WALKING ON THIN ICE

marrakech is a barter and favor town, whereas i’m a fixed price kind of guy. i’m also an analyzer, a flow-arounder - skills i cannot utilize here because i’ve a paucity of input to evaluate, and what input there is, none’s in english. it’s as if i’ve taken all my mental abilities and gone to a place where they don’t matter. so i’m down to karma and luck. one can never safely evaluate one’s own karma - and luck is, well, luck. sometimes i think a good heart and fantastic luck is all that’s gotten me through 61 years of misadventure… sure hasn’t been prudence or planning.

lady k bought a white jellaba - that’s one of the full length hooded robes you see in star wars. with the hood up, she looks like princess leia walking through the old city. i bought a white loose morrocan top. had to haggle. paid too much. abdul made him throw in a pair of baggy blue morrocan pants and return some money. since i’m getting all these clothes, maybe i should stop shaving my head, let my hair hang, go hippie. i got the dope and the chick, may as well do the hair and clothes… except once you discover the freedom of shaving your head, it’s nigh impossible to go back to having hair. especially if you travel and are unsure of your next shower.

i think basic smith is shaved head, black jeans, black t-shirt with something enigmatic printed on it, and white beard. at the d.a. levy festival 2 years ago, a cameraman read my t-shirt that said “The broken light bulb at the end of the hallway tour” (for Harry Dean Stanton with The Call) - he told me that was the saddest thing he’d ever read. Lady K says my enigmatic t-shirts were what first caught her eye… then my poetry. see, cool clothes and poems do get you women.

i was with the hippies back in 1968, but never of the hippies. seems i was never OF any one group, tribe, clan. closest community i’ve found are poets and artists. now, 39 years after the hippies, i’m finally starting to live the life. talk about being a slow starter.

lady k is cooking dinner in 2 nights for abdul’s family. he brought some pots over tonight to loan her. we offered him some of our hash and he said the same thing i’ve heard repeatedly across america since i started smoking in 1968 - “here, use mine, it’s stronger.” he was right, it was stonger - so of course i ordered a pinky finger’s worth of his.

i love being stoned, and i love being in a strange place. but neither are enough by themselves because that still leaves purpose. what here in all this chaos is my purpose? what do i do in this bailiwick of confusion? what am i to glean? perhaps my purpose is to lose my purpose - i am after all the “agent of chaos (dot com)”. can’t believe after 61 years i’m still looking for purpose.

lady’s creatively bursting. her french is sprouting, her camera eye focused, her written words running wonderfully well, and her latest uploaded video of the marrakech souks is especially cool. and she’s set up her assemblage work area to start making art. i suspect my purpose may be to provide lady k the track on which to run, the board from which to spring.

as for me, i’m to keep on shadow dancing before the darkens arc.

“You are not a careful man,” I say.

He looks up, wide-eyed. Looks back down at his stick of hash. “Things happen to me.”

“I wonder why…” I say sarcastically.

“Well, I don’t demand that reality stay the same, not play with me. I wonder what it means. Today I broke my watch with my camera in the same pocket. Shattered its crystal face. Then my camera broke. So I lost my watch and my camera. Then I got a new watch. Then the camera started working again. I can’t get a handle on what the metaphor’s supposed to be. I wonder what it means?”

“Well, to me, it sounds like good plot foreshadowing.”

“For???”

“For our story. I mean if you put all your eggs in one pocket, then you lose all your eggs.”

“No. If you put all your eggs in one pocket, you’d better not sit down. Or bend over. Whichever one.”

“Well looking at it from the context of our suspicion that someone was in here today. You can imagine where this goes.”

“No, where would you say it goes?”

“Well, if we’re expecting a break-in, then an plot device such as an omen of loss and recovery applies.”

“Are we expecting a break-in?” he asks.

“Well it could be a break-in literally or it could be we break-out of our minds.”

“So we have a fear of either break-in or a break-out.”

“Yes.”

We watch the prints of our art. They’re lying against the wall. Smith has turned some of them on their side.

“My baboon collage looks like a nature scene from here because it’s on its side.”

“Yes, that’s true.” I use my magic picture eye and I lose the likeness of the baboon in the picture. It’s replaced by a mountain and its reflection surrounded by greenery.

Smith points to a print of K59. We used my piece for the back cover of ArtCrimes 21. I love the piece so much that I took it with us to England. Then had to mail it back home to Mom because it was too heavy to lug around.

“Actually, your picture there too looks like a painting of a city, in snow,” he says.

“Yes, that’s true, it does…”

“That means we’ve been hanging these the wrong way.”

I consider what we’ve said. “I like our conversations,” I tell him.

“Yeah, I do too. Interesting that our relationship is on blogs, you know?”

“Yeah, we could be making all this up.”

“If we do, we’re pretty consistent. You know what I mean?”

“We’re creating so much writing right now that I don’t see how we can back to your biography.”

“Well, that’s changed too. The biography is a whole other thing now. We have three parts rather than one part. We have your conversations, we have selected blogs. All interspersed with the memoir. We don’t have to worry about flow right now in the book. Gonna get *new* flow.”

“We are getting new stories right now.”

“Yes,” I say.

“So actually we’d end this thing at the end of Morocco rather than when we got to Marrakech. Who knows, maybe after Marrakech too. We’ll see where this thing goes. That, too. You know, we spend a lot of time in stone cities since we left America.”

“Yeah, it’s been nice.”

“Now we’re in a stucco city, a tiled city.”

He looks at recent photos on the computer, paging through and thinking. He comes to a picture of an area in which some caravaners rest.

“You know, it makes me sick.” I say. “I look at that scene in that picture and I romanticize it.”

“Oh, what picture?”

“That one there with the caravan. I look and see this squalor and rather than seeing it in this light I look at the pretty painted door. I have a terrible way of seeing the squalor as stage scenery, and not as a condition of daily existence. Privilege is sickening. I make myself sick.”

“I am privileged not to be sick.”

He moves to another picture of a tunnel in Bezier. It’s an underground pedestrian way that leads from Poets’ Park into the tree park.

“Now that’s a metaphor,” I say.

“I’m seeing it as a tunnel of our passage from France to Morocco. Or life passage. Any metaphor will do.”

I agree. “Yes. In the near future there’s lightness. Then darkness. Then way at the end there’s lightness, and a dark soul.”

“You know what you wrote today with Hamid and Annette, that’s a short story,” he says. “A true story, but a short story.”

“Hmm… I think you’re right. This *is* a serial that I’m doing on the blog. It turned into a cliffhanger in Marrakech.”

“Mmmm… and I know just the cereal, too. Fruit loops. Fruit loops in Marrakech.”

“So what are you thinking?”

“Me, I don’t know. I just have my eyes open, I’m watching, and we’ll see what happens. I don’t know what to expect… I don’t know what to anticipate…”

“Well, I think we should take something heavy in our bedroom.”

“That worries you, does it? Why?”

“Because we found a medicine capsule in our toilet.” I hear the mysterious musical theme from Scooby Doo in my head.

“But that could’ve been there for a long time,” he says. “It could’ve just not flushed down.”

“Yeah… I wonder if Annette met Mohammed today.” The Belgian lady and the Moroccan agent. It seems our story is a spoof of film noire. I hear footsteps in the hall.

I try to think about something else. “It’s interesting. I started writing these conversations after I got the mySpace page.”

“You’re gonna be in trouble you know. I’m going to run out of words.”

“Ah, no. You? No. And besides, I’m incorporating other people now, not just you. And I don’t have to have the notebook. I remember the conversations. I recall them later and write them down.”

I think about how writing conversation has made me much more expressive. It seems to have fast-forwarded the development of my articulateness, improved my memory and my ability to understand my environment.

* * *

Smith’s crossed his arms. He’s staring at his computer, thinking. Swaying a little. I put my computer down and snuggle against him. “I don’t like what I wrote today,” he says. “It’s boring.”

“Oh honey, anything but. I think you’re amazing, you’re so good.”

“Yeah, you and only you,” he says.

“No, really you *are* amazing.”

“You are, too. Look at that thing you wrote this morning. It’s a story. You got good photos, too.”

“Oh ho ho…” I giggle.

“No, really. You got it both ways. I sure did a good thing, hooking up with you…”

I nudge myself against his chest. He says, “Another thing about knock-out drops. You don’t have them in little packets, labeled. You know?” It’s his attempt to reassure me.

“I know,” I say. “I’m using this as a plot device.”

“Oh, okay.”

He removes his camera from the computer. “There. I’m done. Got the Coca cola pictures. Coca cola is a really strong type.”

Pauses.
He growls in an evil beatnik voice, “complication by intonation by implication.”

“What did you say? Complication by intonation?”

“I’m not really sure. My brain’s going fuzzy!”

We pass out.

“No, we don’t pass out. Don’t write *that*,” Smith says.

“In the story we do,” I assert.

“No, real travelers don’t pass out.” He sucks the last sip of hash smoke. Says, “That’s ended,” to the ashy chunk.

Snuggles up to me.

“Ummmmm,” I say.

“Mah woman,” he growls. “Oh! I know what that voice is. That’s my jive voice. Bit of Amus and Andy, mixed with Tom Waits.”

“You like to float on the periphery of popular consciousness.”

“Yeah, but don’t tell them that. I want to *be* their consciousness. You can’t talk about the periphery. Let them talk about it. Anyway, you say whatever *you* want to say. It’s *your* conversation. It’s *what* you select and don’t select that makes it work, anyway. Madame?” Now he sounds like a hoarse Casey Casem.

“Yes?”

“Would you like some aspirin?”

“Yes, I would.”

“OK. Here ya go. Sometimes they make you smaller, sometimes they make you large…” he sings.

“Hah!” I shout.

“You know White Rabbit? Them’s the lyrics to a Jefferson Airplane song.”

mental whiplash, cultural electro-shock therapy - this is the cost of riding the marrakech express. someone said this is all part of going to a new place, but a new place implies something in common with the old place, and this place is way through the looking glass. to my western mind, marrakech is other, an entirely different solar system somewhere east of the sun, west of the moon.

we walked through a walled garden park so lush it had to be the last remains of the garden of eden - a slice of what africa was, or will be. depends on global warming. except for the coming deserts, plants are going to love the new world weather.

when we mentioned we might head for the sea town of essoaire after marrakech, youssef said “ah jimi hendryx’s town.” hendryx’s been dead 37 years, while youssef is 30 years old, yet it’s still jimi’s town. jimi hendryx, janis joplin, jim morrison all checked out 1970, a bad year for geniuses whose first name began with j. and they all smoked jays - slang for joint, as is number. myself, i smoked a number of jays in my day - and my day is all days now and then. speaking of now and then, here’s a poem lady k is translating into french for me:

Ever Now

I’m normally normal
but just not now
and it’s always now

there’s two times:
there’s now
and
not now

today,

and not today

it’s never tomorrow

that’s why I’m nearly normal
nominally now

told lady k no way can they say marrakech is 1.7 million people. once inside the old walled city, no one knows how many whos in whoville. i mean, they can’t send census takers in there to count them - the takers would either get lost and never be seen again, or disappear to reappear as lamb stew. she said “yes, in the cannibal souks.”

souks are bazaars, markets, and they’re gathered by merchandise - you have your purse souks, shoe souks, silver souks, drum souks, etc. i wonder if there’s a soup souk. sounds like a refrain in a 1950’s pop song - “she’s my sugar baby, souk soup, souk soup.”

Hamid meets us this morning. He’s wearing his fancy garments. When we first met him, he had a dull navy coat. But since Friday he has a traditional head cap and robe. The robe is like something from Star Wars. He looks very nice. I wonder if the clothes are new.

I’m wearing the same skirt he always sees me in. I try to dress more traditionally when we’re with him, but I only have one skirt in my traveling collection of possessions.

We spend four hours wandering the souks. The most interesting part was seeing all the craftsmen. We saw tanneries and carpentry shops and metal workers.

Hamid said for us to look around and decide what we want to buy. He’ll go out later and barter for the items and get a much better price than what we could get as Westerners. I’m looking for a purse and perhaps a traditional robe and a musical instrument. I’m also replacing my smelly, worn western t-shirts with Morrocan clothes. I see crazy crazy prices at the souk. A beautiful hand-crafted drum for 16 dirhams (2 USD). I don’t understand how these people live. I’m conflicted; I don’t know what constitutes a fair price.

We give Hamid about 70 dirhams for produce. We lag behind so that the shop keepers don’t up the prices. We allow him to make all the choices. I specify that we want oranges and tomatoes and cucumbers and melons but he buys a lot of other things as well. He returns about 40 dirhams to us.

Exit Bab Doukala area of medina. Hamid points to the modern supermarket across the street. “Over there, you pay 400 dirhams. But in the medina I can get you the same thing for 40 dirhams. You understand?” All this is in French.

“Oh yes. The supermarket is very expensive. I understand. It’s very expensive for us. If I spend this every day I must to finish our voyage. Do you have thirst or hunger now? I can do some cuisine for you.”

“Oh, my family?”

“I would love to do some cuisine for your family. Can you come on Friday with your family? But today, maybe you would like some lunch for just yourself. I can make lunch for us three.”

“Oh, my family?”

“Yes, I make cuisine for your family. On Friday? It’s good?”

“My wife can come. She can make you a big tangine.”

“But I make cuisine for you and your family.”

“No, my wive can come. You can help her.”

“OK. That is good. I love your family.”

We walk from the city wall to our apartment. It’s dusty, no shade, afternoon sun. Around 85 Fahrenheit. My mouth is dry. No sweat; it bakes off our bodies.

“Do you think Annette would go to the hammam with me? I would like to ask her,” I tell Hamid. A hammam is a bath house.

“Oh the hammam. You can come with my family. On Friday we can do this together too.”

“Thank you. You are very kind.”

At the apartment, Smith gives Hamid 200 dirhams, about 25 USD.

“Would you like to come upstairs to have some lunch?”

“Oh no, thank you,” says Hamid. “I go home and eat now.”

Come home with sunburn, beat, culture-shocked. Eyes and cameras brimming with new images.

The phone rings. “Hello. It’s Mohammed. ça va?”

“ça va bien, merci.”

“I have a problem,” he says. “My friend, she’s European. And she wants to come back to the apartment.”

“Oh?”

“Yes, you know how Europeans are. They change their minds. She is not happy here and she’d like to come home early. You can use the apartment downstairs starting tonight. I’m very sorry.”

“That’s OK. Pas de probleme,” I say.

Smith and I do a two hour cleansing frenzy to leave everything in better condition than we found it.

Five o’clock. Annette rings the door. She’s back, but she looks a little wide eyed. I kiss her three times, the alternating cheek peck.

She speaks fast French at me. She says, “Mohammed gave me this packet of money for the concierge so you can take the apartment downstairs for ten days. But the rest he put in his pocket and left.”

“What? Is there a problem?” I try to remain calm.

“He gave me this, then he put the rest of the money in his pocket and and left.”

“Perhaps I don’t understand. I only speak and understand a little French. I think you said that he gave you money for the apartment downstairs but he took the rest, which should have gone to you? Maybe I should ring Youssef on the phone.”

“Yes, but how? Where is he? And I don’t have any money on my phone card.”

“Hmmm… I must think. Just a moment.”

I tell Smith what’s going on. All this has been in French. He gives me his notebook which has the numbers for Youssef. I know that Annette has Skype on her computer, but I’m flustered. I open the notebook, show Annette the numbers. She puts her index finger on each one, thinking.

The buzzer rings. It’s the concierge. We stand up to greet each other in the standard Marrakech hello:

“Bonjour. Ca va.”

We sit together again at the table. Annette opens the envelope and counts out the money. It’s separated by ten piles of 400 dirhams a piece, one for each day. I get a bit nervous here because my understanding is the apartment is for 300 dirhams.

“OK,” says Annette. “This is for lundi, mardi, mercredi, jeudi, vendredi, samedi, dimanche, lundi, mardi et mercredi. Ten nights. They come here again on the 25th.”

“What?” says the concierge. “It is eleven nights, no?”

I take Smith’s pocket calender. “Today is dimanche. This evening we go downstairs. Here, I’ll count and mark the days.”

Everyone comes to a concensus that we stay for ten nights downstairs, and then come back up to Annette’s apartment on the 25th.

“And from the 25th of April through the 3rd of May they are in my apartment,” says Annette.

“What? I think we agreed on the 11th of May with Mohammed. Hmm… maybe there is a misunderstanding. But we paid for thirty days,” I say.

“But no, on the 3rd of May I come back here,” says Annette.

She turns to the conceirge. “How do I explain it to them? I don’t speak English, and she speaks only a little French.”

“I am sorry,” I say. “Perhaps I don’t understand. For now, we go downstairs. It’s good. And when we see Mohammed, I talk with Mohammed in English to assure I understand.”

Annette speaks fast French with the conceirge.

“Pas de probleme.” Not a problem. “The concierge has explained everything to me. It’s all solved. Don’t worry.”

I try to be gracious and friendly. I hope that I haven’t overreacted to anything. I collect our things. Annette stops me in the living room. My computer is in my hands.

“I hope you enjoyed this apartment.”

“Oh, very much. Thank you. It’s very pretty. We are very comfortable.”

“Please, you can come visit. I can make tea or coffee.”

I have difficulty at first understanding and it dawns on me what she’s saying. “Oh yes. I understand now. Thank you.”

I carry the computer downstairs. Smith says, “You didn’t put that in a bag.”

“What?”

“You didn’t put that in a bag. Now the concierge knows we have a computer.”

“Oh yes,” I sigh.

The evening before last I tried to ask Annette and Mohammed if we should be tipping the conceirge. I think they said no, that he has a salary. But I’m worried that I don’t understand and that we’ve offended him. We are at fate’s mercy.

Smith and I settle on the couch.

“We’re in reactive mode now. Tossed by the flow,” he says.

“I wish someone would steal my computer. It’d take a lot of worry off my hands. But the difficulty would come in that I couldn’t write.”

“Yeah,” he agrees. “I caught myself thinking about the old days when I used pad and paper to compose.”

“But the computer makes it so much easier. Still, I’ve been using paper and pen on our walks to capture our conversation. I think we could go back to this. The only problem is that I like to use Photoshop to process my photos.”

A large couch runs along most of the wall of our new apartment. Five or seven people could lay down and sleep comfortably head to toe.

“This is a weird couch,” I say. “We could have sex on it… all over it. A new position & location each day.”

“Serial sex,” Smith comments.

“There’s a kind of shabby elegance in this new apartment,” I say.

“Yes. Nice expensive fixtures, but the workmanship is sloppy. Still, if we moved here we would make it our own. Look at that grout along the baseboard. It’s a bad job.”

“The walls are nice, though.” Our walls are fresh. Must be a new paint job.

“I saw her walls because I looked at the head stains.” We analyzed her apartment. We theorized that Mohammed must have the habit of smoking on one side of the couch because of the cigarette burns. The other side doesn’t have any. And the couches have no backs, so the walls are smeared with head grease on both sides. Nothing objectionable to us; we just noticed it.

i have no control, am at the mercy of the flow.

reality is fast, interactive, mutable here. spent 4 hours wandering the alley maze markets with abdul. he and lady k converse in french. i follow, silent non-understanding 3rd wheel. the physical expenditure wandering mazes is great, the psychic expenditure greater - and when you don’t know what anybody is saying, the expenditure’s greater still. now and then lady k turns to me and talks to me in french - i just look at her. her brain must be hopping all over the place.

everyone wants to sell you something - you’re a non-native life form, ergo walking money. things don’t call to me to own them, but the medina souks / markets / bazaars are nothing but things to own piled upon things to sell intertwined with things to buy. it’s surreal insanity. for a god oriented culture, there sure is a lot of stuff.

returned to apartment, got phone call saying home game has changed - again. belgium owner lady we kicked out for 4 days is homesick after 2 days and is returning tonight. so we’re moving downstairs for 10 days, then back up here when owner flies to belgium. all this eats up our time, but i get the impression time, fate, and plans are variables here

my watch broke this morning. then my camera quit. abdul found me a watch but price doubled when they saw it was for me. after a couple times of this, he had me stay back and bought me a new watch for $2. an O&O watch. am i on Oh Oh time, or double zero time? i’m familiar with I & I but not O & O… the circle encompasses all, so maybe this equals the All & All. Abdul had us lag behind when he bought our fruit and vegetables for same price reason. i’ve heard it called “rolex time” here, meaning if you’re not a native, you’re rolex rich, so prices rise.

my camera lens wouldn’t extend. “lens error” error statement each time i tried. and i tried. tapped it. took battery out couple times. smacked it on my palm. pushed and prodded repeatedly. no good. said chant to calm myself, accept the inevitable, and camera worked - i know if i’d cursed and gotten angry, it wouldn’t have. reality is one constant choice between better and worse. we both shot some fantastic fotos today. marrakech has upped our game level. now just have to find a cyber cafe that will let us upload from our data sticks. in a third world city looking for internet upload access. my needs are simple - water in, water out, bed, food, internet access, and lady k.

marrakech has filled my eyes up to my brain brim, stuffed some strange within. i need to download to clear my mind, then run analysis to see where and what who am. but down time’s slippery here.

we’re now in new apartment 2 floors down. 4 balconies, no chairs, 40 foot of couch along one long wall and short wall. upstairs we had a clothes washer, pots, pans, dishes, internet, towels, sheets, toilet paper… down here there’s nothing. had to go out and buy a pan to cook. lady k’s invited abdul’s family for dinner friday, but we’ve nothing to cook with, nothing to serve on, no chairs on which to sit. be interesting. you use a bucket to pour the water in the washing machine, then drain it out each load - the sun’s so hot even jeans dry on the roof in an hour.

got even weirder for awhile. belgium lady brought some of our money back to pay the concierge for our 10 days here. the rest of our paid money may have been pocketed by the guy we paid, or maybe we’re misunderstanding. it’s hard to follow in english when there isn’t any. lady k is doing amazingly well speaking french, but still it’s hard to always be groping for words and comprehension.

seems we’re housed for 3 weeks at least. life here so far’s an interactive tapestry. we sleep tonight in our 7th bed in 10 days. i’m starting to feel like a serial sleeper.

this is all lady k’s fault. before she goldiloxed her way into my cyber cave 20 months ago, i lived in one hole with one warm waterbed for 20 years. married to her, i’m now homeless and fear bedlessness in marrakech halfway round the world.

hear a donkey braying beneath our 4th floor window - moving down two floors from the 6th sure increased the life sounds level. i have no idea what’s going on. we begin our 6th full day here, and it seems to get stranger each day. my sole constants are lady k and nightly hash.

Gotta figure out how to upload a higher quality video, but I think this gives the gist of our apartment here.

donkey carts everywhere in the old city, intersperced with scooters, motorcycles, millions of feet both human and animal. folk wear burqas, caftans, long flowing desert robes, knit hats, faces lined with sun and wear. if no motocycle sounds abound, it’s as if we’re in the old testament.

bird chirps everywhere. a lot of thin calm cats with no fear of humans. no buildings over 6 stories so far except the minaret towers - unusual in a city of 2 million. the atlas mountains ring the city east of the wall, dramatically rising 11,000 feet, steel grey blues topped like mutant sundaes with iridescent white. the mountain bottoms disappear in the blue black horizon, so great bold strokes of iced blue stone hover over the horizon. i swear it looks like special effects, a bit of rene magritte in real time.

prayers come throught the open windows 5 times a day - a deep drone chanting. i like hearing it - it soothes me like my buddhist chant. it’s a reminder there’s more to life than life. prayer times are Fajr / pre-dawn, Dhur / noon, ‘Asr / afternoon, Maghrib / sunset, ‘Isha / evening. my first hearing was Fajr - our one night sleeping inside the old city, i’m drawn from sleep by this drone chant, so at 4:30 i lie there and listen in pleasure. it spurs rumination.

people here can’t understand why the rich want it all when there’s enough to share, can’t understand terrorists defiling the purity of Islam, can’t understand america murdering the world for oil. governments and the rich are such unclean evil entities.

folk here say “t’barak allah alik” - which i take as all flows from god.

i was getting out of sorts, off flow in spain, so i started saying more my Nam Myoho Renge Kyo buddhist chant i bought 41 years ago in san francisco for $5. i say the chant irregular days as thank you universe for letting me survive one more day… calm myself… ease others… mental help… spiritual help… physical help… stop worry… get back in the flow… express my pleasure at being alive… ease confusion… cool anger… as an admission i am but one string in the wider weave where i’m sometimes warp, sometimes woof.

i don’t subscribe to This God or That God, though i like Philip K Dick’s agnostic idea of a higher sane god trying to help us with our local insane god - in that scenario, the snake was the hero in the garden of eden for trying to tell us the truth - we do need to know good from evil.

i do find the universe to be a conscious entity though, one with a sense of humor, and gentle more times than not IF it has a choice. i say IF because good and gentle and happy ever after are not always on the menu. if you’ve a decent attitude, the universe will not hurt you just to hurt you - it will hurt you only if it must… but if you’re an s.o.b., the universe just might hurt you because you deserve it. which is how it should be.

speaking of s.o.b.s who deserve cosmic retribution - dick cheney and his middle finger puppet george bush have now killed near a million people in iraq. one million women, children, men, old, young have been slaughtered by the u.s. government in their greed to steal more oil. bottom line: the u.s. government is killing human beings for money - they’re committing murder for profit. cheney and bush and rice and rumsfeld and company are mass murdering serial killing war criminals. may their day in the docket come swiftly. may their days of punishment last long. may they get what they deserve. do as you would be done is the whole of the law - may they be done to as they have done unto. there’s talk of trying tony blair internationally for war crimes - may the dick bush duo also be included on that bill.

another fine person who didn’t think much of the cheney bush beast - the too soon departed kurt vonnegut had this to say in his last speech in cleveland: “the only difference between bush and hitler is that hitler was elected.”

there’s cobwebs in the closet. there’s no closure in the hole. there’s past sins must first be offset before we save our soul.

to lighten my backpack load in madrid, i tossed two print-outs of our poetry, then tore the blank paper off a bunch of lady k’s poems and kept the poems because they were too good to trash. i lost 6 pounds of pack by trashing poetry, art supplies and found objects for assemblage. our art supplies are down to 2 bottles of copper powder, a bottle iridescent white paint, a few shards of rusted bed springs from croatia, and a chunk of hash (i included the hash because we list it as “art supplies” on our financial sheet). in the clean-up, i found this poem i’d forgotten

Lady K

If Eve hadn’t given Adam that apple
I wouldn’t be smoking today.
Even so,
I tried to serve Sky God
but was drawn to that old Debbil Weed.
I became a happy pappy
papa puff daddy
gadfly to gladly
nouveau bohemian in old school crowd.
Sir Laugh-a-Lot of Pot-a-Lot
Queen MaryJaned
Lady Day to Lady K
Kafka to a kiss

when lady k first came into my life 19 months ago, she was so dark strange insane i called her kafka’s lady. as i helped lighten her darkness, i realized she was strangely sane, so i started calling her lady kafka, and that morphed to lady k. she’s still strange, thank goodness, but the dark’s departed. now we dance in moroccan light.

. . . . . . .

in house in walled city, we all ate from one plate. our host smoked hash mixed with tobacco - the one drug my body never took to - so i put piece of hash on a toothpick, lit it, and inhaled. night before at hotel with no water glass to capture the smoke, i cut a plastic liter water bottle into a smoking glass… assemblage artists are used to making do with what’s around within reach.

streets here are lined with orange trees full of oranges and vast herds of palm trees - thousands upon thousands of palms. this must be their sacred wintering grounds. gorgeous red and flaming magenta flowers everywhere. the sun when out is amazingly hot. the weather skips from mostly sun to rain to mini dust storm. intricate tiled patterns everywhere. repeated pattern is a reminder of god and the interconnectedness of all.

there’s a bit of english thrown my way now and then, but mostly i hear french or arabic. lady’s picking up french faster here than in france.

lady’s last blog ended with her feeling bad about the wee mewling kitten. i tried to make her feel better by telling her that even if we’d picked it up and brought it home, after i’d cleaned and skinned it, there wouldn’t have been enough of it left to eat..

. . . . . . .

time to put on our packs, do the old double shuffle carry to our new digs. our 6th moving on since we left albeihlan france 8 days ago.

citywide prayer woke us 4:30 a.m. - we hear the city pray / chant / sing repeatedly through the day. we’re traveling in a movie soundtrack, the scenes outside from art house films.

we displaced a nice retired french speaking belgium lady from her own home for 4 days. it’s a 6th floor multi-roomed apartment looking out over the Medina, the old city’s wall is 2 blocks away from the balcony. though two blocks here can be dangerous if you have to cross the street - you need to be nimble, calculate gaps, and hope for future and fortune.

we were to rent an apartment for 12 days 2 floors down, then rent the belgium lady’s place for 18 more days while she flew to europe. but when we came to move in today, we found a glitch - the folk there had 4 more days. so the belgium lady insisted we live here 4 days and she went to stay with a friend. this is a different world.

we are complete strangers, and strange, in this strange land. we stick out, folks watch us. our first day here we were picked up by a berber guide who knew we needed him before we knew we needed him. there’s no way we would have had such a propitious start without his help. we’d probably still be wandering the alleyways of the old city, trying to get back out. once we went to his house and met his family, everything changed. lady k’s going to have him show her how and where to shop, how to barter. he told us to ditch our ever present small backpacks because it’s a dangerous mark of tourist status. it would be so easy to be taken advantage of here - and i spose we are in that we overpay for everything so far - but our berber friend has made this a magic rather than a tragic start. who knows what is ahead, but this beginning is fairy tale fine..

it was a weird adventure our first trip into the Medina… as we went deeper in the twisty maze of alleys, i tried to first memorize sight clues to retrace my steps, then started writing down clues, then started taking a foto of each turn, and then gave up - except for my compass - i figured worse case scenario i could eventually get us back out alone using my compass. there were moments we wondered if we were in trouble being in too deep with no people around - had we not had the good fortune of a good man as guide, we may have been. sometimes it all comes down to luck and karma.

this world of Islam we’re seeing is nothing like we’ve been indoctrinated in america to expect - the folks we’ve met seem happier, kinder, gentler, more connected to the cycle of life than most. this is a poor country, so money is an abiding factor here, but courtesy, politeness, quality of life are serious aspects of the warp and woof as well.

from our roof you look out over the old city, the minarets, the mosques, and see the mountains in the distance surrounding the city. above the mountains a blue grey haze. and above the haze, what looks like magic clouds hovering but are bigger blue black mountains topped with snow. looks like a hollywood movie special effects scene. we walk through our own photographs, inhabit our own foreign film.

today i recover, do wash, sleep, relax - gotta get basic chores done every chance i get because i never know when i can clean the clothes or body again. i worry about getting enough water into my body, then getting it back out of my body, cleaning clothes and body, where to sleep, what to find to eat, and how to escape my backpack. after that, it’s all companionship, experience, and creation. not a bad life.

it’s been quite a journey, a journey that seems to be but beginning. i am so glad we stepped off the edge and came. before we left, lady k read that spiders fall to float - they start a strand of web, then jump into the void hoping the air currents will carry them to the other side. if they don’t, they crawl back up the web and fall again and again until they reach the other side. lady k says we’re falling to float. don’t know where the other side is, but we definitely jumped from the side we were on.

THURSDAY AFTERNOON

Spent much of the afternoon on the rooftop of Hamid’s house while his wife cooked dinner in a little room next to me. I sat there under the meditative sky blue and the surrounding white and salmon buildings, totally relaxed in his home while Smith and Hamid smoked some hash downstairs.

I had a gist of what the rooftops were like, but this is an entire world of air and birds and sun and stars. I closed my eyes and basked in blue sun until Hamid’s son greeted me, “Salaam.”

“ça va?” I asked.

“ça va bien,” and he held his heart with his right hand.

He bade me come downstairs with the rest of the party, and we ate from a common bowl, couscous topped with lamb stew. Hamid tried to get us to eat all the meat in the bowl, pushing it towards our side.

Afterwards he gave me a lesson in Arabic. We practiced counting 1 to 10.

* * *

THURSDAY NIGHT (at the riad)

A bird comes in, says hello, looks around.

“Hello,” Smith says.

The bird leaves.

“Hmm. He didn’t answer me. He looked around and left.”

“We gotta buy some water,” Smith comments, surprised. “We don’t have any water.”

And I think about how I am intimidated by going on the street to find my water. It feels so cozy to be in here. On the street feels cozy, human, when we have our guide. But other times, it seems alien. And tonight we’ll be out on the streets when it’s DARK, but we’ll be with our guide.

“I feel like we’re at sea,” I say. “And I feel like we’re on boats. And going on the road is like going into water. It’s that close.”

* * *

FRIDAY

Smith sharpens the needle for our hash. Hash leaves black residual on the needle. It’s hard to push through the paper.

“Reminds me of when I used to shoot up with needles,” he says.

“Oh yeah?”

“Well, see, I didn’t know you could go to a drug store and buy needles as long as you signed a piece of paper. The needles I had were all from Masumi. She was a diabetic. Shot up morning and night. Ass cheek, ass cheek, arm, arm. And I kept all her needles because I’m a found object assemblage person/maker. After a while of using them over and over and over again, some got dull, some broke, some got bent, some malfunctioned.”

“Oh yeah?”

“Yeah, so, you know, for some of them I used a little nail file to clean the needles to make them a wee bit sharper and smoother.”

We smoke, then eat rich buttery cakes from a nearby patisserie.

“You want anything atoll?” Smith asks.

“Huh? atoll?”

“You want anything at all, I said. You want face wipes? You want hand wipes? Web wipes?”

“Web wipes?”

“You want rat wipes?”

“Hmm…” I ponder. By *rat* he refers to my vagina. Tonight is all a matter of decision making. Like do I want my vagina rubbed now, which will make me zonk out so that I’ll have less of an opportunity to write. Or will I smoke more and be more creative now, which will mean I’m too tired to have sex later? Ah, decisions, decisions.

“Yr mah woman,” he says. “I can just reach over here and put mah hand on an intimate part of yr thigh…”

“Yes, you can,” I daphne.

“You know it’s a quarter to eight. We can get a good night’s sleep. That is if the universe and us are in agreement. Who knows, you might get up at four in the morn and start typing away.”

* * *

SATURDAY MORNING

It is now our fourth day in Marrakech, and I feel so grateful that Smith and I decided to come to Morocco. The overall feeling I have is that of making contact with an ancient civilization. It’s strange but familiar. I am simultaneously an alien and at ease. I feel that by being here I’m experiencing something that is at the roots of human history, some essential experience that says “home” to me.

We were lucky our first day here. We met a wonderful friendly guide — Hamid — and he’s helped us every day. He helped us find an apartment for a month. The apartment is expensive but I understand we are paying a fair price for it. Our second day here we had dinner with his family. We ate couscous out of a common bowl. Another really really good thing about Hamid is that he doesn’t speak English. So I’m making a lot of progress with French. He’s taught me the proper pronunciation of some Arabic words as well.

I find it awkward to have someone help me, but I know that he needs the money. And he provides a valuable service to us. Much of the medina area of Marrakech is completely unmarked. It’s a total maze and it goes on and on and on.

I sit on some Middle-eastern style couch which runs along the border of the room. I face the window, the balcony. It’s framed by gauzy shimmery curtains. There are plants on the balcony. One of them reminds me of an orchid. It is lush with magenta-colored flowers. Past the balcony, I see another apartment building which is painted the ubiquitous color here in Marrakech, salmon/orange. Laundry hangs from a line on the building’s roof underneath a cluster of satellite dishes. The sky is bright blue.

If I watch the street below there are people in Western dress and traditional dress. I love the traditional dress. It’s romantic to see men and women in robes.

My favorite view is up on the rooftop. Our host provided a mattress for us. If the nights get warmer, we can sleep on the roof under the stars.

We see mountains all around the horizon from there. and before the mountains we see the medina. And before the medina, there is an expanse of sand with plentiful palm trees cocking this way and that.

I feel as though I could stay here much longer than a month.

My thoughts return to Hamid. It’s awkward for us to have a guide, but I’m rolling with it. I constantly worry about whether I’m being disrespectful to him.

He’s missing half a finger on his right hand. He used to be a carpenter but he can’t do this work right now. Thursday morning I saw that blood had soaked through part of the dressing. It must have been a recent accident. I know it’s painful for him. I wonder if he’s received medical treatment.

Yesterday we paid him 300 dirhams over the course of the day. It’s the equivalent of 35 dollars. We’ve read different things about tipping here, that just a couple dirhams for a simple service suffices. But he’d spent most of the day with us, and he fed us at his home. I worried about being too ostentatious with overtipping or that I might offend him by tipping him for things offered out of friendship.

I read that the average salary in Morocco is some 1400 dirhams per month, so I’m hoping that 300 for a day in Marrakech is sufficient. The median salary for the country of Morocco may not be on par with the median salary for Marrakech.

It’s a bit awkward for us because we are perceived to be rich Americans. I know that in comparison we are rich, but we are not here for just a couple days. I’m worried that Hamid will try to offer us a service every day. It will add up quickly and it’s way out of our budget. Just the rent here in Marrakech is over our budget. We could have paid much less for a simple room, but we need to be able to create and cook and live. An apartment was necessary.

I’m wondering how to inquire about how much medical care costs in Marrakech. I don’t know how to approach the subject with Hamid without being disrespectful or making promises I cannot keep. I don’t know if he has taken adequate care of his hand. It would be nice to have some assurance that we’re paying Hamid enough so that he can get treatment and also have a nice amount for his living expenses.

I am not accustomed to paying someone every day for services. We feel he’s worth much more than we’ve given him, but we cannot maintain this pace of spending.

“I never thot I’d be doing this,” Smith declares.

“What? Smoking Moroccan hash in Morocco?”

“Yes. It’s pretty cool.”

“Well,” I say, “if you say it’s cool, it must be cool. Cuz yr the coolest.”

Steve puts the needle and book on the windowsill. “You know, if things go right, we’re going to be buying a lot of sewing kits.” We use a needle on a piece of hash as tho it’s an insect specimen. We anchor it on a book. Then we light it, blow it out, and hold a cup over it to collect the smoke. In France, we used Shakespeare. In Morocco, we use Camus.

I watch the palm tree leaves outside the window. They fingerly touch, tustle the sky. I moan.

“Feel it?” he asks.

“Yeah. This is a happy hash.” I’m feeling so glad that we have this thing we can indulge in. Feeling rich without it as well, and better for the parallax gleaned from the shifting of straight and stoned perspectives, the shining of my mind.

“Having a good day, Lady?”

“Yeah. This is going to be transformative, you know.”

“Why?” he asks.

“Well, we’ll be in the center of Marrakech, in the old city, getting high, meeting weird people, creating.”

“Drooling?”

“Hehehe.” I launch myself at his toe, chew on it, bite it. “Um, you gotta nice big juicy toe.”

“It’s probably not very clean, you know.”

“Oh right,” and I spit it out.

And I look at Smith, and it feels like we’re the same age right now.

“Wow this is pretty intense,” I say.

“Oh, yeah. And we got a lotta good stones left in the chunk, too. So what you writing?”

“Oh, little bits of our conversation, here and there.”

* * *

“Being here is pretty weird, isn’t it? It’s like ‘hippie nostalgia’,” I comment.

“I was *with* the hippies. Not *of* them,” Smith grunts. He lies down on my laptop power supply and cord.

“Yr on my cord, you know.”

“I know. It’s heating my nether regions.” He turns over to show me the power supply. It was under his butt. “Here. I’m having heat sex, that’s all.”

I rub his belly.

He says, “It’s going to be hard enough to write. We’re gonna have to explain what happened today. Go ahead, write it down.”

I’m resistant. Too foggy to recall the day.

“You know some bears aren’t hibernating anymore.”

I continue rubbing his belly. “Some bears?”

“Yeah, it’s getting too warm. All they need is enough grub to stay awake. I’m going to get the big juicy bug grubs.”

We zone out for a while, and out of the blue he asks, “Do snails have livers? They wouldn’t get very fucking big. I mean, how many snail lizards you gonna need to fucking tip the scales. I can see these vast snail herds being herded to market. I used to be a snail herder, you know? Nothing like snails on the trail! You know, it’s interesting. Seeing what goes into the pot?”

“Oh yeah, gets added to our soup,” I say.

“We read about snails on the plane and that got in. I keep thinking about that Steven King where the doctor’s marooned, hurt on an island. He knows which part of himself he can safely eat to stay alive.”

“I’ve been thinking about that too,” I say. It seems like a relevant metaphor for the world and our investment in ourselves. We had to sell the condo to do this. We’re eating our past to pay for the present to invest in the future.

“Steven King’s short stories are better than his books — I think,” I say. “I’m starting to understand the process of writing longer pieces. A fictional story seems possible. I’m learning a lot from writing your book. I think in writing a book a person works on a puzzle of oneself, other people and the world. Clarity’s gained in working out the plot of the book.”

“I know myself and I don’t know myself,” Smith says. “There’re more than two of me. I don’t know myself. So, does this make you a hippie chick now?”

“I don’t know what you mean. What do you mean by that?”

“Well you’re on the road, you’re writing this down, you’re smoking hash, you’re in Morocco.”

* * *

“Does my hair look messy?”

“No,” I say. “You look good. Why?”

“Cuz he kept trying to shave me. I think he thot it’d make me look younger. The gray hair and all.” Our guide pointed out several barber shops and rubbed his face suggestively.

“I wonder what I’d look like under there. It’s been so long I can’t remember. I wouldn’t look like me any more.”

“Who are you?”

“I don’t know. It’s one of them guessing games.” He watches the wall. “I’m looking at that shadow on the wall. It was especially nice, seeing that this morning. It was brighter then.”

“We saw the shadows before we saw the country,” I say.

* * *

“OK come on Steve, write your story. It’s the call of the hippies! Steve, Steve!”

“I was with the hippies, not of the hippies. Hippies all sold out. They’re just a marketing tool now. I wasn’t of anyone, straight or stoned.”

I insist: “You were telling me about the magic little guy. I said maybe he’s a genie.”

“Yes, he was,” Smith says. “A hash genie. He appeared and told you where the ’souk’ was. Down the street, he stopped you to show you where he used to work when he cut his middle finger off. He popped up again when we went past the alley entrance. So he started taking us down the right way. Wouldn’t leave.”

“Sounds like a good genie,” I say.

“Yeah, after that, he sorta ‘hovered.’ He took us deeper in, and he’d turn, and I’d look about for something to mentally mark where we were going, kept checking my compass. After a few more turns, started taking pictures. Cuz I was starting to give up. And after that I just tried to keep a vague west/northeast/south sense. Knew logically we could compass our way back.”

“I got afraid at one point.”

“Right - you said you wanted to be where there were more people. And you know what? More people appeared. Interesting.”

“That is interesting. He’s a good hash genie.”

I drift into myself for a while.

“I’m just having the thought that by allowing ourselves to move around the world helps us to find our true set points.”

“Set points?” he asks.

“Umm hmmm… set points are a controls engineering term.”

“I think I gave my set points away.”

“How’s that?”

He evades me. “I pray for multiple points. You know what it is… it’s like triangulation. You know where they use radar to find three points to find bad guys in the movies. By using more than one set of systems, you use your mind, you use your instincts, you use your experience, you use your - I don’t know - camouflage powers.”

“Actually, you know that’s interesting. I didn’t have to use the camouflage powers today. I didn’t have to pretend not to be me. I just stuck out, like a sore thumb.”

“Yeah that’s right,” I agree. “We did stick out.”

“And when it was over, when he was getting ready to leave us, after he steered us to his store collective, I figured this was my best chance. And I asked him if he could help me find where I could get some hashish.”

“He said, Me, I guess. Moi. We can go to my house.”

“It turns out he thought we wanted to go smoke right then. He was going to take us to his house. So we go further and further in to the medina, to his house, get served tea and pastries made by his wife.”

“Yeah,” I say. “Just seeing their domicile just totally flipped my head.”

“There’s just so much. This is really weird. I’m usually kind of good with this kind of stuff.”

“The thing that stuck out to me was how his son was so studious. He showed us his textbooks. And then I asked him what he was going to do after studying.”

“And he told you what his job was after school. He makes necklaces and textiles, I think.”

“Then his father bade him bring his hash tray.”

“Ah… he invited us to dinner. We tried to tell him we couldn’t have dinner right away. We asked him if he knew a good place we could stay. I figured a man who’d get me hash might find me an apartment. Looks like he will.”

“Started off the day unsure of what we’re going to do. Wandered into the old walled city. Wandered out with an apartment, maybe. We’ll find out tomorrow.”

“And it was interesting, you know. Because at one point another pop-up tried to help us.”

“Another genie, yes,” I say.

“But I don’t know how he recognized we already had help. And he went away.”

“And that was difficult, everybody speaking, the father, his wife, the son and us today. We were speaking, what, four languages? French, German, English, Arabic?”

“We were speaking Pigeon,” I say.

“Pigeon? What do you mean?”

“We kept speaking at each other in different sentences, languages, until everyone came to a consensus of understanding. Pigeon.”

I continue: “It’s definitely interesting. A fundamentally different economy. Everything is based on personal contact here. Less opportunity for slack.”

“Do you wanna see my photos? A lot of them I don’t know what I got. I couldn’t see the screen when I pointed my picture.”

“Oh that was intrusive, him telling us where to take pictures, wasn’t it?” I felt positively resistent. But today I plan on just doing what the guide says. No use resisting the flow.

“Oh yeah, but at least we got to see a lotta weird shit. He coulda just seen that you were taking weird pictures, so he decided to show you weird shit.”

“I didn’t want to take pictures of people. Felt too exploitative. I tried to take pictures of cats. I felt they could stand in as metaphors for the conditions of the the people.”

“There was an old woman, white scarf over her head,” Steve recalls.
She was leaning against a tiled mosque in the courtyard in the sun. It was an excellent photograph. Like she was posing. She had long stuff, covered head to toe. You could tell she was old.”

“You didn’t take that one?”

“Didn’t have a chance. I’m not sure I could have asked. I’m kinda shy in a weird way.”

“Ah, remember the little kitten we saw crawling in the dirt?” Smith pointed him out on our walk back to the hotel. Dirt covered movement flailing under a tree.

“Yes Ma’am, I do.”

“At first I thought it was a rat or something.”

“So did I.”

“How distressing it was, to leave it mewing in the dirt.”