Mysterium Tremendum: Peb's big day out
"To speak s literally to open the body to penetration by opening an
orifice...it suggests a certain incompleteness, a need to be in relation.
Speech relates the person who is speaking to other people...It requires
acknowledging their existence and, by extension, their parity."
Jane Tomkins, West of Everything:The Inner Lives of Westerns
So what's a single guy who hasn't made any friends to do on a weekend? Two whole days. Laundry? Ironing? Cooking? Reading and writing and learning Arabic? Am I boring you yet? Now I do some of all of those things, minus the first two, every day. The first two I do once a week. But from Thursday at six pm to Sunday at eight-thirty in the morning, especially from the Thursday end of it, seems to stretch on for a considerably long amount of time. So, really what IS a guy going to do?
The first two weekends I spent here in Dharhan I took long walks out into the urban areas and neighborhoods of Al Khobar and Dharhan, for exercise, for a break from the tedium, and to explore and to learn about more about this localized part of our planet that I am now inhabiting. KFUPM is situated just to the northwest of a highway, a beltway, really, that wraps around the combined conglomeration of the three cities of Dharhan, Al Khobar, and Dammam, which have, over time become really one large urban sprawl. So upon leaving the university proper, which is perhaps a half mile from my flat, one has about another half mile to go to cross under the freeway and, continuing on the road which comes directly out of KFUPM's Main gate, and to get to the first commercial center, the Dharhan Mall and the other businesses across the street from it, Ikea, Toys R Us (I know, right?), and a mini mall that includes, get ready, Hyper Panda, the Fred Meyer type store I have talked about once before, and Baskin Robbins, perfume shops, electronic stores, fast food, Chucky Cheeses (yes, this is where they disappeared to!). While they may have done a fairly impressive job of keeping the western world's political system and religion at bay, Papa John's, Starbucks, Little Caesar's, McDonalds, not so much. What is that they say, the thing that the good old US of A best exports is its culture. My students, for example, love Breaking Bad.
I have my oil cloth traveling hat on to keep the strong sun off, my knapsack, my iPad, and I have actually a goal. I am trying to walk to a store called Farm 5, which is a grocery store some three plus miles away. There is a bus that goes from campus to Farm 5 at nine-thirty in the morning, supposedly leaving from the little store, called the co-op, about one city block from my flat, on campus. I waited for it until ten this morning, but it didn't come. Well, I should have known, because it is Friday, the holy day. So I decided to walk. I need two things. I need to obtain some more passport photos to finish processing my paperwork, get my iqama, which is the work permit, really it is a plastic state ID card, and I need to exchange dollars to Saudi riyals, which can not be done on campus, as I am out of riyals, and, incidentally, almost out of dollars as well, and will not be getting paid for another almost three weeks. Dollars can perhaps be had at Farm 5, and there are rumors of a photo shop some place near Farm 5, apparently across the street from a "very good restaurant called "Djidawa," or something like that. So those are my goals.
When I was in wifi range, in my office the day before, I pulled up a map on my wonder device and found Farm 5, then I left that map open in the map app so that I could use it today. The problems with using the map, however, are that, one, it is of a scale which does not allow me to read any of the street names, and, two, I am not going to be able, as I have no wifi connection now as I walk, to determine my location on the map once I wander very far. But, hey, what the hell else am I gonna do all day? So I take a left at the first big street, as that seems fairly clearly like the way to go, and I begin to walk into a residential neighborhood.
In KSA the houses do not sit in a yard which one can see, rather they sit behind walls, so that to look down the street is to look at the walls of houses attached to the walls of the houses next to them. And there are no numbers on the houses, a pizza delivery man's worst nightmare come true.
The turrets of mosques can be seen over the tops of the houses, and the houses are all so different one from the other, colors, architectural styles. There is a complete absence of any people walking on the streets. Just me and the servant class, the cleaners, the servants of families washing their cars or getting their groceries. I know a teacher here who has his car washed and rubbed down every day. The cost? One hundred riyals a month. That is the equivalent of about twenty seven dollars.SA is a car culture.
Why are there no Saudis on the street? Not sure. I have heard speculation that perhaps it is because the huge amount of young males, as females can not drive in this country, are bored, and being that sixty percent of the country's population is under twenty and that the unemployment rate is over fifty percent for that demographic group, and that it is a large country, about the size oft he US east of the Mississippi River, that there just isn't much else to do. KSA also ranks fifth in the world's countries in terms of internet use per capita, creating quite an interesting potential powder keg for the future in terms of coming together of the super rigid, restrictive orthodoxy of the culture and the potential quest for personal expressiveness and freedom of a young population increasingly exposed to the lack of rigors imposed in pretty much all of the rest of the world,
There are over seven thousand car related deaths per year in a country of twenty eight million. Put another way, if that same ratio were to be present in the US, there would be about eighty thousand deaths by car every twelve months. Instead there are about ten thousand. I read of two deaths by people being run over by cars in the Arab News one day, one of the two English language newspapers printed in the Kingdom. With the other worldly, Dutch angle slant common in the news here, the article on a boy run over and killed, about three inches in a column of news, there was mentioned almost casually, two or three lines from the bottom, that the boy also had a bullet hole in his head.
The newspapers in English feature the anti-extremist positions of the KSA government, while the Arabic editions, I am told, do not. In another number of articles and letters to the editor I read how it seemed that a new law was in effect with regard to not being allowed to turn right on a red light. People wrote in complaining that other drivers needed to stop honking when in queue behind them at a light because they were no longer allowed to turn right. And I overheard teachers in the copy room discussing the same issue. The article said "seemed" as though there was not really any way to know. About a week later I read an article in the same newspaper stating that there definitely was no such new law. The English version has articles on the Saudi international film festival, the Arabic version does not. And considering that there are no cinemas in this country, I think one begins to understand why there is an effort to be portrayed with one face to non-Saudis and a different face to the cloistered, conservative citizens that support the monarchy.
I was surprised one day to see a five by five inch drawing of the new "wall" put up by the Saudi government along the Iraqi border to keep radical KSA youth from crossing the border for purposes of jihad and to keep ISIL or other radicals, like AQAP, Al Qa'ida of the Arabian Penninsula, members, from coming South. The wall has a sand berm in front of razor concertina wire rolls, then a 100 meter open space which runs up to a ten foot high chain link fence topped with razor wire, behind which runs a road for the rapid movement of soldiers, peppered with towers manned with infra red goggled, armed troops. Attack helicopters are positioned at strategic intervals and the area between the wires is laced with buried seismic sensors to detect any movement. Below the schematic is a picture of a grinning, aviator sunglass wearing, black beret topped Saudi soldier in US military fatigues, cradling his M-16.
I walked and walked for almost two hours. Attempting to gain my bearings I pulled out my iPad and checked the map app on three or four occasions, and even though I was not connected to any wifi, the blue dot displaying my current position was lit up and accurate every time, moving with me as I walked. God is indeed generous and merciful. I finally found Farm 5. But just prior to finding it the noon prayer time happened, replete with great broadcasting of the azaan from every direction and then, as it is the one time of the one day of the week where all Muslims men are required to attend their mosque, men began flowing out of the houses and cars and shops, all closing and locking up for the dhuhur prayer. It was strange because I was walking away from a big mosque, still triangulating in on my destination, and they were all walking toward and past me, and, given that I was the only white guy I had seen in the two hours since I left campus, it felt as though a horde of undead walked past and around me, somehow blind to the fact that I was not yet turned.
Perhaps ten minutes later I found Farm 5, the central business in a smallish collection of fast food joints, and other shops. As it was still closed for prayer time, I sat down on a bench in the corner, in the shade, and rolled a smoke, one goal accomplished and now intent on finding the photo shop. How would I discern the whereabouts of this restaurant I had heard third hand about? I had not but taken four or five drags when, taking in my surroundings, which included a Burger King, a Happy Bunny, which is another fast food burger chain here, a Hardees, a Starbucks, a doughnut coffee shop, and, immediately to my left, a photo processing, camera, passport photo taking business. Mashah Allah, God has willed it.
Checking the hours of operation, I read that it was open indeed on Friday, but not until four pm, and it was now about fifteen after twelve. It was at this point that an Indian looking young man of about twenty two or three, handsome, wearing a red shirt and an impish grin, approached me as I lounged still in the shade on the bench. He asked me for a cigarette and so I rolled him one. We began to talk. Nepalese he was and an employee at the Farm 5 to boot. His English was passable, and much better, as a certainty, than my Nepalese. He spent his fifteen minute break chatting with me. I told him my tale, how long I had been in country, about five days at this point, that I taught at the oil college on the hill, that I was hungry and did he know of a place to eat anything not fast food? He walked me just past the Happy Bunny and the Hardee's and lo and behold he had a friend who was taking a smoke break in front of an Indian looking restaurant. I was stoked until he said, "No singles today." It took a moment to soak in, but on Friday, the holy day, the restaurant was only for families, meaning there are women in there and therefore no man unaccompanied by a female wife or direct kin could enter. All restaurants, coffee shops, banks, etc., have separate sections for single men and for families. It takes a bit of getting used to.
It is interesting to note that in the time of the Prophet Muhammed, may peace be upon him, women had the right to own a business, fight in war, divorce a man, pray in a mosque. In fact Muhammed's first wife, his only wife for more than fifteen years, a woman more than a decade older than he, named Kadisha, was a very successful merchant before she married him. Aisha, a wife he married later, accompanied him and fought with him in every battle he was involved in. Nor did women wear the kijab, the head scarf or veil. The development in Islam of the modern lack of rights of women are not part of any of the words of God as revealed to the Prophet, May peace be upon him; they have all come later.
The quote which I chose to begin his piece really struck me. It phrases the act of speaking in a manner which at first hit me as somehow alien, strange. Upon rereading it, however, it sank deep into me. It jives well with my understanding of any extension of oneself toward another as an act of love. Being hat I haven't any connections here with other beings, I am constantly in a state of, well, loving others, I suppose. Extending myself through engaging others in conversation, exposing myself, making myself vulnerable with the simple goal of merging with that which surrounds me.
There is something sexual about the quote, the penetration and the orifice references, and while I in no manner associate my wandering through the world seeking interaction and merging with others as a sexual practice, I guess that in the broad spectrum of possible ways of interacting, I can see that a "Hello," or maybe just a brief bit of eye contact may sit at one far end of the range and physical intimacy in terms of intercourse probably sits at the other end of the range of sharing consciousness that is a great joy to me. At this time in my life the latter is not what I am looking for. The type of penetration that most interests me is more that of soul or ego incursions from the one into the other.
And so I went into the Farm 5, both to see if I could cash dollars into riyals, to browse to eat up some of the time between now and four, and to get something to eat. I wandered, picked up some bread, cheese, tomatoes, happily paid with a US one hundred dollar bill and got about three hundred and seventy riyals in change, then went back out to my bench to sit and eat, trying to get to four o'clock. Maybe twenty minutes later the Nepalese fellow came back out, ostensibly perhaps to collect shopping carts, and we repeated our smoking ritual.
I wrote and read and smoked for another couple hours before going back into Farm 5 to do a slow, thorough shopping, doing it so as to eat up another hour. I strolled and looked and bought spices, candles, food, and then paid with dollars again, scoring more riyals. I took my hard earned prizes, exited,and went into the now open photo shop. After fifteen minutes I had eight passport photos for twenty riyals, about five and a half bucks.
My Nepalese friend! somehow back on break, flagged me a taxi, Igave him a tip, and took an over priced taxi! which turned out to be not actually a taxi! but rather a local who was happy to charge me thirty five SR for a twenty SR ride. And given how long I had been out, how far I had walked, the smiling triumphalism of my having accomplished my two goals, I didn't mind.
You do know how to make 'boring' into interesting. I'm guessing your love of people and desire to help will end up filling your hours.
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