there is no obligation

In most places around the world the end of the week would call for a night out, a libation to salute the survival of five days of nonsense to which I am paid.  In this desolate and forgotten border town I watched John Adams: ‘The tree of liberty must be refreshed on occasion with the blood of patriots and martyrs.’  Thomas Jefferson.  With the king on his perpetual deathbed rumors of insurrection swirl in dirty pools.  A free press this country has never seen and in the speculation spills out the next generation’s desire for reform.  But to what end, youthful imaginations are temporal, stability is not in their minds, only power and greed.  So, should I worry, no, there will be no Bastille Day here, rather the rabble of constituents who respected the king while disagreeing with him on issues we today scoff.  You want more than he has given you?  You want to secede, to join the country to your west, you want to break this country apart?  That would be interesting to see. 

A week back from Sri Lanka and how time demonstrated its relativity.  Can I say I had fun without guilt, I don’t know.  Today I was informed I wouldn’t be a coordinator for the next semester, something I am happy to relinquish.  One man now will coordinate the three levels and ha! God bless him, should I help the new super coordinator, we’ll see.  He is new to the nutty system and if he thinks he knows what is best, I’ll support him though I’ll know he’ll be wrong in any endeavor if he doesn’t listen to those who’ve been here for a while.  

Tomorrow I will go to mass but if there are long lines at the border I will not attempt to cross.  I will instead wash clothes and continue reading Doris Kearns Goodwin’s ‘No Ordinary Time’, which is good, as I expected it would be.  I will also most likely purchase a printer.  From the first day I arrived here I have been coordinator, which I enjoyed executing to the best of my ability.  Now that I am only an instructor I can teach and for the rest of the day work out of the grotto.  I look forward to this new role though I will probably intensify my job search though there is still no desire to attend the conference next in two weeks. 

A colleague in long standing with this country said the Dhofaris established a new tribe in defiance and will most likely contest the next king.  Gee why would I want to return to such instability aside from the mountains and oceans coming together in harmonic beauty, well, admiration.

2.28.15

I don’t know what I ate but I have to stay close to the loo and I am not hungry.  I bought a printer this morning for fifty bucks and set it up in the grotto.  Now that I’m no longer a coordinator I’ll focus on teaching alone and with that I’ll no longer do eight hour days at the ‘institution’.  I could pretty much be home for lunch every day, or I could take a snack and stay six hours, I don’t know, we’ll see.  For a year and a half I ate lunches at the canteen and while I never had a bad meal, ok, one suspect fish dish didn’t agree, it was the biggest meal and perhaps contributed to my borderline obesity.

In Sri Lanka Laxman told me in so many words he did not want me to ‘invest’ in his business anymore.  While I never felt obligated to help pay for screens or a dining room floor or a renovated kitchen, I did on my own initiative and they were grateful but I suspect he doesn’t trust me in the long term, that I am going to one day demand something in return. This is completely unfortunate because I have no intentions and I can’t change whatever is going on with his insecure thoughts but I’ll back off, who cares, all the furnishing I gave them, carpets, paintings, clothes pins, whatever, possessions mean nothing to me, money means nothing to me.  I have it, I don’t have it. 

Six years ago an Irish friend asked me if I wanted him to get the big cash back because he thought the transaction had no merit, that in the long run I’d be out.  I knew the moment I gave him the money, the intentions then were to build a round-house on his property, those intentions would never materialize.  The cash was a godsend, it paid for immediate bills as the construction of the eight room guesthouse continued.  I knew it all along.  So why not ask for the money back?  Because I don’t care.  I was a part of a huge transformation in this family’s fortunes and in the small community which continues to grow today.  I am fortunate to have been a part of it and to have contributed a small part.

But I am under no obligation to stay at the guesthouse though I could remind him of his own words, that room six is mine, completely and if his insensitive relations don’t build in front of it, it would still be a good place to see the end of life.

Accumulation is just inevitable, isn’t it.  Such choices I’ll have to make when I move again.  

post:  for days I've considered the wording of this blog and easy enough I could rewrite parts of it (which I did), or simply take it down.  I'm leaving it up, call it getting old and who gives a hoot what I think, but there is something good here, for someone not to want my money, I can save or I can find someone who I am naive enough to give, and that's alright. I'm in alignment with the Catholic Workers here, give without question. I have never second thought what I've given.  That's good.  Sometimes I've lost money on boneheaded purchases and felt sick to my stomach.  Not here.  Perhaps it's age again, who cares what I do with my money, perhaps it's the aura of inevitable.  In any case, it is what it is.  

post post:  in light of everything something really weird happened.  A coincidence that I cannot explain.  
We were discussing the cost of a roundhouse and he wrote an estimate based on supplies and labor on a napkin I still have stuck in a book in a cellar, a figure later on I understood to be a fifth of what it would actually cost to build, anyways, he wrote this figure on a napkin and handed it to me at the table in the dining room.  I had the cash in my pocket, the amount I was willing to give him and Jesus Lord of the Earth the cash was the exact amount he wrote on the napkin.  Lord Jesus who is #$% with me.  So, what to make of that I do not know.  It's been six years and where am I, no closer to what I thought would be a destiny written on the walls.