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.