cats eat dead things in the hall as we walk up the stair well to the 5th floor internet cafe. sometimes the lights go out, the stairs disappear in the dark, and i take one step too many or too few in this eternal shell game of reality versus expectation.
all gods are tricksters, but the more i read of coyote the trickster god, the meaner and more perverse he appears – he offers to watch mrs badger’s hungry children while she scours food for them, then cooks them into a stew and eats them as soon as she leaves. eats her too when she returns. has an eternally hungry endless penis always getting him in trouble. assumes other’s skins to have sex with beautiful unwilling women, as well as their mothers and grandmothers. no compassion. no honor. not a nice guy. a bad role model unless you want to be a politician.
time here doesn’t proceed as scheduled. yesterday we found tomorrow’s dinner was to be tonight. lady k’s market trip with the upstairs lady 2 days hence became today. schedule things for friday and saturday, they both happen thursday. marrakech doesn’t care what our plans are, the city decides for us, informs us as we go. don’t believe i’ve ever had less handle on reality than here. of course, some of my previous realities have had less to handle.
lady k left for a 2 hour supermarket taxi trip with the upstairs lady, leaving me to greet the berber family should they come for dinner before their scheduled 3 hours. or if lady returns after. i had her phonetically write down something in french to explain in case i’m it. mrs hamid speaks arabic, hamid arabic and some french, and i’m one-lingualini english.
i do speak absurd and droll, as well as sardonic and wry, but those are sub-languages – i’d need french or arabic carrier waves to get them across. Sardonic & Wry sounds like a law firm downwind of Hollywood & Vine.
lady k is blossoming here. she’s blossomed each stop along the way since combining our ways, but she’s blossomed some of the blossoms here. the marrakech free range reality agrees with her. she started two assemblages, very moroccan flavor. she’s now a three continent maker of international trash art. and i’m her main trash man. gimme some garbage, baby.
lady k invited hamid and his mrs over for dinner to be social, and as a thank you for feeding us in their house. hamid’s wife took over and did all the cooking, showing lady the moroccan way. lady tried to bake a cake to be part of it, but his mrs insisted on doing that too. she even cleaned up after. for 4 hours i was social with folk i could not communicate with. we again all ate from one big plate. good dinner. they brought gifts, but as they were leaving, he said i should give his wife 100 dirham ($12.50 u.s.) for “doing the cuisine.” so what we thought a social engagement turned financial (i gave her 150 dirham – figure 4 hours is worth $19). but i don’t understand them bringing the gifts – i guess it was both social and financial. i speak neither the languages nor understand the customs of this country. i do know everyone has very little, so money matters. i don’t like paying people to do things for me. paying for dinner in our own apartment upset some sense of sociality i have – and messed up my bowels as well.
there’s threes here. when they make mint tea, they add enough sugar to keep a horse happy. from two foot above the glass, they pour one glass of tea, then pour the tea back into the pot. this is done three times, partly to stir the sugar but mainly to create tea foam. when mrs hamid cooks couscous, she uses a 2 part pot – puts lamb meat and the harder vegetables in water in the lower pot and starts cooking. she places a large amount of couscous in the steamer top part. after it steams, she dumps it on a large platter, kneads it and adds oil and water, then puts it back in the top to steam some more. she does this 3 times, adding various vegetables to the bottom along the way. very time intensive meal – maybe 2 hours to cook. one of several spices used was saffron – a magic poet word, like autumn and sapphire. the amount of food prepared was prodigious – oranges with cinnamon and sugar.. couscous with lamb, carrots, turnips, eggplants, yellow squash and more, a mound of couscous sprinkled with cinnamon and sugar, sliced green melons, bananas, apples, cake… etc. could have fed 8 well instead of our 4.
. . .
took a packed bus 20 kilometers south to the town of tameslouht. people pounded on the metal bus walls when they wanted off. we walked parts of town, went into the open-air souks. poverty everywhere. the souks in the medina here in marrakech are richer, wealthier, more for tourists. down there they’re for moroccans. camel meat, mounds of nuts, figs, barber tents, goat heads in piles on the ground – made me think of the rolling stones’ album “goat’s head soup.”
coming back, hamid was stopped by the tourist police – he’s not a registered as a guide. he slipped them 50 of our dirhams, they went away. if only all police would accept $6 bribes.
i’m at least a head taller than most folk here. we stuck out today like rich white. and we’re not rich, not even vaguely well off. not quite white either after 5 months of croatian, french, and moroccan sun. we can’t afford to be here, but we can’t afford not to be here either. we’re gambling what little we have to see what we might become. sold our place, paid off all our bills, and left america. figure we’ll travel for two years and settle somewhere where money grows on trees (it’ll have to, cuz we’ll need some by then). the world is finite, and maybe fracturing. we all may have gone one step past the tipping point in global warming or social cooling. whatever. we just thought it prudent that while things are as they are, it’d be a good time to take a look around.
the unholy trinity we’ve seen everywhere since leaving america are tobacco, tv, and coca cola. you can toss mcdonald’s and cell phones in there too – let those 5 be the unholy 3.
spell check wants me to capitalize tv, which proves TV’s one of our new godz. why capitalize tv and not Truth?
someone else invited to a tangine tomorrow, a traditional moroccan dinner stew. as soon as we accepted, we were informed they’d need 150 dirham to buy the ingredients. customs are uncustomarily strange here to me. even sociability and friendship have price tags. i spose learning this is part of the purpose of traveling. from now on, anyone who wants to be my friend will have to pay me upfront.
