WALKING ON THIN ICE

intrepid reporter polly pureheart june 13 2007

had dead bee tea today. we were in sunny outdoor courtyard drinking hot mint tea when some bees decided the sugar should be theirs. i tossed the sugar lumps into our 2 teapots to protect them - one bee flew in after, and drowned. i fished his wet corpse out, tossed him to the side, and drank the rest of my bee corpse tea. i was hoping for a buzz.

i’m totally out of the flow today, have neither grace nor wit - nor balance. lady told me i was so bad i was “reducing her flow zone layer.”

an arab walked up to us, looked at lady, grabbed her hand, shook it, invited us to eat couscous at his house right then and there. he wanted lady, probably would have drugged us, bundled her off to the white slave trades. he was rubbing her shoulder as we said no, kept saying how nice lady was - how very nisssse.

as money obsessed as morocco is, it is even so strangely honest… when the street vendors go to daily prayers, they just lean a stick across the doorway of their shop to indicate they’re away. nothing is locked up or put away, yet nothing is stolen.

we’re playing movie language roulette - we bought 10 movie dvds for $1.30 each. the jackets say they’re in english, but so far the language count is 2 english, 7 french, and 1 hindu. odd watching films where your only clues to plot are what you see, where you cannot understand a word of what you hear. these are street stall bootlegs - when they make copies, they forget to copy the language and subtitle menu options. the best film so far is terry gilliam’s The Brothers Grimm. the weirdest is from india, a bollywood sci-fi musical about a brain damaged adult who thinks he’s 8 yrs old - with no provocation, he and the children and the small blue alien life form break into singing and start dancing about the country-side (Koi… Mil Gaya by rakesh roshan).

lady’s starting a dead kitten count. a lot of the cats and the beggars have disappeared from our alleys. i suggested they went into meat dishes, but lady thinks they’ve been thinned by authorities to clean up for next week’s yearly music festival.

here’s the online blurb about the festival:

The annual Essaouira Gnaoua and World Music Festival is a celebration of the mysterious music of the Gnaouas, the product of a mystic tradition with branches as widespread as Haitian voodoo and Brazilian Candomblé. Originating through a cross-pollination of African magic and Islamic rituals, the Gnaoua brotherhoods form a structured unit around a master. He leads the music and dancing until the participants are in a trance induced by the mesmeric rhythms of the drums, the guenbri (a form of lute) and the hand-held garagab (metal castanets). During religious ceremonies, Gnaouas have been known to impale themselves on swords or beat their heads with iron balls without sustaining visible external injury.