simple

A fantastic overview of the rest of my time in Africa.

Back to something resembling a grind. Two classes with substantial work right off the bat. But I've been hustling in the limbo since last semester and I've got a stack of things to submit. Learned to write something excruciatingly simple in this spare two weeks since returning.. I'll post it here next week after some strange-er eyes than thine have seen it. It's starting to seem that the point is to get as close as possible to writing 'nothing'. That is, our subconscious is not linguistic and thus our experience will not ever truly be captured, so our efforts to hang decorations on our construction are often futile. And yet the beauty of language is an end of its own. Strike a balance in the smoke.

A friend of mine is shooting a film that he wrote and stars in, check out the trailer:
Person of Interest


I don't have much to say that isn't directly related to writing. There is a group of hackers calling themselves Anonymous who are systematically dismantling Scientology, which pleases me to no end. For a minute there I was overwhelmed with a sense of "missing", not loneliness exactly because I've got people here now (not a tribe, but disparate individuals cast across the 208 that I genuinely like), but a futile reaching out in the early and late hours. I've settled into it now. It's one of those vaguely negative mental states that is beautiful and useful and finite.

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We're All Tanzanian - January 2008

I slept over most of Africa. Comfy in the plane eating hobby-kit meals and trying to read more than a page at once without passing into fitful sleep. Waking up, outside the tiny window the Sahara Desert is truly infinite and I dreamt of nomadic tribes who worship the sand. Believe as a primary tenet that the desert extends forever and whisper about the Ocean in hushed tones like they're guilty hope is that man will see some day see it.



After visas and walking across the darkened tarmac like drug-runners and tipping men in olive drab uniforms we drove in the dark across the dark continent. Such a strange way to see a new place. The semblance of farms. Little communities. Advertisements for cellular service vaulted up over the rotting husks of farming equipment. Tank-topped young toughs playing billiards under floursescent lights with disproportionate cigarettes in their mouths.



Beers and British holiday and asking the politest women you have ever met or ever will meet for favors. They shout at their co-workers in Swahili. They flash warm smiles at us. My body refuses to sleep for a dozen reasons that being awake does nothing to resolve. At 5am one morning I peer out the window listening to distant call-to-prayer and watch the upside down crescent hang there as the orange morning pushes its way onto the world. The sun rises and sets faster here, being near the equator the sun breaks the horizon at nearly a right angle. All of its fearsome velocity dedicated to moving up in that sky. A sentinel wielding a varnished wooden stick and wearing too many coats walks by on the esplanade. A few hours later I sit and write in the garden thinking about Burroughs eating supper from a tray in Mexico somewhere as he talks about Orgone with people who think he's insane. Outside of the sanctioned hotel, the real sounds of Africa in barking dogs and diesel trucks revving up hills. We do not see it until we're in the back of the Toyota headed for the gates.

The porters are mostly kids but they are tougher than you. They will carry their own pack of 20kgs, and your pack of 20kgs on their head, and a two-gallon vessel of water or kerosene in their hand. Sweating as we walk through the low, humid jungle. The most beautiful little girl I have ever seen in my life is toting a huge bundle of firewood and asking me for "somzing", anything. We make friends with two Dutch kids who wear blue jeans and would probably give them to you if you asked. I don't know what to say to their enthusiasm. You see, she never showed up. And despite what was said over Tuskers and delicious coffee, I feel that it is all my fault.

We walk through jungle. See monkeys and trees like you would imagine but moreso. At one point the thin stalks of some alien fauna rattle in the light breeze and as beautiful as they sound I can imagine lying there malarial and being driven insane by them. We literally walk under an awning at the first camp as torrential rain begins. Enormous hail. The metal roofs of the huts and mess hall rattling against the elements. Our hut less forgiving of personal space then a jail cell, the rain hitting our little patio so hard that the water bounces in under the door. We eat backpacker food out of little plastic packages that we pass back and forth. The groups next to us, not doing the "hard way" as our finances and egos required of us, are brought out freshly boiled potatoes, delicious smelling stews, real china, tablecloths, meals of several courses. They vaguely acknowledge their guides as their second thermos of tea or their extra loaf of bread is brought to them. I am, for perhaps the first time, dimly proud of my nationality.


The next morning. Over porridge and the chatter of half-a-dozen languages (you see there are many, many people climbing the mountain and staying in the little hut villages), a sunrise quite unlike any that I have ever seen, and would ever see until exactly 24 hours later. And then we begin to hike and every step is getting harder by midday. Porters say "jambo!" as they head in the other direction, well ahead of their group and finding the descent delightful. Our feet begin to ache. The environment is changing from jungle to heath and the plants are shorter. We stay at a high enough altitude that one many begin to feel sick. Everyone sleeps for a long time.

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Amsterdam-news years day

Amsterdam. No longer living historyless behind fresh paint. This place cobbled together out of something from each human tendency. So in the grey, achey morning we mind our step out into the leftovers of new year's celebration. Hazardous taxi rides threatening decapitation to what must be beautiful women tucked under scarves as we careen over drawbridges older than consumerism.
Out of the hotel sidestepping vomit and empty champagne bottles rolling in gutters. Into brimming coffeeshops to find a seat to smoke and caffienate for the whole day is rolling out before us. A look into the eyes of what passes for authority in my life now, and over to the friendliest drug dealer in my life of uncountable friendly drug dealers. Smoke my smoke like turning to fresh pages with this guy, you know the guy that signs my checks. And then out to stoned wander through a city growing familiar.



A language of consonants, and the throat. Young women with bills standing in window frames nearly naked and I'm freezing cold as we eat and traipse and find more places to smoke in. Unamerican thoughts finally processing themselves outside of america. I now think of grad school overseas: cramped apartments up several floors of teetering stairs looking over a garbage strewn canal, pale-skinned women talking to me and blinking through the smoke, books with pages barely clinging to their edwardian dust covers as I read pretending one can have a unique thought.



And the next morning we wake up and are told that Nairobi is on fire and that the road from the airport has been blocked by what are very likely righteous youth outraged and disappointed. And she's there. Seeing it, maybe. The sinking feeling in my gut entangled with some much larger one in hers. We think.
An entire day in Amsterdam Airport trying to change flights for safer ground. A million attempts at communication through every mechanism I can lay my frustrated hands on. I offer my kingdom for 5 minutes on the phone. I cannot offer enough.

An unplanned night in Amsterdam. Freezing under the logos of multinational corporations because where the fuck are we really? And public transit with the maternal instinct personified and more smoke and more alcohol because these things are not strange to us. We're now three drinking 6 varieties of identical Heineken and sprinkling hash on our joints way back in the corner there like we've been living here a decade and we're merely staying warm in the loooong night between leaden days. This city is a place to write poetry after port wine. A place to look down into your reflection in the canal's distorting scum of oil. Somehow a place that has made more sense to me than I assumed.


In the morning, Africa.

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"Voted Unlikely to Suceed . . .

. . .coz my class was full of naysayers, cheaters and thieves."



Finally found an agreeable way to host PDFs, so here is the final story I submitted for class. It's based in Detroit, has a little bit of people I know in it. I realized writing about the city, or at least constructing narrative within it, is difficult. It's more suited to impressionist poetry and the like. I'm not sure how I feel about this, but it's hundreds of times better than the first draft. To be sure.

I've got draft versions of three other stories that I'll be taking with me on sojourns over the next couple weeks. Try to wrangle them into something unembarrassing. Cormac McCarthy has changed my perceptions on writing. Working to reverse what David Foster Wallace has done. Non-overlapping magisteria perhaps. I learned to revise this semester, at the very least. Learned that there is something that appeals to the thanatos in permanently deleting things I agonized over bringing into creation.

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12/13

My semester is essentially over. This marks the approximate halfway point of the whole Boise, get another degree business. And I now feel innured this institution a bit. I know people here now, and have allowed myself to be absorbed into the culture of the program much more then during the engineering gig. My fiction writing workshop was a bit disappointing . . .just wasn't all that pleased with the things I wrote. And not that encouraged by the classroom environment. The connection between the two is tenuous though. My 20th Century British Fiction course was a bit illuminating, owing to the prowess and demands of the professor. But my classmates were mostly disengaged. . .

It feels absolutely bizarre to be at the halfway point of this place. When I moved out here it felt like an epoch rolling out in front me. Immeasurable to my impatience. Yawning across vital years of my life. But the pressing things been good-god I'm still learning about everything. Swirling up latent entrepreneurialism. Pounding out words in volumes I once aspired to. Gradually revealing some primal discipline. And so I can't possibly imagine where any of this will lead to, like driving at it all with lowered shoulders and hoping you end up somewhere marked success. And I don't recognize anywhere or anything.

That feeling that you're getting old. Like some arrangement of chairs and intentions makes you realize "god damn I'm an adult" and it is not what anyone told you it was. It's daunting but not scary, it does not require perfection, it does not utterly destroy you if you slip. Risk is the most valuable part of life. Hard work is worth it because it makes you good at things, and being good at something is tremendously rewarding. Genuine experience is all that matters. Dahh . . .all the chinese fortune slips I want to write for these kids . . .

Reading Baudrillard between the melange smoke and gangsta rap and flipping ones and zeroes in SimBoise . . .the consumer as progammable and blind. A system of objects erecting itself into crude symbols of the abstract. The real world existing in everything that is not said. "The festival of supply and demand whose effervescence can provide the illusion of culture".

Somehow I feel like going to Olduvai Gorge is a pilgrimage that exceeds the scope and "spiritual" value of visiting the Hajj by orders of magnitude . . .

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Hip-hop. History. Hilarity.

2007 was a great year for hip-hop. Jay-Z has released what will be known as the penultimate classic of pusher-rap, a narrative concept album that reflects the full spectrum of emotion and tragedy. Rhythms that seem diegetic to the world as inscribed. Aesop Rock back to form, impressionist and tweaked, the place he's created now folding the scattered past in with the crumbling future. Pharaohe Monch back from exile, veterate yet hungry. OneBelo with "R.E.B.I.R.T.H., still absorbing this one. Talib Kweli. El-P. etc etc

I'm reading a book called "A Continent for the Taking" about African history. Most of it recent, but also discussing the pre-slave-trade state of things. I don't mean to blame the white man for everything, none of us alive can change the past. But we literally tore Africa apart. The British Empire fought west African empires for nearly a century before they submitted. History only becomes real to me when I know details. And I don't have the time I wish I did to collect them.

My wallet was stolen from under my nose. The gentlemen that swiped it immediately went to McDonald's and spent over $200 on my credit card. And rented a DVD from a Redbox DVD vending machine. Whiskey-tango-foxtrot. Hamburgers? I'm not liable for any of these charges, and this will be nothing more than a hassle. But I couldn't have come up with a better "spending spree" for the morons of 'merikuh to go on.

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Fatherhood. Forlorn. Foam.

My father has a difficult time understanding things that have not come to him as a product of television or the narrow tableau of corporate hierarchy that he has been witness to. Thus, when I told him that I plan to eject myself from the world of engineering (a 'good' career as it makes a reasonable amount of money) and into the impoverished world of the humanities he not only generally disapproved of the idea, it barely even registered in his frontal lobe. And yet now, when I tell him that I am at the half-way point of completing this set of hoops towards another degree he is jazzed and motivational. Tells me "that's great" for perhaps the first time in my life. Maybe he's just getting soft with retirement.

All the people I love or might have loved are spread across the earth. Leeching their essence into the ground so that a billion years from now there will be some trace evidence of their existence. I miss them every day. The amazing girl I left in the hood who is now as tough as anyone I know. The mook out there on the edge; born to roam. My Fellow Traveler poised to slap the scientific establishment upside the head. The raven-haired expat, daring the world to not move when she leans into it. . . .A dozen other people I want to share drinks and photos with even when I'm 40 and no longer worth a damn.

I read a thread on ask.metafilter about a guy that reminds me of me. He is reasonably successful in his career, is intelligent (at least he can compose a paragraph) and once a week he likes to get obliterated at the bar and absolutely lose control. Each time he drinks like this he ends up somewhere strange or he gets in some vague legal trouble or he . . . you know the deal. His girlfriend claims that she will break up with him if he doesn't seek help. Everyone on the thread exhorted him to go to AA and get himself cleaned up. Reading the thread, all I could think about what was getting unbelievably drunk. Like a mythical, existential drunkenness in which the hangover is so extreme that waking up on some stranger's floor is akin to being born anew.

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