1.26.2013
At the end of my contract in Turkey I left a
huge bag of winter clothes for charity.
At the end of my contract in Oman I left all of my work clothes with the
landlord. This purging, misdirected, was in anticipation for something to
happen that didn’t happen.
Of course if I hadn’t given away my sport
jacket and three pairs of shoes and so forth I wouldn’t be able to travel as
light as I like to be. This philosophy, however, doesn’t bode well when one
needs a job that requires shoes and a tie and a nice shirt or two.
A little nibble from Antalya, said to be the
third most visited place in the world.
The objective for the man whose ambition wanes when there are no
like-minded people around him to encourage and inspire is to stay in one place
for longer than a year. A city by the
Med sounds ideal. Work your ass off, buy
a bike, running shoes, swim in the morning, I can live there. I gotta sell myself, Lord. Strength, direction, where am I going. I hate and am tired of anticipating. Oh wait, to not anticipate means one is lazy
which I’m not. This is a journey and I
am at yet again at a crossroad, not easily.
Anticipating poverty softly isn’t traumatic this time. Room eight suffices for now. Pennilessness isn’t upsetting yet though the
division of my labor and and…the cute kid with the awol dad comes in. She has enjoyed the mango gummy sweets she’s
received in the past week. Her mother
and her other child, a three month old, sleep on a mat in the sun. Priscilla is about four and can’t
weigh more than twenty pounds. I can’t
be right, can it? Whatever food they get
must be coming from their family.
With Maya’s mother and sister and the kids
huddled in the kitchen Laxman and I sit by the fire with a pot of coffee vodka,
a full bright moon and a return to frigid temps. It’s only a guess but caffeine
and booze reduces the chance of projectile vomiting considerably. We will see
tonite.
1.28.13
A plugged nose leads to a sore throat which
results in poor sleep. Another group of
Chinese check in, the third such in the week.
This bunch can’t be older than twenty and as the sun readies to emerge
they’re all sleeping. Welcome to
nature.
I am concerned that professionally I am sliding
into oblivion faster than I imagined.
It’s my fault and I have to reverse this or I will never get out of
here. A fiasco is what it’s looking
like. Seriously, I have to be more
professionally developed, on the edge of new and innovating methodologies to
answer the basic question that really doesn’t need fancy speak. Rapport, technique, empathy.
A default career for eighteen years is absurd
but it’s still about the absence of ambition.
Why don’t I have that risk gene, that inner push to pursue what I really
want to do. Imagine hard for a few
minutes and what do you see yourself doing now, the dream job, the way of life
you haven’t attained. Photography, a VW
camper going from art fair to art fair.
Living in the bus. Wow, a nomadic
artisan. And what would it take to do
this? A whole lotta money otherwise what
would stop me other than myself. A year
or two in Saudi would do it. Sigh. Where is the love Lord.
Penance.
I don’t mean to trivialize carrying sixty pound logs on my back as
something I need or want to do in order to cleanse my head of internal
negativity. Five trips to the homestead,
five logs carried back to the lodge. In
addition to the expected pain my nose ran like a politician and it wouldn’t
stop. Fatigue, pain, a bottle of rum in
milk tea afterwards, a big group checks into rooms one through four. What am I feeling guilty about, what
motivates me to carry wood like the others today, women, Taka two houses above,
pain is my friend I tell Posteraj. I
want to carry my weight here, I want to earn my plate of rice. I want to suffer and remain humble to
thyself.
As for ambition. Is the lack of it tied to confidence or the
lack thereof? I don’t think so all the
time. And nothing is going to happen
unless I initiate. And running out of
money isn’t initiating you to do something?
Aside from tossing out the work history, no.
In the NYT a story about finding work says the
best way is to know someone who can put a good word in for you. Well hasn’t that always been the case? I got the Zirve job, I think in part, because
of someone I knew from the Emirates was there.
Simple. And then over dinner I
told her my loony story.
I’m not telling anyone my loony story
again. It is behind me and it serves me
and no one else any purpose. Nothing
happened, your imagination was pitiful, we are here so let’s go. And I do think now that I will never share
the loon again I am forgetting it, push it away.
My cough persists, my nose
runs, and I have no medicine other than the cups of hot honey and ginger tea,
nice but, and not even rum helped, ok maybe it did a little. 
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