ubik
no camel today. not a whole one anyway - saw a dead camel head with a hook through its lips hanging in a meat tent at a souk for moroccans west of town. camels have really big lips. at the souk south of here, i saw camel forelegs hanging in a meat tent. and ashtrays made from camel hoofs. i don’t think this is a good place to be a camel. there’s lady k’s camel leather shoes too. that’s head, forelegs, feet, and a small swatch of camel skin. i may as well buy the pieces, build my own camel.
hamid, lady and i took a 40 minute taxi ride west to see another souk. there’s 4 categories of people here - those who make things to sell… those who sell… and those who bring foreigners to where things are sold. the 4th group consists of the service industry which house, transport, feed, and clean the foreigners. yankee go home, then come back and buy more stuff. hard to sell to us 2 folk who carry everything on their backs. we’re our own donkeys.
taxis here wait until they’re filled before going - filled in this case means 1 driver and 6 passengers in a small 4-seat car - coming and going there was skinny hamid, lady k, 6 foot 3 me, and a large lady in traditional dress in the backseat, while the driver had 1 front seat & 2 adult males shared the other. the taxis also share the road with pedestrians, bicycles, scooters, motorbikes, donkey carts, horses, tractors, trucks, buses, fork lifts - even saw a blue dune buggy. the taxi played a cd of a woman in a slight echo chamber singing the koran unaccompanied. haunting. peaceful.
we ate mutton slow cooked in 4 foot earthen clay mounds. this place is pushing me to vegetarian territory. seeing piles of severed animal heads on the ground beneath stomach linings and intestines hanging from hooks amid the casual cut and whack of steel on flesh and bone on unclean chopping blocks sitting all day in the sun does not promote hunger. meat’s starting to make me feel creepy. i think from now on i’ll just eat snickers candy bars - they’ve got nuts, goo, sugar, chocolate, all the food groups except coffee.
after we ate and drank tea, hamid had them wash our tea glasses in land water and filled with mint tea. i wouldn’t drink. this is unsafe water country - land water is anathema. lady drank. she can never say no, she’s soft hearted. or maybe she just has more balls than i. so far she’s okay.
i’m going to synthesize the heavy sweet smell of centuries of human urine on hot earth baked by the sun, then sell it as Eau de Marrakech.
lady says “i’d like to start reading the book we’re smoking.” it’s Ubik by Philip K Dick. i’ve been using it to support the sewing needle we burn hash on.
our first day here lady told our guide we were canadian because we’re a wee bit ashamed of our u.s.of.a. she told the truth next time. yet today he told the large lady in the cab i was from england, and lady k was from the netherlands. i prefer her country over mine… she gets amsterdam, while england’s politicians seem as slimy as the cheney-bush beast.
saw a barber / dentist / maybe doctor under a tent at the souk today. he cut hair. pulled a woman’s tooth and was stuffing gauze into the missing space. several vials of medicine next to the hair comb and scissors. made me think of the old west - but now, in the mother country. here where then is now, now then. everything is salvaged. everything done by hand. everything manually moved, repaired, harvested, sold. there’s more smiles here with less money than any city we’ve seen. marrakech seems more an extended family tribe village city - at least within the walls of the old city. who knows in the new.
this is also a demanding city. it intrudes at will. turned down lunch with mohammed and 2 english ladies, said we’d see them later. within the hour they’re at our door. they’re leaving later so naturally will visit now. i have never been so at the mercy of my environment as here. city does what it wants when it wants, often without informing you of the change in plans. it will dangle live camels before your sugar plums, then give you dead heads instead.
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