't smell. They skinned the legs and hung it upside-down on an overhead hook, drawing a rope through what would be the equivalent of the human femur bones. This is when the bile came out through the neck and I realized the smell of slaughter is more the smell of bile than blood. When the men had finished skinning it, the corpse spun in mid-air like a poltergeist as the rope unwound itself. They cut it apart, taking out the organs and washing them, washingh their hands often, and washing the body. They cleaned out the intestines and washed the blood, piss, pellets, bile, and partially digested straw and grass down the drainage points. Mohammed and I went inside and he put on the television, which felt like a vacuum. There was just a great transformation enacted, a killing, and there was this stream of images and sounds from a box which played a video of Saddam Hussein being hung and Egyptian music videos and weaved our imagination with the world before us, saying, "No, that was not real. That was not you. No more than this," and we lay down in forgetfulness. I could have been anywhere in that TV room. Mohammed fell asleep and I was invited to listen to a prayer on mp3 with English subtitling while had words about Jews being evil. Then we ate. Some of the sheep was good and some was too potent and sheepy, so I tried to stick to the pieces that wouldn't make me gag without appearing to be avoiding some of the food. On our way back to the main Plaza, there were heads roasting on mattress springs laid over fires and pelts out to dry. An activity, this ritual, with death and togetherness.

I've begun self-catering, which provides a much needed break from tagines and fills my pockets with some extra dough. I got a pair of babouches the other day--traditional leather shoes. They're yellow and a little too small for my feet, but they're supposed to be worn with the back of the shoe bent under your heel, so they fit fine. I also went to a nearby hammam, public bath, with some other travellers a few days back. It is cold up here in the mountains, and after coming out of the hammam my core temperature must have risen a few degrees, and I was warm for nearly the remainder of the night. I think it was that same night I attempted to play the card game Mao (from Reed and Hyde Park, where you don't tell anybody the rules, they just have to figure them out as you keep making up new ones) and met with just less than mild success. Haven't played since.

I took a rare excursion from working on the writing and the translating to hike up to the destroyed Spanish mosque about 20 or 30 mintutes out of the medina with a Quebecoise girl named Laurence. She's been travelling for I think half a year and welcomed by fortunate circumstances at nearly every turn; the world is conspiring with her as it is wont to do with people up to the bobbing and thrashing and occasional inhaling of water of going with the flow. From the mosque tower expansive view of the rolling hills and mountains dotted with villages and dappled with sunlight breaking through cloudbeds as if pointing to hidden treasures, wind watering the eyes, and a connection with a human. Then back to my hovel to pound out Whitman and move words from notebooks to other notebooks, books to notebooks, mp3 players to notebooks. Notebook notebook sore back bending over notebook notebook eyes failing notebook.

Next day Farid's wife offered me heroin. I said no thanks and told Farid and he got upset at her and told me how giving someone heroin is like shooting them, only they die little by little instead of all at once. I noticed how thin his face was, how much skin he had, points of sincerity coming out of his contracted pupils. I went and got some Amlou, which is almond butter with argan oil--the closest thing to peanut butter I could get. A few days later I mixed it with nutella and now I'm a golden being of transdimensional properties.

Laurence got to meet Farid before she left, which was good to have someone who I thought would get the situation and his idiosyncracies just be able to witness it, him. I am still waiting for Farid to reimburse me. Bea told me he has a slip of paper laying around the house that says he has to pay 600 dirham or go to jail which he may or may not be planning to show me when he sees I'm not lending him anymore money. What a weird tangle they are and we are. I'm disappointed in Farid's supposed plot, but I shouldn't expect much else. It doesn't mean we can't be buddies (I hate that word, but friends wouldn't do) if he doesn't get pissy when I don't give him anything. It's been on my mind.

Other things I've done this week:

Hanging out with the Ahmed, Mohammed, and Abdulmalik at the restaurant and waiting on Farid. Ahmed is the owner, Mohammed the waiter, and Abdulmalik the large joyously retarded uncle of Ahmed. They told me they took me for 25-28, which came as a pleasant surprise following years of my face looking younger than its years.

Reading Ulysses and my thesis adviser's The Logic of Culture while pilfering unscrupulously from each and more. I've been more concerned with moving ideas than incorporating them, working in preparation for that work and wondering whether preparing is the thing to do.

Playing with the Tao and putting it down--picking up, out, and apart. Trying to loosen my grip on the rudder and life vest while clutching ever more firmly to soaking and dissolving pages of books I can barely read anymore, my eyes blurring strained splashed blinking.

I'm in Morocco working on writing, translating poetry, meeting people. Surviving ain't that hard.

Yeehaw.


Also, Happy Birthday Baloo! I love you times a million.

What My Parents Probably Shouldn't Read About What I've Learned About Pain, Ideation, And Paying Attention This Week

As violent a gesture the call to prayer may be, I'm beginning to enjoy it as a reminder of the wonder of being, as a catalyst to reflect on this more frequently (5 times a day the call to prayer is sounded out from PA systems mounted onto the mosque towers where the call was once called from human vocal cords).

I was eating one night and a guy named Abdelmajid came and sat next to me. He said something about us being brothers, as opposed to the people outside of this little dining room in which we were seated, and so he could talk frankly with me. And did he talk. He gestured wildly in his speech; his voice, its pitch, volume, and origin within his body, modulated just as forcefully. The light on him and the shadow projected onto the wall, a wall covered in a pattern in which I cannot help but see a row of mexican wrestlers or ninjas, by the single candle threw me into a mild revery; it was as if these monologues for which I have been playing audience with some bizarre frequency have been saturated with godliness or something of the sort. Like when I was in Rome, the world is playing itself out and I am watching as it plays me out. I am understanding more what Daniel was talking about in Paris, how unreal everything seems when you understand everything is being and coming into its right place.


There is one hash peddler who has taken a strong dislike to me and comes off threateningly. Gives me the creeps, this guy. I've made friends with some locals, though, plus my tourist status is a deterrent, so I'm just staying out of his way, and he should be staying out of mine. One of the "friends" started out by conning me out of an embarrassing but not unliveable amount of money. He said his kid was sick, I gave him a little money. He came back for more, I said I want to see the kid. He was sweating from what I took to be worry for the kid. He came out of his house with the child wrapped in a blanket, actually looking like he could be sick, so I gave him some more money which he promised to pay back the next day. Next day came and he asked for more money for his wife to buy a phone card to call her parents in Spain to wire them money. No money. At this point, I considered the loss a loss. I talked with his wife who knew nothing about this con, she brought me to their house, he was caught. Only thing is he didn't have the money anymore, so I played hardass, saying I don't want problems, but I'll deal with them if I've got problems. He's paying me back over time now, which means I spend a lot of time with him waiting for him to give me more of my money back and running around with him to collect from people who owe or will lend him money. Again, weirdly enough, I've begun to enjoy running around with him, he is a good guy in some respects, and he is more of a person with me than I would have expected. Also, when he's around, he'll shoo away any hash dealers or scroungers easily where I would have a difficult time--not because I don't say no and mean it, but because they are more persistent here than in the other towns I've visited. Farid is his name. I've talked to his twice with boogers hanging a quarter out of my nose and he tells me with what seems to me a compulsion for cleanliness or seriousness or the appearance of such. It could also be read as a friendly or protective gesture, but I wouldn't assume him to be conscious of it. Still, I'm on my toes.

I'm realizing I need to revise my stubborn projection that everyone is trying to be good for every- or anyone; sure, this doesn't mean I need to appear otherwise, just to take things in with more attention to what they may be rather than what I want or care for them to be, which goes for all interactions, not just those in which I'm worried about deception.

PAIN. All of the sudden I'm doubled over on my bed for no reason I can call up. Pain unlike anything I've felt, it hurts to breathe even shallow breaths. Pain to even lay down flat. Wow, pain. I was thinking testicular torsion, I was thinking kidney stone, I was thinking caught nerve, wildcat running through my organs, appendicitis, wildcat, my mind must be malfunctioning, wildcat. I tried to stay with the pain, not push it out, bend it into a sense of the overwhelming intensity of life, no meditation. Was this childbirth? At ten or fifteen minutes in, I took an ibuprofen and got myself together enough to lie back and rub the pain, expand my slight breaths little by little. Just the other night I was thinking about writing about pain and my relative inexperience with it, that I should know what it is better before throwing it around. I got that wish. Considering how little confidence I have in doctors in the States, I was not keen on seeing the inside of a Moroccan hospital. The pain subsided after around three quarters of an hour and I was coming into the intensity of comfort to which I am so accustomed, riding on this for about as long as I was writhing in pain. Apparently the herbal tea I drank in the morning has this effect sometimes if you aren't used to it, and my digestive system has been working slowly lately, so I couldn't recognize it immediately for what it was. I'm okay now. It's like the only relationship advise my dad has given me "stay away from the crazy ones," which I also had to realize for myself with darling Edie Darling. Wow.

And Happy Birthday Ruth. 20. How did this happen? Happy Birthday, I love you.

Vomit!

The town used to be called Chaouen, meaning The Hills, but now it is known as Chefchaouen: Look At The Hills. I sat up on the terrace at the Hotel Andaluz looking at the mountains the other day and noticed a harmony between the silhouette of the mountains and the curving crest of rooftops. I began writing and quickly became overwhelmed by more and more ideas, flooding me, not letting me actually do anything. It was both marvelous and terrifying in how potent and impotent it made me feel.

Over the same mountain, I saw a white bird and a black bird flying together and at first mistook the black one for the white one's shadow. I saw a black cat and a white cat walk up to me the other night. I cut my finger on a fresh notebook I'm using for this larger piece I'm about to start on. It drew blood, and I'm taking this as either a very good or a very bad sign. Once again, I am surrounded by omens, only I haven't been feeling their strength as gutturally as when I was in Italy.

've met several travellers, spoken several languages, and have found one or two people compelling enough to talk to for more than half an hour. Worked on a poem for a good 4 or 5 days, finished it and promptly got food poisoning. I threw up for the first time in over 11 years. Just like riding a rollercoaster--not as bad as the anticipation of it. My fever cut immediately and I woke up in the middle of the night thinking to myself, "I fell like Jesus' son." Don't ask me.

Trying to get my feet under me today. Just thought to say hello.

Fés and The Adventures of Jacques Braun

So I hopped on a bus to Fés, feeling more capable with each passing hour. The bus ride itself was a horror--11 hours in a box into which has been leaking a certain not negligable amount of headache-inducing exhaust. I got into Fés two hours after sundown and walked past a graveyard to the medina gate through which I was to find my hostel. In Marrakesh I had experienced the awkwardness of being caught in a lie, telling some faux guide I was Italian and I couldn't understand him and then him speaking better Italian than I, what with French sinking in as my functional language. Here, I was Canadian to anyone concerned. Thoughtlessly, this is what I told the hotel until I showed my passport and pardoned myself embarrassedly, following with a few derisive comments about the US government. Funny enough, I pulled the same thing when I got to the next hotel, in Chefchaouen, but maintained that I live in Canada, just born in the US and was studying and living there when I got my passport. I know, what's the point? Part of me wants very much to be as honest as I can wrap my head around in all speech and action, but another part desires to train the ability to make shit up and be okay with deception. Jacques Braun in a deceiver. With a constantly shifting backstory, Jacques consistently calls himself a Canadian Christian who is not religious, but believes God is everywhere. His lineage is French, but the family has been of Canada for three or four generations by now. If pressed, his parents now live in the US, unfortunately. Not that he thinks Canada is so great, because he just loves Morocco--yes, you have a beautiful country and yes, Morocco has a place in my heart, thanks for asking.

I've begun writing down my dreams in the morning. I wondered why I am always quasi-within myself in these dreams when an "I" isn't necessary to action, mood, environment. The next night, a dream without myself. What can I say.

I met an actual Canadian (well, a Quebécer) and told him I was Canadian, too. I did not do this because I had some unconscious wish to be found out (or, at least, not just because of this), but we were in a place with people who I had told two or three days previous how I was from Vancourver, BC. Turns out this guy, Lillian, has family in Surrey, is it? What is that big suburb right by Vancouver called again? Um, I don't know, I don't get out of the house that much. Hm, that's strange, because I think this suburb is, like, bigger than Vancouver itself--Surry or Currey. Well, actually I was just born in Canada and lived there until I was three or four, then my family moved down to the States. Haven't really been back since. I feel strange, removed, worried for the rest of the conversation, but Lillian seems to have ignored or not understood or accepted my whole schtick and for the next two days he does, infact, refer to me as a Canadian--to others and to me. I am left bewildered as to what actually happened here.

All the week, I've been taking Arabic "lessons" from Mohalled, the dude who owns a restaurant just next to my hotel. I got the alphabet and sounds after three days, and could more or less sound out words written wherever. When we got to sentence construction I learned why there are accredited institutions of learning. I spent a quarter of our time waiting of Mohammed to work with me, a quarter telling him I understood something as he was flogging the horse post-mortem (i.e., ten minutes on "min" means "from"), and half of the time trying to direct his scattered "teachings". Regardless, I ate nearly every meal at Mohammed's place, though he never gave me the slightest break on prices and the food wasn't that great. I sort of made myself a presence there, to get a feel of the workers and build a familiarity of which I was either feeling in need or just curious to try out. Here is a picture of Djellal, a worker there, and the restaurant. My "course" took place on the upper shelf.

Also, one night Djellal brought by a hooker. I was confused if she was supposed to be for me or for him, saying, "Non, non. Mais, allez-vous si vous voulez". The hooker seemed to be confused, too; maybe because her pimp's client was saying no after the pimp was assuming a yes. I later learned how Djellal is a pimp who pimps girls even as young as thirteen. The boy from whom I heard this is too old for his age.

I gave up on the Arabic with two days left in Fés after Mohammed had spent the first half-hour of what was supposed to be lesson-time talking at me about Islam being the last and best and only true religion as I stonewalled him, giving the occaisional affectless "je comprends" or "oui".

Here is a beautiful sunset. The tourists all hit the roofs to take photos, not simply digging on it and in it, but making pathetic attempts to bottle it.

Here it is:

The five calls to prayer per diem are broadcast over PAs from the mosques. It sounds like I imagine bomb drills in 50s America sounded, it sounds like some sort of hell. There is a definite oppressive and aggressive aspect to the call to prayer, just as there is to the ringing of the hours by chuch bells.

I'm still reading Infinite Jest, which got me going on the idea of irony as a means to absolve onself of the sin of feeling or being/having been attached to something; valued something. Irony is a mechanism by which the knowing separate themselves from the ignorant, but there is a small frightened empathy in the brief identification with ignorance needed to assert ignorance and knowledge. I think I am beginning to smell a little like franks and beans, and my feet definitely smell like cheese popcorn. Anyway, in this fashion, irony can be understood as an extended branch of Enlightenment thinking in its will to knowledge and progress, though it modestly undermines the productivity so much aligned with this progress.

Leaving Fés, I say goodbye to the guys at the restaurant. One of the kids is playing soccer in the alley. I'm told he is an orphan and homeless. I say goodbye to him and he gives me one of the strongest smiles I've seen since my sister was a kid. Happy, honest, good-willed, vulnerable. Sheer honest smile. This smile wraps itself around me and says, "yes, this is the feeling you love and miss when you remember you don't have it. This is being home, but not too home. This is having friends without having the recognition of the third-party called the relationship, which makes for the awareness of power fluctuations. This is a realized love." A homeless orphan, and what could I give him that would make him any happier or more beautiful than he was just then.

On the bus to Chefchaouen I talked with a very nice man who invited me to stay in his home if I came to his town in my travels and who bought me a yogurt drink when he went to get one for himself. I felt a little bad about lying to him about myself and I gave him a fake e-mail address that jived with my story. When I arrived in Chefchaouen, I made this fake address into a real one out of some guilt and maybe good-will? The mountains remind me of Elba, as do the snaky Escher-like passageways and building-gestalt. The medina is painted all in blue/violet and white, which makes the place feel unreal or surreal or wonderfully real depending on your mood.

When you meet someone on a bus/train/plane or in a bar/party/other social setting and talk and then there is sileznce, is the silence shared or is it a retreat into individual silences?

I bought a rug already. I know, you don't need to say anything. It is made out of cactus fiber, though. It is light and pretty. Yeah, I know. What's done is done. It is pretty, though.