The Persistence of Grass

                                                  The Persistence of Grass

                      

       

                                                         Knowing trees,

                                       I understand the meaning of patience.

                                                         Knowing grass,

                                             I can appreciate persistence.

                                                          Hal Borland

The Belltower-the iconic piece of architecture at the heart of King Fahd University of Peteoleum and Minerals.

Just under one month to go before I return to the states for the summer. Whew. This time here, what will end up being four months, is turning out to be a good setting up of my future life here. The odds are fairly good that I will be teaching here at King Fahd University for as many as five years, so having a four month stint up front is giving me the chance to prepare the platform that I shall use to work and live from, friendships established, work routines and coursework now understood, the local culture no longer a mystery. It is feeling perfect. Ten weeks back home will be a welcome respite. Time spent in my own bed, with my family, with my two amazing sons, with my dog, Walter. Perfect.

While I have been spending more time working on writing projects recently, sadly, the expatriate diaries, this blog, is not one of the projects that has been receiving anything like the lion's share of my energies. My father has been working on a book for about thirty years and I have been doing editing on that quite a bit, like ninety to one hundred and twenty minutes a day for the last two plus weeks. The title of my dad's book is The Conspiracy of Silence. It is quite the project, quite an amalgamation of various cultural anthropological analyses on modern culture and its ills combined with aspects of my dad's life story that illustrates in large measure how he came to have the view of the world that he does. 

The basic premise of The Conspiracy of Silence is that humankind has a harder and harder time making proper adaptive choices because we are all, as he says, chasing the mechanical rabbit of standard of living and we are doing so by ramping up the complexity in our societies as though the complexity itself is the goal, adding more variability to the already existing variability as a way to try to gain a greater sense of well being but it is having the opposite affect. It is lowering our sense of well being. The COS looks at the transmission of cultural need resolving strategies and how they are, or are not, properly transmitted from one generation to the next. It looks at the phenomenon of humans using up their own physical energy, their behavioral quantum as he terms it, in search of resolving wants, as they are swapped for needs more and more in CTISs (complex techno-industrial societies) and thus humans use extra-somatic tools, what he calls compensatory devices, to attempt to achieve a greater standard of living, wants, not needs. 

This race to the stars for more and more standard of living accoutrement is more and more difficult to achieve because human collective rules mandate that people cannot just go and meet their needs/wants directly, but that as societies become more complex, they need to use more and more indirect paths to achieve their goals. So that if you want, say, a banana, you can't just go and take it from the store shelf, you need to use money, and you may need, therefore to get a job, which today means finding a computer to construct your resume on, finding some nice slacks, getting a bus pass online, etc., to get that banana. He calls that indirect path the arc of indirection, and he calls all of the parasitic salesmen and politicians and their ways of throwing you off of your directed energies tangents to the arc of indirection, he calls that phenomenon tangentialism.

So that then is the preview. It really is fascinating and, best I can tell, spot on. My father is an academic, and his earlier versions were written in quite a high and dense vocabulary, style, and tone. This is the third edit through with at least one more to come. My father is looking at this project as his last great work. He is peppering the tome with pieces of his personal history, illustrating how much of his ideas were generated out of the taking of many forks in his life. 

So I guess I should update you on the cliffhanger involving the kittens. They are fine. All four of them. No ill has been perpetrated upon them. I was resolved, as disturbing as it was, to do in two of the four of them. I texted Jim, asked him to come over for a pow wow during which I was to tell him of the decision that I'd come to. He came. I told him. He looked about ill and got a real peculiar look on his face, leaning away from me in his chair, sort of looking down his nose at me, eyes fixed in an eyelid squinting, thoughtful stare. He would buy kitty litter and cat food. He would pay to have Tinker and her brood fixed. He would help them to find homes. I caved. Pure and simple. And I can't act like I'm disappointed that I did. It began to dawn on me that our relationship may be permanently damaged if I became that horrible, kitten killing son of a bitch.

So what is it like to live in Saudi Arabia? It is not an easy question to answer. After being here for a matter of only two and a half months, I guess I can say that in many ways there are still more questions than answers. The men that I work with, those who have been here much longer than I, indicate that the confusion and incredulity that swirl inside my head about why it is that much of what happens here happens the way that it does is just the status quo, just par for the Saudi course, er, sand trap. Had my friend Ned visiting one evening with a good friend of his who was passing through town. We were sitting on my back patio talking. I commented on the frustrating fact that as I had recently settled into a good exercise routine, doing about fifty minutes, five nights a week on a stationary bike in the gymnasium building a scant two hundred meters from my flat, suddenly all of the equipment, the six treadmills, the six stationary bikes, the stair steppers, all of the various weight machines, the free weights, mats, incline benches, all of it, was simply removed overnight. As I was complaining, expressing my lack of understanding for why this would happen, that I had heard something third hand about the exercise room being remodeled, Ned's friend, Mark, who has lived in KSA for years, cuts in, "Wait, are you saying that for no reason at all that this situation which was working just fine was dismantled, taken apart and shut down? For no reason at all? Here in Saudi Arabia? No way. I can't believe that." We all broke up laughing. "It's been Saudized," I say. More laughs.

Half way through this last academic module of the year the pacing schedule, the document given to us educators and to all of the Prep Year students to inform everyone what the academic schedule for this module's curriculum and exams is, is abruptly changed. Half way through week four of our seven and a half week term, our schedule changes so that the speaking test we have been preparing the students for that is to take place in less than a week is now moved to week seven. Materials that are to now be covered in week two and three, homework that needs to be given, is changed to two weeks after those weeks have already passed. Imagine our's and the students' surprise. Saudized.

  

During the 2013-2014 school year there was a decision made in this program to go in a different direction with the curriculum, to use a new set of textbooks. Now that seems reasonable, even though of course it can be a bit of extra work for instructors to learn to use new texts, to develop supplemental, complementary activities in order to maximize the potential of the prescribed materials. And students who are in level two and have been promoted to level three may find it a bit challenging to adjust to an altogether new set of textbooks, as it is customary for a program to use four levels of the same series to teach the four different skill levels. But the kicker here is that the new curricular system, textbooks and all, were not brought in abruptly in the weekend or the week between academic modules, which is already hard. No, the entire system was turned upside down right in the middle of an eight week module, causing reactions amongst the teachers from consternation to outright revolt. The curriculum, you see, had been Saudized.

We have exams here every two weeks. Listening, reading, use of English, and the writing of an essay. The exam scores, as well as every grade that we give our students, are submitted to the PYP office where they are subjected to a technologically arcane procedure, almost an alchemical rite that renders them into some new pedagogical element, after which they are passed on to the students and to us, forever altered beyond any recognition. The grades are " normalized" through the use of some secret formula guarded better than the original recipe for Coca Cola. Many of the instructors here think that, like Coke, this one is pretty much not any good for you either. For instance, after the first exam, about two weeks ago now, I was shocked to see that a score of 66 which I had given to one student, a failing grade well deserved, was changed to a 77. Yep, Saudized. I had been telling this particular student repeatedly, as he looked at his phone in class or simply did not do his in class work, that given that he just failed the same course the previous module, he needed to improve if he expected to get passing grades. Sort of defanged me as his inflated scores dropped him squarely into the passing category. We give an effort grade to the students at the end of each module that is worth five percent of their overall grade. I had students get their scores changed by twenty five percent at the end of last module by the little IT men behind the curtain. That'll teach those students whose in charge. Hmph.

It's a bit like Monty Python's Flying Circus around here, truth be told. One does one's best to not let it get one down. It is not our system, we are merely employees. Not to say that everyone takes it. Some go off on the management occasionally and then find themselves not getting their contract renewed. Ya gotta work with what you got is the final message. I do my best to bring good activities to the class, while many, most of the instructors, seem to more or less simply open the book at the beginning of the two hour class and read through the exercises presented therein until two hours is up. 

These type of Saudizing shenanigans cause much chatter and derision amongst the gentlemen who work here, men who have, over time, become jaded and mainly just shake their heads at the blatant lack of common sense or logic that appears to be involved in the decision making processes that govern here. The parking lot which abutted the complex where I live was ripped up a year ago and is now just a small plot of broken up sand and rock. Why remove it? Now the wind just picks up the sandy soil and pelts it against our sliding doors and into our eyes and mouths and noses. People just shake their heads and roll their eyes. A perfectly good parking lot, Saudized.

The whys and the wherefores around this part of the world remain largely mysterious, and not just for those of us who are new. Attempting to link events in any causal fashion defy one's abilities. The difficulty in placing motive to action here is due, I believe, to attempting to overlay the mindset and the learned cultural understandings of cause and effect, the whys and wherefores, if you will, from our own Aristotelian framework, from our perspective steeped in concepts like the rights of man and the constitutional processes and premises of our Western world onto the culture here that does not operate underneath any such template. So that when we search for the starting point for any of the hard to decipher actions listed above, we quickly lose the ability to track the footsteps of this cipher of a desert fox. We simply do not have enough overlap in our culturally based cognitive maps.

Those Houthis must be having a difficult day. As I sit here F-15s are taking off about every ten minutes and curling south, off on their short flight to the Yemen where they will deliver their payload to the fighters in and around the Capitol city of Sanaa in the south of the country. If you have never sat directly below a jet fighter as they pass fifteen to twenty hundred meters above, let me tell you, it is a sound you will not forget. They scream past with a sound like a volcano roaring right next to you, a vibrato shaking of the air waves like a rapid pulse, a super vibration, a cat hissing at two hundred decibels.

Four more F-15s climb and bank to port, curling around to head south by southeast. Twelve hundred pound bombs slung like ovoid eggs or testicles below, screaming off to give a bedu hello to the scrappy but well armed Shi'a rebels to the south. Between the daily sorties against the Yemeni rebels and the low grade but present actions or near actions by fundamentalist Wahabi Saudis against Westerners, it is really surreal being here. News reports state that yesterday 93 KSA citizens were arrested on grounds of their planning of attacks against Western targets, the US Embassy in Riyadh, expat housing compounds. There was an attack against a Canadian man in one of the two malls about a kilometer from here last year by a local wielding a meat cleaver. And yet life here is really tame, sleepy even. Simple quotidian routines, teaching, shooting hoops, working on writing projects, hanging out with friends. 

Maybe my favorite experience with a Saudi that may shed some light on the kind of place I have chosen to be is this one, a perfect through the looking glass portrait. So I have this student, let's call him Yousef. Well one day after class, Yousef approaches me, explains to me that he is quite good at reading and writing, that his listening is pretty good, but he is wondering if there is anything that I may be able to suggest to him that may allow him to practice his speaking. I think, suggest online ESL chat rooms, maybe he can find another student or a few who may want to also practice their speaking that he can form a bit of a club with. Look at him. Nothing. He sort of shrugs, yeah maybe. I pause. Okay, I say, I am willing to meet with you after week one day a week to play toastmaster and maybe we can get some other guys interested also. Yeah, I think, I can help out this way, can sacrifice a bit of my personal time to get these guys up and beyond. To help them to empower themselves to take their educational process by the horns, to really engage in their own learning, their own growth. I suggest this. He is like, okay. Thank you, teacher. We're on. Tuesday evening we will meet. Every Tuesday we will have Talk Time. So I buy a pack of Uno cards for something to have as a central activity, make up some conversation questions, all set. I go down to the Student Mall after a ten hour day, sorry at that point, of course, for volunteering my time. But, hell, if he wants this opportunity to learn, I guess it is the least I can do. So I sit down and wait. Five minutes turns into thirty, forty, sixty. No Yousef.

I see him the next day and I approach him. "Hey," I say, smiling, "I went down to the mall yesterday and waited for you, but you never came."

"Oh," he replies, sort of stretching like one does when one wakes from a nap, "It's okay. I was kind of tired anyway."

Hashtag Eastern Province

                                                           Hashtag Eastern Province

I woke up this morning wrapped in my blanket, laying on a windshield sun visor from a car, on the sand and scrabble of the Saudi desert. It took me a moment or two to recall why it was that I had gone to bed in that fashion and in that place. Little black ants walked slowly, poking around in their thorough robot way on the corner of my blanket in my as of yet unmoved visual field. My clothing and pack items spread liberally on top of them. As I lay there with a great thirst, the space between my ears feeling muddled and heavy like so much wet cotton, the events of the day before began to come back in flighty, Kodachrome snippets.  But that piece of partially eaten cheesy garlic bread half covered with small, black ants, half buried in the chalky beige powder of the Eastern Province soil some couple of feet from where I curled up for the night? I don't remember the garlic bread.

I spent the night laying just on this side of the rock sticking up behind my pack. The garlic bread? It was planted in the sand right there as well.

I had come to this gathering after receiving news of it from my friend, Ned. Another Lecturer, an American named Blake, had invited Ned and it turned out that I would be able to join as well. Camping. A Hash event. Those were the only two facts that I had and they were all that I needed to know. There have been two goals for me since arriving in the Kingdom which have stood a bit taller than the rest. Getting outside of the urban areas to see and possibly explore some of the landscape of Arabia and breaching the hallowed, secure perimeter of the Aramco compound. This camping trip seemed to me to be the key that may unlock both of those doors.

Hashers are people who self describe as drinkers with a running problem. The group was started in the 1940s by a group of four men who were serving in the US military. Today there are Hashers worldwide. In many ways the group is akin to the traditional understanding of a fraternity or a sorority, though it is equally open to the members of both sexes. So that one needs to be invited in by a current member to join a Hash event. Each inductee will be given a Hash tag, their Hasher name. The camaraderie and ribaldry exchanged between the members and the worldwide acceptance of a wandering Hasher into any chapter anywhere, these are also aspects of the Hashing tribe that mimic those of the secret orders of the Greek systems. 

I put together the meager camping goods that I could manage from among my personal belongings here. The fleece blanket from my bed, a tattered sun visor for the front windshield of a car which I had found blowing around behind my flat, water, a spare shirt, underpants, socks, my toiletry kit, my small music box, book, iPad, my down pillow, a couple of food items, flip flops, sun hat, and a folding beach chair that I had recently picked up for about nothing from fellow teacher who will be leaving KFUPM at the end of this module. 

A tall, fit man named Izzy arrived in a white SUV at a bit past one pm to pick up Ned, Blake, me, and our lumpy, inelegant pile of camping items. Izzy is a tall, fit military man who is working with the joint US and Saudi mission to train and establish a Saudi coastal defense force of five thousand soldiers, a KSA Coast Guard. He doesn't talk a lot but is not a grim, stereotypical jarhead. He seems rather gentle, has an open, toothy smile, is polite. All I know about our destination is that it is an hour or two south of Dhahran in the area of the Shia city of Hofuf and that it is in some hills and close to a canyon of some kind. I am later to come to understand that this canyon has a name. It is Scribner's Canyon.

The drive goes quickly enough. Along the way we begin to see camels of many colors in small, loose groupings, off to either side of the freeway. We pass through one police checkpoint, more a military checkpoint, but are not stopped, just slowed down over a series of speed bumps and driving between orange traffic cone separated lanes, small toll booth looking buildings, a pillbox, a mounted fifty caliber machine gun in the back of a military half ton pick up truck. These sort of statements of government presence are more or less ignored by everybody, they are not viewed with foreboding. Given that the Eastern Province is Shia majority and that the Shia have on many occasions risen up in anti-government protests, there is no surprise about the check points on the arterials connecting the larger urban centers of this part of the peninsula.

Concrete structures in every stage of both completion and deterioration, mingled with junked machinery, blue plastic tarps flapping in the heavily sand laden strong desert wind accompanied our drive, all of them, along with the camels, ubiquitous inhabitants of the Saudi landscape, at least that part that abuts the freeways. Upon reaching the correct exit we pull into a junked up petrol station with prices nearly double that of Khobar, the larger city that Dhahran is attached to. .94 Riyals a liter here, or about one dollar and ten cents American per gallon. There were a number of camels across the road and we drove over to see them up close. As Izzy had guessed, sure enough, they approached the vehicle, pushing their noses a bit inside. Patting the soft, flabby skin covering their mouths and nose reminded me of touching a horse. They have the same feel, including the coarse hairs that poke out here and there. And they smell somewhat the same, although these had a bit of a petrol or diesel smell as well. 

We parked near to the station, a motley, rubbish strewn blight that reminded me of the now defunct, 1940s era service stations in the deserts of the southwester US states, except it is dirtier here, more unkempt. It seems to be a characteristic of this country that one finds rubbish all over, collected especially where the wind blows it up against something which blocks it's further progress. Empty plastic pop or water bottles, plastic grocery bags, the lids of juice bottles, parts of newspapers, candy bar or pastry wrappers. We waited for approximately fifteen minutes for the other six Hasher vehicles to arrive and then followed them to the spot on the smaller road that we now took, turning off the road, down about a six foot, very steep embankment, onto the desert floor below, from whence we drove in a modern day caravan across the desert for about two kilometers until we arrived at the campsite somewhat hidden amongst the small hills that turned into much bigger hills and Mesa looking buttes within about a kilometer.

Leaving the road and heading across the uneven, terrain brought a rush of adrenaline; this is what I have been dreaming about, to get out of the city with its concrete boxes, it's inorganic, overly organized shapes, it's air conditioning and fluorescent lights, to be allowed to become free in any atavistic sense, to roam and wander the untamed parts of this portion of the planet, the fractal patterns of nature, the warm breeze, and the smells of dust and vegetation in my nose. We were moving pretty fast, maybe fifty to sixty klicks per hour as we stayed in formation with the other SUVs, all trailing tight plumes of whitish dust. The Martian looking surface was good and bumpy, the hills and bluffs we were driving towards forming a close facsimile of the American southwest, a couple flat topped mesas maybe four hundred meters in elevation formed the backdrop to the first and second row of dramatic foothills.There were of course a few exceptions. 

A pipeline roughly eighteen inches in diameter ran parallel to our course, perhaps one hundred and fifty meters to our left, crossing underneath the road hind us, it ran straight towards and then up and over the first large, maybe one hundred meter tall hill of greyish tan earth. Besides the black pipeline ran five furrows which looked every bit like single lane roads, each separated from the adjacent one by a berm of sandy earth perhaps a meter and a half to two meters in height; it looked as though some gigantic being had taken an equally oversized garden rake with just five tines on it and pulled it straight across the earth, up and over the large bluff just to our left. 

The vegetation was also not the same as the deserts of the American West. No sagebrush, no creosote bush, bitter brush, or Russian Olives. A different low shrub with much less leafy material than the artemisia tridentada of the Great Basin and the western plains, a spindly plant with very small leafy structures that appeared more like single strands of arbor vita poking out strait from the central branch at intervals on one to two inches. Small curled up plants that looked like teeny trees about three to four inches tall popped out of the earth at fairly regular intervals. As I was later to learn, the great flat furrows in the earth that moved along with the pipeline up and over the top of the rise above us were the marks left by the treads of a five tracked behemoth machine designed to relocate oil drilling platforms. The pipeline carries water to the sites where the drilling relocates.

We shortly pulled into a space hidden between two arms of what turned out to be the mouth of a canyon. The actual opening into e canyon was not visible from this sandy bottomed wadi. The seven or eight SUVs were soon arranged at somewhat regular intervals along the edges of the small natural arena and along one of the two forks of the arroyo that ran out of the main wadi, small tents and cots beginning to crop up before the twenty plus persons assembled began to migrate towards the head of the depressed area, close to the small boulders that stacked up at the beginning of the canyon.

It is with a bit of shyness that I enter into a group of blokes who obviously know each other well, fighting the sensation of feeling the outsider. I walked up to the collection of chairs set out around a low fire pit, drinking some water to await a run or a hike which would commend shortly. Lots of fit fellows in their smart running gear, things which I do not posses. Thinking thoughts to myself about how this coming fall I will get some running shoes and a pair of athletic shorts and a running shirt, things which I did not bring with me and have not bought. In fact I can't say I am much of a runner, having run as a regular form of exercise for only a handful of times in my life outside of high school sports. 

Being somewhat overweight and having weak ankles and flat feet, there is a good bit of punishment to suffer when I do much regular activity. I have been riding exercise bikes and shoot some evening hoops, but not running. If I can climb down another ten pounds I think that my feet and ankles may allow some running. I opted for the walking group, composed of four ladies and three other guys. The runners set off in the hundred degree, hot sun, while we kept up a decent clip behind them over the soft, loose sand and small rocks. We engaged in light, casual conversation, learned that one of the gals was from Czechoslovakia, two from South Carolina, the other a Brit. The sun around here does not play. It beats on you and there exists a bit of mind game involved in  working somewhat actively to not mind. We climbed over the pipeline when we got to it, surprised at how hot it was, painted black, stretching roughly forever. No doubt hot enough to cook an egg, one needed to straddle it quickly and slide over it, careful not to, well, fry one's eggs.

Putting one foot in front of the other in the earth, which varies here from the softness of talcum powder to bony, calcified scrabble, puts a mad rush of juice in my veins. It is so the diametric opposite of holing up in either my concrete office, my concrete classroom, the concrete student mall, or my concrete flat. I like outside. No, I need and love outside. I would rather live 100%  outside than 100% inside. To walk out where I can turn my head around and around and up and down and take in fully high definition, IMAX type, 3-D visual stimuli like this brings me a fine and utter gratification. Sure it's not blu-ray, it may not have that great glow, but it is pretty dang good to look at. And hey, does blu-ray let you feel the grit of wind blown sand in your ears and scalp? Deep down in the corpuscles and the double helixes there is a vibration that only responds to this, and here in his place I am buzzing like a magic fingers bed with two fresh quarters in it..

We returned to camp about forty five minutes after we set off, just before the runners got back. Before too long the shadows were low and long and mean old mister sun was poking his fiery head down below the walls of the wadi. With the falling of the light came a very certain, very present, raising of the night. The amber started flowing, the campfire was lit, the main event was about to get its groove on.

Ned and I congratulated one another many times over the course of the evening, chuckling, clinking our glasses together, our good fortune in and of itself a worthy cause for celebration. One of the Hashers, Shut the Chuck Up, played guitar and sang songs on and off for the entire evening. Pink Floyd. John Prine. Rolling Stones. The Band. An oblong pit was dug in the sand, charcoal bags dumped in and lit, and two grills laid down across the top. Upon this perfect outdoor range was arrayed a variety of skewers, potatoes, steaks, chicken. The smell of the grilling meats, the cold drink in my hand, the company of women around the fire, the gay and vibrant verbal jousting, teasing, joshing, talking. All of it has been too long in the waiting. Before long the songs began to get a little bit louder, the jokes a little bit funnier, the lines of reasoned conversation a bit harder to find.

Living in a society that does not have women to talk to or even to look at or to be around, be it as a check out girl in the store, a bank teller, a barista, a neighbor even, it takes a toll that is hard to assess. It's one of those things you don't exactly notice until the lack goes away. No. No women in the Kingdom. Here it is men, a Kingdom of men. Living with men. Working with men. Teaching men. Men for cab drivers, and store clerks, and baggers in the grocery store, and servers in the restaurants, and manning every position behind the bar at every coffee shop, from Starbucks to Dunkin' Donuts. I talk with my mother on occasion. Recently, maybe four days past, I spoke with her and she asked me, "Peb, are you in love?" I laughed. No, mom. No, I am not in love. We don't actually get to see women here. The only ones that you can see are black Caspar the Ghost figures shuffling along from a distance. As a friend calls them, Moving Black Mailboxes.

Then we ate as the music continued. One of the guys, a feisty, smaller man with a European name, hailing I believe from Lebanon, or maybe Jordan, set many tea candles along a series of horizontal ledges against the wall that stuck up vertical about six to eight meters bordering our ring of chairs around the campfire so that these lovely small lights lit up the rock up close in a string, illuminating more intensely in spots what the firelight was painting with its strokes of dancing, brighter and less bright patches. And through it all a wondrous, caressing breeze pushed through, the perfect and most welcome complement to the seventy eight degrees ambient temperature and the heat from the fire next to us.

Then the Hash Circle was called and things went a bit properly sideways. The Hash leader, a Limey some twenty five years in the group, led the forty five minute event. Think of sailors, sea shanties, celebrity roasts with the added piquancy of bawdy and certainly inappropriate humor, and you'll be in the ballpark. It went something like this.

Our evening's Hash Circle emcee says, "Yanksoffalot, it's your turn, mate. C'm'in ta the circle." His stepping forward is followed by chuckling, heckling. Yanksoffalot knows enough to bring a full drink with him. 

"I think I'm gonna tell a lil tale, then," says our emcee, who proceeds to talk about a Hash event that he and Yanksoffalot were involved in that took place in Thailand in a downpour so torrential that three to four inches of running water covered the ground, obliterating any marks for their trail run. This tale goes on for five minutes of untoward descriptions of incidents from that Hasher trip, put downs and profanities laced aplenty. Sexual innuendos, make that flat out sexual insults, are flung at the man in the middle and then emcee man begins one of many short drinking songs sung for the purpose of ridiculing the penis size of the participant or their sexual prowess, their inability to hold their drink, etc. 

He's the Meanest

He's the Meanest

He sucks the horse's penis

He's the meanest, he's the horse's ass.

Ever since he found it

All he does is pound it

He's the meanest, he's the horse's ass.

So drink it down

Drink it down,

Drink it down, down, down, down, 

Down, down, down.

Yanksoffalot gulps the rest of his drink and moves back to the edge of the circle. 

As a Hash virgin I, and four other first timers, are brought into the middle, asked a few questions, not ridiculed badly, made to drink, insulted relatively little, and moved back to the edge. Why did we come to KSA. Why did we come to his event. Then emcee begins this sweet song for us.

Here's to the virgins ,

They're true blue,

They are Hashers through and through,

They are arseholes 

So they say,

Tried to go to heaven,

But they went the other way,

Drink it down, 

Drink It down,

Drink it down down, down, down

Down, down, down.

There was a naming ceremony for Izzy our driver. It was not his first hash event but he had yet to be named. He was brought into the circle not to be named, but just, as every single person around the fire was, for the purpose of ritual lambasting and heartfelt inclusion. Emcee man was asking some questions, as he is won't to do, for the purpose of finding an entry point into the target's sphere that he can exploit for harassment. 

"What did you do earlier today?"

"Worked then did gym and swim, then packed up to go camping." 

The only Saudi man present, a Shia man who I would later learn had been expelled from KFUPM as a student in 1982 because he was arrested and held by the secret police in Riyadh for eighteen days during a Shia uprising, speaks, "You should not be doing Jim." After a brief silence in which comprehension settles in, there is an eruption of laughter, even Izzy grins broadly, understanding the joke made at his expense. A second round of guffaws go around, as this homoerotic turn of phrase, especially coming from the one non-native English speaker in the crowd, continues to pay out in well merited mirth. 

"Doing Jim! I believe that'd be a right fine Hashtag for Izzy." Emcee says, holding his cup up high, the firelight turning him into some archetypal medieval fireside bard. "Doing Jim!" Assesses the nodding heads, the murmurs of assent, the other glasses raising. "Do I hear a second?"

There is a second, and it is confirmed.

"On your knees, Doing Jim." He kneels, a cup of libation and a fistful of sand are both used to baptize him, his shaved head lit by the fire now tarnished. He gets a rousing collection of shouts and giggles as he stands, a new man reborn a Hasher.

Why was he born so beautiful?

Why was he born at all?

He's no fuckin' use to anyone,

He's no fuckin' use at all. 

They say he's a joy to his mother,

But he's a pain in the asshole to me,

So, drink it down, 

Drink it down,

Drink it down, down, down, down

Down, down, down.

The Hash circle doles out its requisite verbal abuse and mandated chugging of libations, runs its course. 

After the Circle is complete, the guitar strums back to life, there is a lighting of paper globes, Japanese lanterns really, so that the piece of flammable material suspended below the soft globe fills it with hot air, causing it to light up like a magical, naturally lit globe maybe the better part of a meter in height, lifting slowly up and up and up, becoming smaller and smaller until it drifts too far and is lost behind the wall of the edge of our little firelight lit wadi.

Drunken food eating happens, louder laughter, continuing on for another hour or two. The evening could not be more meteorologically gentle, the crowd mellowing. It is not much longer before people begin to drift off. I, deciding the amber wasn't doing the trick, go for a cup half filled with what is called "mother's ruin," and find myself stumbling about as though somebody had improperly tampered with my gyroscopic controls. It can't be but ten minutes after this that I decide, if that precise a verb can be attached to my very much anything but precise state, that perhaps heading for horizontal may be the best or only reasonable choice. There is a bit of haziness that creeps into the pictures of what happens to me at this point. But while I remember still shots of the firelight on the faces of some of the Hashers, somewhat tilted and grainy images of the wadi as I shuffled in search of my bedroll, I am gonna guess that one of the items that I reached for as I made my last fly by of the food table, en route to bed, was the tin foil wrapped, cheese covered garlic bread.

Doppelgänger dreams

                                                          Doppelgänger Dreams

                                                     That which is inaction is action,

                                                stillness is motion, eternity is change,

                                                  that is truth, and that is existence.

                                                       Real life lies in this eternity.

                                

                                          Everything else is just the stream of dreams.

                                                   In truth the world is just a dream

                             and the question is not whether to leave these dreams or not.

                                                  One has just to be aware of them.

                                            With this awareness, everything changes.

                                                                       Osho

There are bountiful examples of a counter intuitive, highly contradictory, almost oxymoronic, axiom in the universe. It is the tendency for precise opposites to exist within the same phenomena. Matter and anti-matter. Positive and negative magnetic attractions. Day and Night. Like Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, the worst of actions within the best of beings, an unbelievably bad act in the life of a superlative person. How can we talk about this tendency for the seeds of all possibilities to exist inside of every being and every force? "He seemed like such a nice man. He never bothered anyone. He was so polite." Isn't that what the neighbors usually say of the mass murderer, the man with three women chained in his basement for two decades? And while that one is easy to see, happens frequently enough, the opposite is less fun to play with, but equally true. The most base of humans, the vilest, who does someone a good turn. Say the Denzel Washington character in Flight, an alcoholic, cocaine using, lying airline pilot who saves the lives of some hundred and fifty persons in an utterly heroic act--is he a hero or a heel? And who gets to judge?

But it's not just people, it's other animals down to insects and bacteria. Right? The ant instinctively understands, is genetically programmed to sacrifice itself for the good of other ants, for the nest, for its queen. And systems. Every system has within it the seeds of its own destruction. It seems fair to ask, does it also possess the kernels of it's own salvation? This type  of dichotomy, this kind of balance, must exist. All the good must have some bad. All the bad must have some good. Which part, the mostly all or the little bit of strong opposite, should one be judged on?

The spiritualist and writer Osho has written many meditations, many words that I have found too apt, too perfect, too much how I feel or want to feel, strive to feel. Here are a few.

"To avoid pain, they avoid pleasure. To avoid death, they avoid life"

"Take life easily, lovingly, playfully, non-seriously. Seriousness is a disease, the greatest disease of the soul and playfulness the greatest health."

His understanding of how a person may choose to understand their place in the revolving emptiness of the great universe that we inhabit, that we pass through in a so short span of time, how we can work to place our perspective in a spot from which each and every emotion or attachment is but a cloud passing overhead soon to disappear or a guest who stays in our house that we should, regardless of the quality of said emotion, honor and host until it chooses to leave, seems to me to be so worthy of emulation and awe. I mean I want to be in that marvelous place, right? Enlightened. At peace. No worries. Hakuna  matata. 

Yeah I strive, I work at it. The long slog towards enlightenment. Forgiveness yada yada yada love blah blah blah breathing. Want to let go of attachment, learn to do without, let go of the things not meant for me. Who doesn't? It is a bit easier for me here so far from away from so many of the things and the people that are triggers for me. Especially being away from the most recent her in my life. The crazy upside down ness of the last years are of such a bizarre, hard to believe nature that I stopped using other humans as a coping mechanism, meaning I no longer regale others with hard to digest anecdotes from my last marriage because the look on the faces of those unlucky enough to have been the unwitting recipients of my desire to unload made me realize that it was an very unpleasant experience for them. The crinkled noses, the averted gazes, the half sounds of discomfort. Frankly, I think many folks just flat out didn't even believe half the things I said, that's how messed up they are. Besides which it ends up setting up a dynamic a lot like when you've just met someone and they start sharing with you how they were molested as a child and you sort of withdraw and think, why are they telling me this?

It is definitely easier here. Since I have stopped unloading on others, the only options I gave for processing the large backlog of icky events is to either pay a counselor or just work through them on my own. While I was in the relationship I never had time to process because other events happened with such rapidity that I was always chewing on some new crap not long after the last one became apparent. As for a counselor, it would take a year or two of just me talking at the rate of one or two hours a week to even relate all of the separate incidents, let alone have any time to "work through" the episodes. Someone said once that it is much easier to be holy on the top of a mountain than it is in the middle of a city. Well, ain't that the truth.

"A serious person can never be innocent, and one who is innocent can never be serious."

"A comfortable, convenient life is not a real life – the more comfortable, the less alive. The most comfortable life is in the grave."

I had believed Osho to be Japanese based on the content of his words and his name. Much of the paradoxical logic is from the Far East, and much of Osho's words bear frequent oppositional phrases. He is not from the Far East. A photo of the man appeared on one of the websites that held a list of some of his words. The man looking into the camera was quite obviously a man of Indian, dot not feather, descent. This intrigued me. I Wikipediad him. What I found was far more interesting than I could have imagined. He is a Hindi man, or, rather he was. He passed on in 1995 at the relatively young age of 58. Interestingly enough, his name was changed to Osho for most of the second half of his life. The reasons for this change appear to be a bit vague. 

Here's where we circle back to my initial points about the inevitable, inherent contradictions within all beings and systems. For you see Osho was a man who owned 93 different Rolls Royce automobiles. The vehicles were paid for with money "donated" to him by members of his, well, his church, I guess. Osho is another name for Bhagwan Shri Rajneesh, the man who was the leader of the sect, cult according to many, that lived on a 64,229 acre property just outside of Antelope, Oregon during most of the 1980s and into the 90s. Anyone remember Rancho Rajneesh? This is a man who was deported from the United States in ....under the cloud of controversy that included, amongst other things, attempted murder. Incidentally, before he changed his name to Bhagwan Rajneesh in the 1979s, his name was Acharya Rajneesh. His given name, which he went by until he was in his thirties, was Chandra Mohan Jain.

Among other strange episodes, the Rancho Rajneesh disciples imported many hundreds of homeless people into the town of Antelope in order to have them register to vote as locals for the purpose of having members of their collective elected to local office. His second in command, a woman named Sheela, secretly taped him discussing plans to introduce ..... Into the local water supply to poison the local citizens of Antelope, punishment for their antipathetic views and anger towards this mammoth group of outsiders with their different lifestyle, their peripheral views, and their strong arming of the local government and community. 

Are the beautiful words that this figure bespoke true, are they words of truth? Can truth be derived by persons who are, well, not truthful people? And what does it mean to be a non-truthful person? Can good come from bad? It seems quite evident to me, given the overriding beauty of his statements, that indeed it can. 

As far as final judgement goes, when the scales are balanced at the end of days, the actions of a lifetime added up, do some deeds really count for more than others? Does a life spent mostly living so as not to harm others, lived with much energy given towards the betterment of others, does every one of those small actions merit only small coins dropped into the bank account of personal worth? Does one, two, a few, really nasty injuries to others count for much, much more in the negative so that a life of helping others, of holding one's impulses and angers, resentments, in check while giving and aiding and treating others well all get wiped out in the ledger with the sordid, drunken, or rage fueled moment or two of insanity, infidelity, brutality?

These seem terribly important questions. In my own life I have worked hard to live and to love, to approach other beings with peace and with acceptance. Many of my jobs have been for charitable organizations, volunteer work, gifting of my time to lend support and succor. Yet there are episodes of madness that have plagued me as well,and some that have caused great and unwarranted misery to others. So where do I stand in the universal accountability/goodness balance? Perhaps more importantly, how will I ever know? Or what, in the end, is the value of knowing? Were a person to in fact know where they stood on the cosmic scales could it help them? If one has certainty that they are in the black, will they then feel complacent, able to sin a bit more because, like spending only the interest on a trust account, they have knowledge that they are not going to end life overdrawn? Or the opposite. If I came to a realization that I was not only deep in the hole but that there would never be time or ability to climb out of it, would I stop trying to keep the demons inside? 

No, there is not any benefit to the knowing of any answers in this game. Nor does there seem to be any advantage in attempting to calculate the status of myself or anyone else in this macabre contest of yin and yang. There is already enough judgement in the world. We all carry it around in gross surplus. How many consecutive minutes really pass each day in anyone's life in which they are not in some form assessing others, their thoughts or their deeds? 

My world for most of the last ten years fell into his unhappy, self cannibalizing milieu of tallying up the wrongs, the perceived wrongs, of my partner, codifying and concretizing the negative, deceitful wrongs that caused me pain. The betrayals. The abandonment. The confusion. The helplessness. So if her misdeeds, missteps, unhappy actions were tallied, well, so what? What is the good that rises up through the negativity? If every system bears within itself the seeds of its own salvation, then where and what did the seeds germinating in her sprout into? Could it be that as I solicited from her the emotional malnourishment that I desired yet could not notice or understand until it grew so large that it suffocated me so that finally, misanthropic and deformed with self pity, it forced me into recognizing my own needs for self examination? And in this process, this distasteful yet necessary procedure, has it caused me to grow? To limp just a bit further down that unimproved road marked self enlightenment? 

Early in our time together I was upset over what was always the same issue for us and was talking with her about ending our relationship. She pointed out our personal problem areas and how they fit together like a "lock and key." Me with my issues of self pity, betrayal, emotional abandonment, and she with her issues of betraying trust, emotional abusiveness, selfishness, philandering. She reminded me that when we first got together I had told her that I did not want to be in any serious relationship with anyone who could not view being in an intimate relationship as a most difficult form of yoga, an exercise that would aid a being in getting closer to God. I was reminded that without discomfort, people do not generally examine their own behavior or their patterns of belief with any serious intent to change them.

Did she tip all of the scales back to even with this service that she in the end gave to me? This other that I had known from the ultimately first instant that I laid yes on her would bring me right back to the place that I guess, in retrospect, I had been sticking out my thumb all along to hitch a ride back to? A place called home?

             Truth is not something outside to be discovered, it is something inside to be realized.

.

.

Where I live. What I live for.

                                                     Where I Live. What I live For

                 The caterpillar thinks that the world is ending, and then it becomes a butterfly.

The view of the student mall at King Fahd University of Petroleum and Minerals taken from the building I work in, Building 58. The food court inside the ground floor of the mall is where students and staff eat lunch, bank, get haircuts, office supplies, and more. 

US made Saudi Air Force F-15 fighters take off from the airbase five or six miles from al jamiya petrol, the oil university, meaning KFUPM, regularly over the course of every twenty four hour period now. One can tell because they are so near as to be exceptionally loud and the sound that they make as they cross the sky is different from that created by the passenger jets which take off and land at King Fahd International Airport, which is perhaps fifteen miles from where I now sit on my back patio. The F-15s are making bombing sorties against the Houthi rebels and AQAP fighters (Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula) in what here is called the Yemen, the small Muslim nation on KSA's mountainous border to the southwest, the corner of the Arabian Peninsula that forms the northern mouth of the southern entrance to the Red Sea.

The Yemen has always been a special part of Al Jazeera Arabiah, the Arabian Peninsula. It has been one of the key points along the established southern, ocean going trade route between points west, including Egypt and the Levant area, Turkey, Europe, and those east, Persia, India, China, the East Indies. The northern route has always been the overland route that passed not through Arabia at all, but rather through Persia and the area now known as Iraq and up through Istanbul. As for the deserts of the peninsula, the Rub al Kali, the empty quarter, the driest, hottest portion of this arid region, international trade has never flourished. The central and northern parts of the land here in the Eastern Province, the Hasa, where I live, the Najd, controlled by Riyadh, and the Hijaz, where sits Jiddah, Makah (Mecca), and Madina, have ever had smaller trading routes from oasis to oasis by camel caravan for more local, tribal, Bedu commerce, dates, rugs, sheep.. But the Yemen, abutting the most southeasterly of the Saudi regions, the Asir, is separated by a range of mountains that make it easily defensible by the Yemeni people, by the Houthi, the Shi'a populations which even today control the north of the Yemen, the group that had a separate state, North Yemen, from ......

Here in Al Hasa, the Eastern Province, the oil rich region, things move on with no disruption. There is no chatter amongst the folks I work with about the troubles with the Yemen, it really has no bearing on our lives whatsoever. We are not living in the midst of some war torn society. Nope. I went to work today, prepped for classes, corrected essays, had a subway sandwich for lunch with two colleagues followed by a large Arabic coffee to power up for my afternoon class, then walked home and am now writing on my back patio listening to some blues. Will walk to the co-op soon between evening prayer times to get some groceries, make dinner, write some more, watch some TV from my hard drive, read, brush my teeth, set my alarm and get my eight hours horizontal.

I am eager to fly back to my little hovel at 209 S. Anderson St. for the summer and get on with playing catch up on abusing my liver. Got a righteous road trip planned with my two beloved sons out to the Midwest, down to Austin, Texas, to visit my mom, step-father and brother and his family. Can't hardly wait. And I am excited to return back here in the fall. I like it here. It is like going away to work camp where you make friends, do your job with a great ability to focus on doing it right, and it is also a great place and way for me to be able to concentrate on my writing, hone my craft. It is just now that I am setting up some other, bigger writing projects. I have had enough time to make some friendships, to learn my job, to set some routines, to make some money, to start to acclimate to this new place with its weather, its natural beauty, and its people and culture. I have, in essence, built the platform from which I can properly live and work next fall for my eight month academic year before what will be, due to the positioning of the month of Ramadan, a four month summer holiday. Al hamduh lillah, praise be to God.

Inside the student mall.

My teaching this module is two sections of level three students, all of whom have just failed three and are repeating. It is my kind of challenge replete with lots of motivational speeches and innovative classroom tactics aimed at addressing their collective academic needs. I gotta say that I am really finding it appealing. I have always liked working with the underdogs. I think I am seeing some of them catch the spark, become engaged with their own education, as there is a tendency for them to be pretty unengaged, to not work hard. In KSA they say, "there is no such thing as bad students, only bad teachers." The administration, unfortunately, not only agrees with that, it is they who propagate that truth.

As I have ever been somebody who writes the words, at least when they come next to each other in this order, self discipline, in about six point font, being here is every bit the writer's weekend retreat, just, you know, packaged into two year contracts. Maybe that is just exactly what I need to get outside of my own copse of trees long enough to see the forest. Slowing down, facilitating quiet time for myself, thinking and constructing ideas for writing projects in my head in lieu of socializing, being sober enough to find myself sitting in front of a screen to write, allowing peace to manifest within me--these are not usually part of my real world. Sure I value them. And yes, I have found them at times, but no, they are not close friends that I spend much time with, more like great friends that I chide myself for not keeping in contact with as much as I ought to. 

From here the world that I inhabit, externally as well as inside, seems more assessable and manageable. I can chew on something for days, weeks even, before I act on it or before I decide it best not to. Time is one thing I am rich in now and that has been for many years my goal. Money is easy to find, time so rare. My father always told his three children that making money is easy but that the price one pays for it is steep. So it is. Here I have both time and money. Money enough to gift my eldest son ten thousand dollars to pursue his, and, frankly mine for him, dream to study and to live abroad. Teo, my eldest, twenty one years old, will graduate with a BA in GIS/Geography this spring and will be attending Northern Ireland University in Galway this coming fall. Wow, a dream come true. For both of us. You go, son! Make your life extraordinary. Don't you ever let those who believe it can not be done get in your way while you are out there doing it. From living in Ireland already and now again, to walking across Spain. Good for you, T. Carpe the fuck outta that diem!

My two handsome Bicchieri Lanegan boys, Paolo Fiann on the left, and his hermano, Teo Fiann on the right. Below Teo on top from kindergarten. Paolo below pre kindergarten. 

 

Recent days have found me working on a writing project that my younger, twenty year old, son, Paolo, and I have been cooperatively pecking away at for some time. This brings me joy in that it is a collaboration with my boy and in that it is me self actualizing, creating, writing. It is a great project that Paolo began and let me join in on. It is the tale of Judas Sycamore, Vampire hunter, set in Manhattan at the very beginning of the twentieth century. I am also working to help my father edit and revise his opus, The Conspiracy of Silence, what he feels is his last great project. The blogging is a perfect vehicle for me to get down the work of writing, to pound away at the keys and to learn to do the writing, not just to come up with what may or may not be great ideas for projects, but to actually give them life in the material world. It has been through the blog work that I have put pressure on myself to actually make the time, roughly an hour each day, to write and rewrite pieces. They are never actually polished, but I usually work on about two or three simultaneously, getting a start on one and then going back to add to another and then back to finish one. Juggling them all so that I can let them sit a bit like a good dish in the fridge, the flavors all getting cozy one with the other before returning with a fresh eye to taste it and see what it needs. Working to find small bits to save for the end of a piece, learning to recognize that bit as I go, set it aside at the bottom of the page to re encounter when I write my way down there and then, rediscovering it, work it into the ending. Learning to see it and know it when it comes up and then having the presence of mind to set it aside and then to work my way to it with the rest of the piece to set it up for that punch line, that is something I have learned over the roughly hundred posts that I have put together between the three blogs that I have kept: autenticexperience.blogspot.com; pilgrimpeb.blogspot.com; and this one, expatpeb.blogspot.com.

Checking on my pilgrimpeb blog today, The Pilgrim's Way, was a fascinating experience. I started by typing "pilgrim who calls you" into google and saw my blog post of that name pop up in the number one position, what a great tickle that was. Then went to see that last month I had 44 hits on the blog which I have not posted on for about seventeen months. Immortality achieved through the synaptic pathways of the world mind. The internet. A small patch of ground in cyberspace that I hold title and deed to. 

There is not much in my life today, outside of sharing consciousness and space/time with my sons, that causes me as much endorphin/dopamine excitement as forging a piece of writing that I find satisfying and real. Not that all of them come out that way for me, but like pulling on the slot machine, some of them come out that way. Intermittent reinforcement. Ya gotta love it. What do they say about obscenity? It is not easy to define but you know it when you see it? Same goes for me as I survey a bit of writing. When I feel it has worked, that my goals have been met, my expectations and hopes for it realized, it pleases me something fierce. 

Inside there are so many very different aspects of myself, so many troubling cyclones still so unsettled, great mountain tops of joys, perfect moments as yet unrealized, goals, sorrows, unresolved disappointments, triumphs, so many sunrises still to see from so many different places. Here Saudi is functioning for me as some manner of sensory deprivation tank, a container that will hold me comfortably, will rein in my impulsive drives as well as my tendency to over stimulate myself, will uphold an imposed sobriety, will aid me in keeping some focus on my physical health while my emotional self is able to take long, aimless strolls through waist high summer grasses, will provide for me the writer's cabin on the shore of my own Walden Pond. 

A few things have to happen for me to be satisfied with my expressing of myself through the written word. One is it has to be true, meaning that it has to be real, it has to be me being honest about what and who I am and the words have to be the bricks used to build that Taj Mahal of a structure that is me on the two dimensions of the page. Two is that the language which I best adore is a language that exists some place between prose and poetry; mushing around the rules of syntax and grammar; turning one part of speech into another; juxtaposing words and images on top of or next to each other; ignoring rules of common usage as it suits me; boring deep into a gobbledygook of language messy like mixing cookie dough with your fingers, emotional content and finger licking good strings of syrupy, heavy, rich syllables; and then like they say about a director making the same movie over and over again, I am inexorably drawn to issues of intra and inter personal connection and loss, alienation from self, from other, from the universe, and the subsequent or simultaneous, but existing on a different plane, recovery of said separation. Seems to me that the latter stated aspect is, in the end, the heartbeat of the human condition, the center of mass of all of us and of all of It. 

While like every other being I have not the ability to stare directly into the heart of the sun except but for a brief moment, the flirting with it, the attempt to capture its flavor or any resonance of it, to put a small bit of it like a lightning bug in my glass jar for just a small part of a humid, summer evening, makes it all worthwhile, dumps the endorphins into the bloodstream and makes me run straight back to the end of the line to wait my hour to strap myself back into the roller coaster seat one more time.

While money has pretty much always been something that I find not much use for, the need to pay off my sundry debts and to, gasp, sock some away for the rainy Mondays of my latter years, are concepts that at the age of fifty begin to coalesce into more than just phantoms playing about unformed just beyond my ability to make them out. Here at King Fahd University in a part of the world that I never imagined that I would live, it all seems achievable without threatening the Tarzan and the Buck Rogers inside of me that will not seem to leave, nor, truth be told, that I in any way encourage to depart. From here the cost of flying to Europe is about half that from Washington State. Istanbul but a hop away. Sri Lanka. South Africa. Greece. Croatia, the land of my paternal grandmother, a relatively inexpensive destination for one of the many paid weeks off that I have and which I can now afford.

So the question then is what is the price to pay in social costs to be here. So far those costs, to pursue the analogy, have been not bills paid but rather money earned, for I truly love it here. Today for example, like pretty much every day so far, is about eighty four degrees, sunny, a ten to twelve knot breeze blowing steady, and lots of smiling and friendly people to interact with all day until I come back to my flat to write and think and correspond and cook. Now I have a cat with her four kittens and I have had two friends stop by for fifteen to twenty minutes each to chat. No, I am not really finding myself in the place of trading good things for bad. Not being close to my family, especially to my two gemstones of children, that would be the rub. But at their ages I think I serve them best by stepping away, allowing them the opportunity to not be in my shadow, to garner their own sunshine, to spread their branches, create their own shade and from here I can drop financial packages seemingly from the sky into their laps for the chance to make their lives extraordinary, to pursue dreams that make sense to them, to feel not the sting of too much debt, to not just dream as they work a nine to five job and acquire dross and sloth or to whither under the soul baking sun of too much too fast. 

If asked what I believe that the meaning of life is I guess I'd have a couple of different responses. On the purely biological level I'd say it is to replicate one's DNA and to do one's best to ensure that it continues on. On a deeper plane, a more spiritual, quantumly physical level, I'd say that our time here has been given to us to learn to merge with others of our kind, not just humankind, and to share our awareness and our beings and becoming with other parts of the universe, the ineffable, sublime, always changing and dynamic matrix of energy that we are an aspect of. I have been reading some teachings of the philosopher Osho recently. He spoke of this idea of the "meaning of life." These are his words,

"Life in itself is so beautiful that to ask the question of the meaning of life is simply nonsense."

For me Osho's words are not The Answer, but like science and spirituality in general, it seems that the asking of the questions is the goal, for certainly there are not really any answers in a universe that neither ends nor stops changing. We define our edges, our places, our boundaries of self through this constant process of experiencing and questioning, seeking to answer only to find more questions to ask, this ongoing curiosity sated by more data, more connection, more seeking. 

No, I feel that the choice I have made to come to this place, to learn this part of the planet, to give some space between me and my last years of befuddled not understanding of what transpired in my marriage, what happened to my friendship with my wife, to give my kids some room to spread their wings, it's a good and obvious and ultimately seemingly predestined, inevitable choice. The angel was already in the marble, I am simply setting it free.

I can't help but be reminded of Cat Steven's masterpiece, Father and Son, a song that has always, always brought tears, a song that I have spent most of my life viewing from the perspective of a son working to cope with the pain of separation from the one being that has always held the most power and wonder and desire for me, my pops, but which more and more I understand from the place of a father. 

I was once like you are now, and I know that it's not easy,

When you've found something going on.

But take your time, think a lot,

Think of everything you've got.

For you will still be here tomorrow, but your dreams may not.

All the times that I've cried, keeping all the things I know inside,

It's hard, but it's harder to ignore it.

If they were right, I'd agree, but it's them you know not me.

Now there's a way and I know that I have to go away.

I know I have to go....

Blinded by the Light

       

                                                          Blinded by the Light

                             My mama always told me not to look into the light of the sun,

                                                 but, mama, that's where the fun is.

                                                           Bruce Springsteen

           

The view of Dhahran looking back from Vapiano's Italian Restaurant in the Dhahran Mall. The tallest brig spire on the lower left is the Belltower, the symbol of KFUPM, sitting on the jebel in the heart of campus.

I feel like I just became aware that the commuter train that I am on,the one that I have ridden on faithfully to work each day for years, has just skipped the track. That moment when you come to understand that something is horribly, horribly amiss. Imperceptibly at first, the sense of weightlessness expands and slides, almost a floating just before and entering into the state, the stomach shuddering place, where the understanding begins. Despite all the factors saying no, I helped to turn a rather large day in Tinker's life and without question the biggest day in the life of her four babes, into a yes. In my time here playing human I have mastered just a few skills. One of them is that of making poor decisions.The knowledge that is shifting my view, that is driving a cold nail into the back of my neck, is the response that I got earlier today when I naively asked one of my coworkers if he knew anyone who may be either interested in taking one of Tinker's new brood or who may just have some good advice for me in general as I can't really see having them all join the small group of felines which already tax the kindness and the garbage resources of our apartment complex at Old Shabab Court.

Simon. That is the first name of the gentleman who said that bad thing to me, that thing that I can't stop thinking about, that I wish I could stop thinking about. I had mentioned the kittens arrival to another Britisher, a man named Franklin, last night as I was returning home from the co-op. Franklin suggested talking to Simon as Simon and his wife have sort of taken charge of the affairs of the wild cats in the Ferdaws area of south campus, the family housing neighborhood. I ran across Simon in the hall today up in Building 58, and probed him for advice. When he took in what I was saying, his response was completely immediate and assertive, and while it seems to me like he should have hesitated first, he did not even for one small portion of time. When he spoke it was as though my ears cleared of built up atmospheric pressure, my eyes sharpened focus. it was like in the most dramatic part of the movie where everything shifts into complete and total silence. While his eyes stayed locked onto mine, rising a bit, his head all in slow motion tilting just up and back, his lips moved as everything else froze, and the world around us stopped making any noise at all. I can play it back, see his lips, see what sounds they make, but still I am not allowing the sound of the words to be expressed. It just can't really be.

When my mind gets vapor locked like this there is sort of a lateral shift that occurs in my space/time, as though through some prism I slide, refracted into the same place but different. It is impossible for me to discern how much of this sensation is physical vs. emotional/mental. All I know is that things get weird, move sideways in ways that things aren't supposed to be able to move and it is akin to traveling but going nowhere and yet everything is changed. The Harry Nielsen song made famous in Midnight Cowboy recurs for me at this place, in this time. Cue blustery day trying to cross New York City traffic, lonely montage,

Everybody's talking at me, I don't hear a word they're saying

Only the echoes of my mind

People stopping, staring, I can't see their faces 

Only the shadows of their eyes

I'm going where the sun the sun keeps shining, Through the pouring rain

Going where the weather suits my clothes

Banking off of the North east winds, Sailing on a summer breeze

And skipping over the ocean line a stone

Well her water broke as she tussled with a larger, overly fluffy calico a couple nights back. There she was, leaking, looking freaked. What was I gonna do? Found a box and an unused sheet, popped them together and into my walk in closet. That was last night. And so I'm sitting here in the chair that I've pulled next to the closet door and I'm needing to leave for work in a matter of twenty minutes or so. Smoking a cigarette with the front and back doors open, the wind traveling through the hallway, and I feel some unclean mix of helplessness, false bravado, and cowardice. I mean she's getting to the last stages, it has become quite plain to see. The sounds she is producing right NOW are new, torturous, the kind that make a man want to walk away or to end it. In all reality, I suppose, they are the sounds that women have endured and moved right through as the men have stayed in the waiting room extending cigars and clammy congratulations towards one another.

I walk away to continue to prepare to go to work, make my lunch, text Jim to see if he is gonna come by, need my wing man back, and she sort of drags herself out onto the carpet in the main room, well, the only room in my one room flat, and is on her side, her leg raised up, the center of mass in her abdomen solidly settled now down low towards her tail end and she makes a plaintive wail and looks at me, don't leave me alone. When I move back to the chair she picks herself up and waddles back into the box in the corner, seemingly fully aware that it is in that space that the deed will be done, despite her possible unknowing of just what precisely the deed will consist of.

Tinker, as I came to call her based on her scrappiness and resourcefulness, her pluck if you like, has been the only one of the four or five cats that share Old Shabab with me and my teaching mates that I have bonded with. Cats are considered somewhat sacred to the locals, some trickle down of pre-Islamic tribal paganism, I'm guessing. Dogs are dirty, unclean beasts that are not kept as pets or tolerated in most any regard. Cats, however, are not to be eradicated and so they live near garbage dumpsters, bin cats as they are called, or, as with many on this campus, they are fed by dislocated expatriates who haven't much other connection with their former lives back home. 

She stood out from the others it seemed. Not a big cat, but alert, feisty, a combination of endearing and assertive, the personality of an urchin, a natural fluency in the language and behavior of the street, an innate master at knowing when to pour on the charm and when to fight. We flirted for a while, she coming into my place to shine her light on me and then, after receiving food and attention, like a teen aged prostitute, slipping quietly out the back door. My idyllic misconceptions about this true bond we had formed, like my last marriage I suppose, hell, like most all of my romantic liaisons short or long, were to be over and over again shattered as we worked through our cycle of me preparing to save her, she responding, me shelling out affection and promises, and she showing me the hard side of how things really work. Then after she spent a day or two working the other fellows and their cat bowls, she'd come a knocking at my back door, all oversized eyes and fuzzy sounds, and we'd pretend to start all over again. Hell, if she's gonna play her part in this small drama I may as well take the other role.

I was maybe seven when my mother, a premed student at the University of Minneapolis where she met my father, dropped out, and married, decided that it would be a good idea to give her three children a small, completely serendipitous lesson on mammalian anatomy. Our cat, Girl, had grabbed a baby rabbit, shaken it just enough to break its neck, and delivered it to us, a small remuneration for our mother's continued provision of room, board, and affection. My mom tacked the small, still aware being spread eagled to a piece of wood and sliced it open. The sight of its bared heart wiggling and bumping amidst the gaggle of internal organs as its eyes stared up at the ceiling is one of those sights that makes me refuse to watch terrible scenes in movies: I know that once impressed into the retina those pictures.  do not leave.

Like a pro, Tinker set the hook the first time out. She has slept with me maybe three times, two of those times occurring within the first week that we started, I don't know, seeing each other, for lack of a better or more apt phrase. And it was a strange, kind of eerie experience for me. It all, as they say, happened so fast. It was unexpected, as these things are. Me fresh out of a relationship, a marriage, spent, dog eared like a worn paperback, shrunken back into myself like some old before its time tortoise. Then she appears, pops into my life and wham, zero to sixty we connect. I mean I guess I'm kind of old fashioned, but I'm not really the guy to spend the night with a female on the first night, prefer a bit of wining and dining. Given that even in cat years Tinker is probably about fourteen, she's not really even old enough to drink. She's a minor. I guess that's what I'm trying to say. 

I've just met her and one thing leads to another, and wham, we're in bed together. It's too sudden, I'm thinking. Oh well, just roll with it, right? There's frolicking, touching, heavy petting even. A veritable love fest, and I don't get a whole lot of sleep. Soon the birds are chirping and the prayer call comes, another night gone, first light. We get up, and I make us a little breakfast, then she splits. Typical, yeah. Whatever. No hard feelings. No promises broken, no time to really set up any expectations. Just another roamer in the night. What was strangest possibly of all about my first intimate encounter with her was that she promptly brought me a gift. Now I have long held it to be axiomatic that the way to a girl's heart is an unexpected gift at an unexpected time. That being said, the bloody, tailless, headless lizard that Tinker set squarely in the center of my welcome mat sort of properly summed up the prospects of any long term relationship. I mean usually this happens in the giving of a cold shoulder and a quick exit the following morning. I gotta say it's never happened just like this before. But then that is just how my little street wise "friend" rolls.

It was difficult to walk out on her this morning nonetheless. Sure we have an unconventional relationship, she stopping by for a quick fix when she needs it then always disappearing again in a flash just when I think more intimacy may be coming. Doesn't take a rocket scientist to see that she probably has daddy issues, raised like a feral animal as so many are today, especially here in the Kingdom where they hang around the complex all day lounging until the men come stumbling on back weary from another day of the white collar shuffle. Then they make all nice, rubbing up against us, all purrs and can I come home with you eyes. I mean it's not like I am not aware of how she has been in the bedroom of pretty much every man here. So sure all off us men eyeball each other with that singular, less-than, stare at the ground glance, but what are you going to do? Sooner or later she always comes back around. Yet even so as she shook and cried, her body tightening up, her moans almost growls, begging for company, for just a touch, I left her, and, truth be told, I worked to keep her from my mind's eye for the next almost ten hours until I walked, anxiety building, back to my front door and in.

There they were, the four little blind bundles of squirms and squeaks, rolling like a roiling mass of eels on top of one another, affixing their barely visible slits of mouths onto Tinker's swollen teats. And she looking up, her eyes a cross between oh, there you are, like why do men always leave at that time, and a resigned, the tough part is over why don't you just fix me a meal. 

Walking home after work today, a day after they were birthed, the day of Simon's molten words, a hot wind blowing strongly, throwing shovelfuls of sand into the air, the grains shooting hard against me, occluding the outside world in a blustery reflection of the storm inside, his two words come against me. His words playing out over and over, the shortest short film in the history of the world, and the most savage. Am I considering his advice now? Will I ask Jim over to discuss it? Is it the moral choice? What will it feel like, I mean in my hand, what will it feel like? And inside. What will it feel like inside. Will it be like the rabbit opened all red and brown and purple tacked to that piece of wood? Will it too never go away? 

Squinting my eyes behind my glasses, my hand up in front of me against the anger of the wind, against the  my internal reaction to Simon's two words, my legs continued to lessen the distance between me and the new, helpless family awaiting in my flat. Like some unclean beast I fought the tentacles of self loathing and disgust. Why did I have to approach him? What caused me to believe that in his words would be found the proper answer to the conflict that I had created for myself, the perfect knot to begin the third and final act of this dramatic set piece, just the most recent installment of look how much emotional damage I can provide for myself by reliving over and over the fallacy of watch me save the world. 

And I'm looking at her looking up at me, the teeny mewings of the still blind newborns acting as the score, while his words print out across the screen in large black and white block letters, "Drown them."  

Spiritual Pun

                                                                     Spiritual Pun

                               To get the truth, you gotta get close. You get too close, you die.

I'm usually not somebody who spends much money while vacationing. To be honest, I do not really consider myself to be somebody who vacations. I prefer to think of what I like to do, and do often, as traveling, or adventuring. From my perspective, if there's no peril involved it's just a vacation. Living life a bit closer to the edge enhances the experience of feeling alive and allows for more opportunities to become involved in the people, places, events of a new locale than just grabbing a cab from the hotel to a nice restaurant and back. An adventure is what occurs when you do not know what is going to happen, when you just sort of aim yourself in a direction, either a geographical, emotional, mental, or social direction, and you fire like an arrow from a bow. Zingo! Landing wherever the wind may take you. For if one goes and one does precisely what one has researched and planned to do, or what one has done before, then how will a person ever learn and experience any or all of those otherwise ineffable, unseeable phenomena  that comprise the universe around or inside of us? I mean who reads only the same seven books over and over, or only the books that have already been researched extensively, outlined, reviewed, planned? Who never, ever just picks up a book and gives it a go? Well, this trip to Bahrain, my first, I relinquished my control over my finances and decided that sometimes you just have to say, "What the fuck."

                                                                  The Seef Mall

We took a cab to this big mall. It is not as big or as ludicrous as the Rashid Mall in Al Khobar, well, maybe almost as big, but not nearly the M.C. Escheresque cubism cum sparkly light show spectacle that the Rashid Mall is. As we were walking I heard a Nora Jones tune that I had been listening to earlier that same day in my fancy hotel room. It inspired me to go off on one of my rants about my complex understandings of the universe. In an attempt to further Jim's personal process of enlightenment, I laid out for him the synchronicity city rap. "You know," Jim, I said, "a coincidence is a spiritual pun."  He laughed at this, which is good, because usually when I go on my little speeches he sort of looks at me with a three quarter glance, one eyebrow raised just barely above the other, you know, like when the nice homeless man you are talking with begins to slide into the part about the seven headed beast and the coming end of days. 

"Seriously, Jim," I continued, "tell me how 'coincidental' it is that the very same song I'm listening to in my room not two hours ago. A song," I tell him, pausing for emphasis, " that I have-not listened to in, like, a year, Jim, is now on the sound system here in this big mall." I do believe that I had Jim's attention. The music was there in front of that one store, but as we moved towards the bookstore in another part of the mall we did not hear it anymore.

                                                      The Bahraini National Museum

The history museum. A good, solid choice for learning about a place. It's like choosing cheesecake for desert, a middle of the road, hard to go wrong with choice, but on the other hand you get what you settle for, right, so it's also not likely to really knock it out of the park. Learned some interesting things, possibly the most interesting of which is that like in the UAE there are artificial islands being constructed in the south of the main island, and they look like fish. Perhaps the best feature of the floor of the museum was the very large satellite image of the archipelago laid onto (or into?) the terrazzo floor of the main gallery. Large enough to be able to distinguish individual buildings  and non-paved desert roads, the map was a hoot just to walk across, to look at the shorelines, the neighborhoods, the Causeway to KSA, and the fish. 

Yes, the photo above is a satellite image. You can see individual houses on the "hook" islands.

Jim and I took a cab to the Museum, had a bite, coffee and a few games of backgammon at an outdoor table outside of the Museum's cafe. Jim picked up this magnetic gammon board here in Manama couple nights before and we settled right into a little bit of competitive gaming, using the betting cube, one Saudi riyal per point. Okay. Okay. Maybe I overstated. Hypothetically when using the betting cube it increases the competitiveness, the electricity, the zing zang in the air--practically speaking what Jim and I have established is a sort of Peb sponsored subsidy for Jim's vacation. That being said, it is very entertaining and I almost win an awful lot.

                                                                    Trader Vic's

After three nights of Philippino cover bands, meaning three straight nights of "They stab it with their steely knives but they just can't kill the beast" in a row, we go to Trader Vic's, the swanky bar inside of the Ritz Carlton Hotel Complex on the edge of town. It's a great time, Jim assures me, smiling, but pricy. Hell, I say, I am always tight with my money on vacation, but not this time. Balls to the wall, let's do it. So we do. As the cab we are in pulls into the drive towards the small fiefdom of the Ritz Carlton, a ten foot security fence around it, I see the massive, ornate edifice itself lit up in vertical, twenty foot wide swathes of alternating purple and white floodlights. Like some mighty Camelot. It faces us as we are stopped at the small security building where five men check us, running poles with mirrors attached to the end around the cart to look for bombs underneath, searching the cab's boot, that's British English for trunk, checking IDs. The taxi driver said they didn't search us more because we are in a licensed cab. The cheap rooms here go for four hundred USD a night. We pull up to the covered valet parking stop in front of the restaurant bar complex not too far past the hotel itself, get out and are cordially greeted by the three to four well dressed valets and the two large, equally well dressed security men. We pay the cab and walk, or should I say, saunter, on in. I mean I can see what time it is, and I am most definitely getting my groove on. 

Past Trader Vic's we go, the band almost two hours from playing, out onto a gorgeous tableau of a broad, sumptuous deck filled with tables of beautiful people, beautiful, finely dressed, wealthy people drinking, supping, sipping, laughing, smoking, all glittery in their Rolexes and jewelry. As we are walked to a table at the edge of the deck overlooking a wide man made pond full of two foot long orange and black carp, I am grinning, he expanse of perfection beyond. At least two aesthetically perfect wooden footbridges cross the pond to take lovely people to the nightclub on the right or to the softly lighted from below palm tree grove on the left, the salt water shimmering beyond. 

We had some food, an appetizer of dim sum for me along with a cocktail, a fog cutter. We enjoyed good conversation, much of mine centering on this unbelievable scene. After an hour and a half we paid and went on into Trader Vic's. That's when the real fun began. The band was five females  and a male, all Cubanos, playing exquisite, rhythmic, bouncing salsa, Buena Vista Social Club style. Short, matching black and red dresses on the ladies, one on keyboard, one on guitar, one a back up singer who also blew sax, a main vocalist, and a drummer. The man played assorted stringed instruments and on occasion sang. I grabbed a tall beer, and smoked cigarettes as we marveled at the perfect sounds and the many lubricated, cigar smoking, jet setting bar goers, a mix of Europeans, Saudis, Egyptians, Americans, Jordanians, Bahraini nationals. The gals shimmied in perfect unison to the music, all black hair and mischievous smiles.

It was while standing near a soft opening at the bar trying to get a drink, you know how we do it, surveying the line of barstools for a semi open spot to wedge oneself into or just behind to become near enough to the bar to places an order, that I met an interesting Saudi fellow. He was gregarious, maybe thirty five years old, wearing a sky blue t-shirt with inane words in English, a surfboard, and a set of two red and yellow stripes intersecting at a ninety degree angle on it. Blue jeans, black leather shoes and clutching a fat cigar. His hair was short and naturally curly, clean shaven, warm, expressive eyes and a big smile. When he spoke to me his eyes lit up as though reflecting inner riches and a sense of sureness.

"Where are you from, my friend," he queries, pulling on his stogie, looking me in the eyes.

"I'm an American. I teach over in Dhahran, and it's my first time here, in Bahrain." I've had a fog cutter and a beer by now but am looking for some drink that will roll like a freight train through my head and knock me into the next place.

He nods, taking me in. "So you like it here," and it's not really a question. He pulls his shoulders up a bit, moves his arms out, swivels his torso and head as though to say, you've made it, habibi, my friend. Nods his head, laughs as I nod mine too and we share a knowing grin.

"Indeed." The barman in his uniformed black vest comes and, unknowing exactly what will cast the spell I'm looking for, point to what seems to be the most popular drink on the bar, a red liquid in a wide, shallow bowl of crushed ice in a wide stemmed glass with a red hibiscus flower set in the center. He nods and begins to fix four of them. 

My new friend laughs and says, putting out his hand and wagging it back and forth as I might if I wanted to indicate approximately, says, "It will make you walk like this," laughs again.

"Well, that's just what my doctor ordered." He laughs, understands the expression while inside I am wondering just what a doctor would in fact say. We talk for about fifteen minutes, me sucking down this lovely elixir, feeling its potency increase my own. He is in finance, works long days in Riyadh, tells me if you live in Saudia it is best to stay very busy  and then take long vacations far away. He shows me pictures on his phone, in response to my asking where he goes, of an amazing villa on an island in the Philippines. A private, green mosaic tiled pool on a hill overlooking the beach and green, green jungle. He flies out there every so often for a week with a Moroccan girl, eats at luscious restaurants on the compound. Informs me that his vacations cost about one hundred thousand SR per day, that's twenty five thousand USD. 

He was studying English in California when 9/11 took place, said it all changed. He said that because he looks a bit Mexican he didn't get it too bad, but the energy just switched and he made the decision to return to KSA. That being said, his English was really good. 

Jim had found a table by now just in front of the ladies with their Cubano wall of sound, pushing out dramatic, deep bass pulses and brassy horn sounds, Latin rhythms, vocals from airy to deep growls, the men watching all leering and bobbing heir heads like so many sharks circling, the taste of blood and flesh in their mouths. 

A bushy haired, black leather jacket man in his late twenties wearing a genuinely open smile asked if he and his friends could use our extra chair as they sat down immediately to our right. Of course. He and I ended up talking some. He is an Egyptian with perfect English, a Bahraini National now, his parents having moved their some years back. He teaches special needs kids, those with autism mostly. A gentle man, there with his friend, Eunace, a Jordanian guy with skin much lighter than my own. He shared a couple of cigarettes with me and we all let the drinks work their magic as we moved ourselves in time with the waves of music that accompanied the  swaying hips of the well formed women in front of us.

The bookstores In Bahrain have books that are banned in KSA. I  have a belief that anyone can essentially earn a degree in any field by simply getting a good book list and starting to pour through books on one subject of interest. A friend once pointed out that he had heard it said that if a person reads an hour a day on a subject for one year that they will accumulate roughly the same amount of information as somebody who has an AA or a minor in that subject. So I am devouring books on Saudi Arabia and the Middle East in general, the history, the politics, the people, organizations, language, food, etc. As I work to accumulate more, either paper or electronic copies, I have been thwarted time and again by the Saudi government blocking websites, Amazon's "Sorry but that title is not available in your region," the lack of any books but those on architecture, cooking, and travel, and, of course, an entire long shelf top to bottom of the Qur'an and books about the Qu'ran. Even the vanilla title and topic of Daniel Yergin's Pulitzer Prize winning The Prize, about the history of oil, is only available outside the borders; I bought this 800 page behemoth in Bahrain and am now cruising through it. It is actually far more interesting than it probably sounds

                                                                     Poolside

Every morning Jim and I would meet at the dining room on the ground floor (which in this part of the world is the zero floor, the first is what we call the second floor in he US) for a sumptuous breakfast buffet. A very long table, perhaps twenty feet in length, held various culinary delights along both sides of its length. Scrambled eggs, bacon that is sliced in pieces like roast beef, potatoes, pastries, croissants, breads of all kinds, chicken nuggets, porridge, all manner of fruits both whole and sliced, nuts, cereals, jams, yogurt, mini quiches, fresh squeezed juices, and a number of Indian dishes that varied from morning to morning, but consisting of spiced lentil and bean dishes with small crepe like flat breads. The waiters would bring coffee or tea to our table and we would dine and talk in a naturally lit long room amongst the hotel's other guests for ninety minutes or so.

After eating we would both retire back to our rooms for a spell, me often going back to bed, reading and snoozing a bit more, and then we would meet at the large, AstroTurf covered deck between the pool and the outside bar. If we weren't reading, writing, or talking, we might be gambling at backgammon. Soon a beer would appear in my hand and we would decide what our day would hold. Close to retirement, Jim's focus would often be on how to market the three ESL websites that he has made over the years, a useful addition to his coming post employment life. 

Jim is an Italian American from Rochester, New York. He is not tall, has short, tight dark, hair and a mustache and goatee. He has that quick thinking, somewhat fiery personality of the American Northeast. Having worked overseas for twenty five or so years, he speaks Japanese, Chinese, French, and has been dabbling in Italian over the past couple of years. At KFUPM the two of us will go and shoot baskets at times together and he is also wont to take his tennis racket and hit it against a wall for exercise, coming back from his tennis to say something like, "The wall only made one mistake today." Jim is not now married and neither has he ever been nor, he firmly states, eyes widening a tad, will he ever be. He is a more cautious person than I, although I suppose that that simply puts him in the class of people that includes, well, pretty much everyone. Goes to bed earlier than I, plans for his retirement more than I.

                                                                       Diggers

So, do I want to go to Diggers? The Diggers that I have heard so very much about, the Diggers swimming in booze and Chinese hookers. Jim pops the question. Okay, sure. Now I am not that kind of guy, okay? I am not the kind of guy who frequents professionals. On the other hand, uh, on the other hand, how can I not want to see this oft spoken of paragon of Bahraini nightlife? I have been to places and have done things to experience as much of this world as I can that if I were to attempt to capture in words, not very many people would want to read about. That being said, I am a straight up sucker for the bizarre, the far, far end of the human bell curve of messed up things. So, sure. Yes. Let's do it.

Leaving the cab and walking for the door I am afraid, I am very afraid. I mean I've dated and lived with women who have hooked, I've worked with male hookers when I lived in Boston, grown up with gals in elementary and junior high school that have gone into the business end of the world's oldest profession, but opening that door, entering that dimly lit, claustrophobic bar, watching the many twenty to forty something year old ladies move towards us gave me a bit of a clammy feeling, something akin to being flocked by vampires, all hands, bodies pressing into me, syrupy smiles, eyebrows raising and falling in rapid succession. We grabbed stools at the closest tall table, both sitting on the same side facing the, you guessed it, Phillipino cover band on the stage at the end of the narrow, low ceilinged room. By this time, maybe two minutes in, three women are touching me, rubbing me, and I am grinning, laughing stupidly, shaking my head, wow. 

I look each in the face and they are working hard to make friendly, beginning to pull at my shoulder muscles, to massage me, squeeze my thighs in time with the music. I look at Jim, he looks back, like, I told you. We order a couple of drinks, and then fall the rest of the way down the rabbit hole. Before fifteen minutes has passed I have parted with about seventy USD for buying drinks for the girls that they never order. One gal is working assiduously at giving me a back massage, one is pressed into my right side, her hips moving in time to the music into my thigh. I have made it clear, at least I have tried to make it clear, that I am not interested in sex, but since I have given them some money, I guess maybe I am sending mixed messages? The gal on my right moves her mouth to my ear, whispers, "I wan you spend night in my room. Only MA-ssage, no boom boom." I laugh, guffaw really. Nervous I suppose. Say, "No. No. Thank you." Tell her she is beautiful but I am not interested. I decide that telling her I am heartbroken and just "not ready" is a decent compromise between being hard and shoving them away and going to her room with her to not make boom boom.

Jim speaks Chinese, having lived and taught in Beijing for eight years. The gals love this and seem to find it somehow precious, taking turns flirting with him. At one point I look over to see how my wing man is doing, and see a twenty year old named Mali sitting on his lap receiving a massage from him. He looks over her shoulder at me, sort of shrugs his shoulders with a perfect 'when in Bahrain...' kind of look. I end up swilling down four pints of Guinness in the two to three hours we spend there. I guess all in all I drop about one hundred and fifty USD in the place. 

We climb back into a cab and begin to head back to the Ramada. Jim says to me, "So you wanna check out Boomers. It's like Diggers on steroids." Me, a bit drunk, unsure of what all has just happened. "Jim, I think Diggers is like Diggers on steroids."

There it is again. In the bookstore in the Seef Mall. The spiritual pun. It occurs again while we stand near one another perusing the shelves. I'm like, "Dude, seriously, check it." He's like, "The what a ya call it, the pun thing..."  "What ARE the odds, Jim, seriously?" and I hear it just behind me and turn to see where the speaker is because I want to know was it on the Mall's sound system or is it so freakishly un coincidentally coincidental as to be simultaneously on in two DIFFERENT stores that we just HAPPENED to walk into. When I turn around I notice that the sound is now coming from behind me again. It is then that, sheepishly enough, it dawns on me. The reason this song that I was listening to on my iPad in my room is following me around mysteriously from place to place is because my iPad is in my backpack where its buttons are being randomly pushed by the other items in my pack. Yes, that's right, the spiritual pun is me here traipsing around with my Nora Jones album intermittently turning itself on and off and sounding like a speaker in the mall always just a bit behind me.