Let's go to bed

9.7.14

I booked a flight today for the Eid Al Adha holiday beginning on the third of October and I feel guilty about leaving on a day I should be at my desk.  But what I feel bad isn’t about taking that extra day to travel it’s the fear of getting caught and not lying about it.  I confess, I left early, take it out of my salary.  The cost of leaving a day early saves me almost three hundred dollars, though it isn’t money that leaves me feeling bad, it’s someone looking for me when I’ll be taking photos of the world’s largest fig tree 1800 miles away.

Sunday night, there are seven tv stations I channel surf and when there is nothing on I haven’t seen a half dozen times, well, I don’t read at night.  I tune in to the news.  Women in India who want to work.  Ok, anything else?  I watched Saving Private Ryan a few months ago, the Katherine Hegal bounty hunter movie was ok the first time, a Brazilian soap opera with English voiceovers is terrible, goofy Korean teen dramas on two stations, a preview of the Ryder cup on CNN, has Tom Hanks ever made a bad movie?

9.8.14

The BBC calls it the new world disorder and I have to turn it off.  Let’s go back to Indiana, 1951, when people’s greatest concerns was basketball.  No internet, shoot, no computers, no televisions in small towns, the world came to farmers via radio.  There were quieter and lesser spheres of influence then. 

I know I’m naïve, I know there was a war going on and so did everyone else and surely there were boys from the farms who fought and died on the other side of the world and no one ought to dismiss the horror that came home. 

I walked to the Anwar al Khadeem Supermarket this evening and in the front of the store a huge tour bus rumbled while a woman was passing her groceries up to another woman.  What the heck I thought and when I entered the store I grabbed a hand basket and there was a huge crowd of women, girls, in black and I rushed through them and heard a gasp and a whisper ‘teacher’ but I wasn’t stopping, shoot I had shorts on.

The broken molar hurt bad today and like before low grade fever, nausea and a generally icky wave had me down on the bed, an ibuprofen two hours ago is helping.  Is it time to have it extracted? Am I fighting an infection?  In Salalah two years ago I saw a dentist’s assistant who said a broken tooth was infected and gave me antibiotics and told me to come back in three days.  I took the antibiotics and felt better and didn’t return to that office though six months later the darn thing inflamed badly after taking too much ibuprofen so I had it pulled out on Koh Samui by a gentle and slightly feminine male dentist.  I know I won’t be there in six months this time.

I read the first sixty pages of ‘The Goldfinch’, a bomb goes off in a museum and the boy, Theo, survives, finding his way out with the famous painting in a bag. 

I think writing fiction is a lot harder than non-fiction.  Sure I see the parallel with this event and another more infamous global changing event, and people might be based on real life characters because who is good enough to create someone who resembles no one in real life?  That is good and who knows unless you ask the author.  The characters are a product of the collective perhaps.

9.9.14

A strange and welcoming pattern of late afternoon clouds brings today showers.  Nothing cools off with the changing skies but it is nice to look at through the window. 

I tried to confirm my flight today on the airline’s website but the website isn’t working.  I have phone numbers to call but I’d like to see someone in person but that would be accomplished only in their main office in the airport in Muscat.  The airline has no branch here. 

The broken molar doesn’t hurt today, it appears it is sharing the discomfort with a broken tooth on the other side of my mouth.  And what is going on with the indigestion?  I woke up with the burning, surprisingly the burning usually wakes me up during the middle of the night and then I take zantac.  Is all of this just normal aging?

Nothing on the television I am thankful for the laptop and Bob Dylan.  I took a zantac after my usual dinner produced that awful burning.  How can I be a better writer if I don’t go to school and have someone tell me how to be better? Sigh.  Let’s go to bed.