long days at the asylum

Itchy eyes, nothing on tv, nothing on the internet, I read my book, ‘The Sixth Extinction’ and almost begin to believe that life in the world of climate change will adapt and go on without worry, without any sudden catastrophic ending.  While we spew CO2 into the air ten times faster than a normal cycle, plants, animals, the oceans, the forests are changing along with the change, but are humans changing, nothing I’ve read says we have but we are because we are migratory self adapting creatures and like the planet’s natural inhabitants, we’ll survive for better or for worse.  

Of course I'm only half way through the book, maybe my opinion will change.

I’d like to shave the beard, I’d like to tame the itch, a colleague asked how long I was going to keep it.  If I am in Kandahar I might need to keep it on for two years!  Ha, should I keep it trimmed, ah, who knows. I told the boy students I was gonna let it grow to my waist. 

I looked at the European map again, hotel rooms in summer time are downright pricy, how about flying into Prague instead the big A, never been there, and then take a bus or train to Hamburg, which after much mental fluttering is better than small flat German towns which have nothing to offer other than their flatness.  I cannot book anything now until I know what I am doing with certainty.  In three weeks I will go to AD to get an Afghani visa, then I book a flight and then book rooms.  How about this airbnb?  The rooms look great, the prices are far less than the hotel rates and yet, the rooms are in someone’s homes and I don’t know about that at all.  Even if they’re cheaper, sometimes two thirds cheaper than a hotel room?  Ya, I know, but what a hotel gives is more freedom of movement.  In someone’s home I have to tiptoe, who knows who will be around the corner, in a hotel, it’s a hotel for crying out loud.

I can’t go to sleep at eight in the evening because I’ll be up at four in the morning and that makes for a long day at the asylum.  Even today I woke up at six and by two I wanted to take a nap at my desk. 

The Pakistani mechanic repaired something with the radiator, though he originally thought there was an issue with the thermostat, but he showed me, please come down he said, I got on my knees and looked up at the grill and he said it had shifted and that’s all the English he could muster so it’s repaired, I think, and it cost me $26.  For reasons I don’t fully understand a few months ago his license to work had been revoked because it turned out to be fake so this kind man was thrown in jail for a month until his paperwork was legitimized again and he had to find a new garage to work out of but he didn’t have a new garage when I took my car and myself to see him.  He was making repairs on two other vehicles right on the concrete in the open in front of a small room filled with auto parts.  If he wanted to get under the car he had to hoist one wheel at a time. 

Good lord and you wonder how in the world mankind has evolved.  Well, in some parts not too quickly.

So, the end of the month and the beginning of the new.  Tomorrow, if I don’t forget, we’ll do the novena again.  I want to do it, not because of what happened the last time I did it and I cannot prove nor do I wish to believe there was any connection with my reading of it with my son contacting me for the first time in eleven years, or being offered a job, or the great Earthquake, which is the farthest impossibility, even though one could say going to Nepal was the intended outcome, but then I’d say  what came of that other than to do what I could do and please don’t say people suffered so I could go and volunteer, that sounds like someone who once said God lets people suffer so we may help them, that’s absurd.  I don’t know if there is/was any connection with these events and the novena but I want to read it again because I liked it.  It was, I don’t know how to say this, a moment of peace in the early morning. 

the inevitability of suffering

He was one insignificant person in all this roaring whirl of India, going southward to he knew not what fate--Kim

Chapter 4 (2003)

It was very cold on the road to another train station I hoped would take me to Darjeeling. My wool blanket flapped helplessly during the taxi ride and all efforts to bundle up left me absurdly exposed to frigid air. In the struggle I saw Varanasi away from the old city had lost all  its color.  Even the bright morning sun could do nothing with a land shrouded in a thick blue haze.  The Ganga chai blues also reappeared, and on the edge of tension I was once more on a treacherous road in the backseat of the three-wheeler driven by the same driver who I tipped generously for taking me to Saranath and back yesterday. 

He didn’t fail me this time and here I sat in the second class waiting area, along with a few others who appeared as if they were used to waiting long periods of time.  One woman across the room stared at me as if she’d never seen a white man with a tattering beard and baseball cap eat two cashew cookies that within minutes hurt his stomach.  Maybe she eyed the bottle of water next to me; it must have looked pretty darn good to a thirsty woman who sat on a bench and didn’t know when she’d need to stand up again. 

I had been in India for a week and saw only one instance of the poverty I feared.  From my cold window seat of life being poor is, in the United States, a relative perception.  Everyone and everything looked poor but I knew the owner of the Ganga Fuji Home and Restaurant was anything but.  On the road through the blue slum everyone wore cheap plastic sandals or nothing, except for the men in green who were armed with nightsticks and revolvers.  All fourteen sitting in second class were barefoot.

Yesterday I walked around Varanasi’s commercial center, and saw a woman lying on the side of the road, bent up in positions you’d see in hospitals and nursing homes in the states.  She had a hand on her stomach and her mouth was ajar; her knees bent slightly, feet curled inward.  Her eyes fixed on anyone who dared a glance at this shell of a body. When I didn’t slow down, my conscience spun into overdrive, why am I not stopping?  Why isn’t anyone stopping?  What has suffering and poverty done to the minds of the people here?  Is it religious apathy?  Has there been an overwhelming sigh and acceptance to pain and suffering, all of it leading to death of this present life and of the inevitability of returning here for a better go at it?  Maybe it’s a caste thing not to help someone in need and I didn’t know enough to understand a legitimate reason for not stopping to help. I hoped and murmured a prayer that there were some Samaritans in the land of Thomas and the Buddha to help this soul. 

For the moment though, and on occasion for the next 36 hours, I wondered if I should have helped the dying woman with terror and defeat in her eyes.  It was an awful four seconds but an awakening to the reality there’s always someone around and in the corners of this country where someone needs help.  It can be overwhelming if you let it get to you; and to think I hadn’t even been to Calcutta, the epicenter and black hole of suffering.  I came to reconciliation and justified my non response response because it wasn’t my time to stop.  I gave the woman and the boy with the plastic green toy on a string a 100-rupee note when I finally left the steps of the Assi Ghat, not stopping to tell her how to spend it, and I didn’t look in her eyes.  On the north coast of Bali I gave a nice woman who had five kids and little else some paper, pencils, erasers and pencil sharpeners after an hour massage on the beach. I also purchased a bottle of coconut oil she made and left it somewhere.  There is no way anyone on earth can help everyone in need, and there should be no guilt in saying no to the majority who have their hands out if one can be charitable with at least one person everyday.  Jesus and the Buddha said people are going to suffer whether they believe or not in the messages of good news and joy.  If I give my change to a beggar on a street corner in Seattle or in an alley Delhi I have, for the briefest moment in time, reduced a need and alleviated emotional distress, perhaps for the both of us.

After an hour of waiting there was no absence of the traveling homeless who was always a shadow’s reach.  Four feet in front me an old woman reclined on a plastic bag half full of clothes, and looked back at me like it was her assignment to make sure I stayed put.  A big, glassy and gray moon of a marble orb stared at me, never blinking, never moving, fixed in perpetual disarray.  The woman’s gray socks barely stayed on her bare gray feet, giving her string-bean legs a dried-up snaky look.  She had a bottle of water on her left side, and leaned on it mindlessly.  Families and boxes waited patiently for their time to move.  I kept moving, from the platform to the second-class waiting room, where I considered a camp out if the 4506 didn’t show up soon. I started having big doubts about this leg of the trip that was going to take a bite out of the scheduled Calcutta plan I drew up, which I also started having doubts about going to as well, and I wasn’t sure why. 

Some things are not meant to be.  The feeling of doubt that grew while I waited in the cold room with the patient travelers was an instinct too loud to ignore.  And it wasn’t the fact that that train to Darjeeling came and went and I didn’t know it had come and gone two hours ago. I acted on the assumption the trains are either right on time or they’re late, and never early.  The train left platform one, instead of platform two, information I was pretty sure I had squared away.  I went back to the ticket window and the man said ‘you failed to hear the switch on the public address system’.  I’m sorry, I don’t speak Hindi and if the announcement had carried a simultaneous alert in English, it was garbled in electronic noise. 

At the hotel Surya, north of Varanasai’s main train station, I sipped masala tea in a grassy green and flowery courtyard with other wayward tourists, while I waited for another train, this one bound for Delhi. 

It took a lifetime to get the courage up for a close and personal encounter with India.  It was going to take a little more of it to get to Calcutta.  My reading of City of Joy helped me get a mental edge on what to expect upon arrival, but from what I’d seen and what I wanted to do now was taking me in a different direction and that was fine with me. 

The road between this morning’s station and the afternoon one revealed itself once the early hour blanket of thermo-filth lifted.  An afternoon of sunny mud in three shades of gray and black starkly contrasted with the garden I rested in only a few meters away.  Even the light where I sat had a balmy effect while I sipped tea and chewed on hot roti, eaten with the help of Carl, the curious chipmunk who was not afraid to climb up the table and join me.  The Nepali waiter came over to shoo Carl but I stopped him before he came too close.  In hindsight the loss of time and money from the aborted east-bound trip seemed irrelevant, perhaps because I still had time to travel and I didn’t want to go somewhere my conscience felt was not the time to do so.   Five days in a holy Hindu city by the holy river my conscience knows no words other than what the present time presents itself day by day. 

I was assigned to a berth with five westerners on the Shiv-Ganga to Delhi.  I assumed this would be an opportunity to be more engaged in entertainment and thought-provoking discourse than slumbering with five quiet South Koreans. The fact I did not have the cherished upper perch berth to look at everything more comfortably also put me right in the mix with the Aussie and UK travelers.

It was a challenge to write with the native tongue’s unique and sometimes indecipherable accents all around me.  The presence of the chai men, however was a nice distraction and a good mood setter; adorned in red, vigorously selling their chai, chai, chai garum, chai, chai, chai garum.  I sat amazed at their hard work and determined resolve to sell as much chai as possible in one of the world’s most cramped spaces on earth.  I assumed the more they sold the more they earned, no doubt like the vendor who sells hot dogs in a spacious ballpark. 

 I enjoy good conversation that is equally distributed. To my right three well-dressed Indian men in various pieces of leather, dress shirts and slightly wadded-up looking trousers conversed casually.  In the berth of all things western it is not lost on anyone we were all strangers, but chemistry, shared experience and a common tongue are key ingredients for sustainable and positive communication, but the most important of the three is just being able to get along.  That would be chemistry.  

Another man joined the threesome to my right.  They were definitely not as poor as the masses that lived in Benares.  I was glad to see at least a different fabric of economy represented in person on this trip.  The chai men in red, meanwhile, maintained an endless amount of zeal for seven hours. 

1)      The Australian man who was going to work for the Red Cross as a translator in Kashmir speaks fluent Sanskrit and Hindu.  An affable fellow and twenty years my younger, we shared with each other late in the night; he didn’t speak much when the air time was occupied by others.

2)      An English couple, one from Surrey, near Leatherhead.  A nice pair, both read hardback John King novels and and only conversed with each other. 

3)      An English fella and his girlfriend from sunny San Sebastian occupied the top berths; he wanted to remind me how to get them and I wasn’t interested in hearing because I was only glad to be on the train.  What was interesting enough to tune into was his story told to the other westerners about his girlfriend’s passport and bag, stolen on a train three days ago.  When I said I was American he made an incredibly feeble attempt to lambaste the states, but I’d have none of it.  All of his angry rhetoric, stereotypical accusations, and general ignorance of Americans,  I believe, was deflected and handled in a very tasteful and adult-like manner that would have made George Washington proud:  watch your words, pay attention to your tone, and stop assuming ‘you Americans’ is inclusive of all Americans, especially if you don’t even know any, and since I am the first Yank you’ve ever talked to, I’d recommend a trip to the big country before you blather on about that which you don’t know.  Oh yeah, and you’re a schmuck for blaming your girlfriend for your travel delays.  Ok, maybe our first president didn’t know Yiddish.  

nature's teet

Back in the suffocating heat for a week, it doesn’t feel like I was gone for three weeks until my reduced salary came in.  Was it worth it?  Would you do it again?  I hope I don’t have to make that decision again.  But for crying out loud, isn’t it time, this cosmological joke we’re all in is making the higher powers to be look pretty damn obsolete. 

It is hard to describe the attitude of the students with three weeks to go before final exams.  Yes, they are burned out, lethargic, apathy you can drink right from nature’s teet.  I got to find another room and show a movie. 

I have until 2 July to notify the people in Washington if I want to work for them in Albania.  Thanks, folks, for the heads up.  I’ll know by then if Kandahar is a bust, and why would it be a bust, no reason, it’s just a long time from now.  The heat is slowing everything down.

I have to get the car in for a check up.  When I returned to Buraimi last week it stalled in the mountains, I pushed it hard, four plus hours in the searing heat and then to climb was just too much, the engine just cut off.  In any case, I booked a few nights at the old Intercon in Al-Ain next week, the car has to work, or I can walk across.  We’ll see.

5.28.15

Thursday evening and it’s only 94 degrees outside, well that’s good to know.  I swept the balcony of its mounting shit and cigarettes butts and dead pigeon to one side and this morning in the pile two pigeon eggs.  They have no decency, so am I gonna chase them away?  Nah, I can watch the ugly birds come to life.  Welcome to this shithole. 

l told a colleague I had a new job in Afghanistan and he said, you will die, I quote Captain Hook, death is the last great adventure, tongue in cheek, it’s been calm in Kandahar for a while and I know people there and they say it’s ok, so I don’t fear.  I’m more likely to die in Baltimore or Brazil than in Afghanistan, right, and besides there’s an airport nearby and a two hour flight to Dubai if anyone behaves poorly.

I look forward to sleep tonight.  I long for the deep recesses of life with eyes closed and if I remain in the silent world for two days that would be a good thing.

5.29.15

I posted flower photos on that social media site today unconcerned who likes them or not. What else does one do with photos if they’re not printed or, or what, I don’t know. 

I tried to read Borges ‘Labyrinths’ and I don’t know where he is going, so I started the ‘The Sixth Extinction’ and that is interesting enough to fill the hours.  Imagine your time off in Kandahar, one isolated place to another, why don’t you try a place with parks and museums and things to do outside, I don’t know, is it a perpetual low grade kind of depression that keeps me in states of isolation I don’t know.

I’ve been looking at the European map, looking for inspiration, Hamburg, Oslo, a day or two in Wittenburg though I’d like to visit the door in two years when for the 500^th anniversary of the beginning of the Protestant Reformation and why pray tell do you want to visit this, because it is big, the moment the Catholic church was confronted, the moment in western history where everything changed. 

I went to Lulus at eight this morning otherwise I’ve been inside today, washing and ironing, reading, napping, on the net, not a whole lot.  And what is there to say here that hasn’t been said already.  Two weeks of classes to go, I need to, I should, prepare lessons for Sunday, next weekend I don’t expect trouble crossing the border though I’ll try to cross at the Shakla border, an eye scan I’m told is necessary, no biggie, scan away.  The beard itches and I keep forgetting to buy a beard brush, dobs of hydrocortisone help, temporarily. 

The moon rises, a full one in a week’s time and then one more and that’ll be it.  Can you look back for the past two years and come up with the best and worst moments?  Ya, give me some time, nothing good comes quickly, bad, the border absurdities jump out, teachers cheating worse than students comes quickly……..gee not much else.  What was good?  I don’t know, professionally it was a good two years, a year and half as coordinator was good experience.  Where would you really like to be, the number one place on your list of places to live.  San Francisco, probably the most expensive city too, gee John, you always think of places so out of reach. 

I want to do the novena again but I fear, what will happen, maybe nothing will happen, but I need to do it, the last six weeks packing, a lot of what I have I’ll take to Girgic’s office for staff to peruse, a can for donations, I don’t want the money, will be there. 

Mother pigeon sits on two eggs.  If I open the door for a smoke she takes off, what is this, there is no bond between mother and egg?

Kathmandu