waiting to sleep

I came back on the four pm transport and went right to bed with Moby but the book was too heavy to hold and dozed for an hour.  I got nothing to do.

Is all this free time exactly what you’d like to have anywhere else yes, man, I tell ya, you could go take a walk now to the French bakery and then stop back at zoom and get your black tea honey and juice.  I could.  I should.  A walk to the bakery might be the same distance as Finest but in the opposite direction. 

I don’t know what’s going on in the eating department but I am just not feeling it, cooking, that is, even pancakes sounds laborious, and I finished the remains of crackers and biscuits and I don’t know.  It doesn’t matter where you are, john, you’ll find something to bum you out, I don’t agree with that, Nepal isn’t a place that bums me out now that I didn’t find what I wasn’t supposed to look for anyways.  Buraimi, the here and now, a move to Europe is it, it’s all I’m going with and I can hardly imagine it’ll happen.  I should be excited, if it happens, brother, going back to school at this age, this is what it will be:  a working holiday.  A completely different activity, a year off from teaching, it’ll be good for everyone. 

And if one year of higher ed is enough where will I go.  I don’t know.  The last day of the month is here and it was a damn long one if you ask though the sky is a brilliant blue and light cotton clouds drift past another day over the ever beleaguered nation.

8:10pm—pancakes it was.  A pattern here, last night’s dinner was breakfast as well.  Tomorrow?  Well I’m outta juice and the bananas are getting to the point I can’t eat them, I could bake with them soon or now if there were any baking accoutrements to produce such palatal pleasantries which there aren’t. What to do.  Less than a month is beginning to feel like a really slow crawl and I shame myself for not getting on the treadmill again.  There is no excuse.

Ishmael’s encounter with the Harpooner in bed was surprisingly funny and easy to envision.  And this chapter it read fast like the author whose name I haven’t been able to remember all day….

Thomas Pynchon

So, that’s it today.  Maybe I’ll take all my medicine, watch a movie I have seen a hundred times and wait to sleep.  It’s that kind of place.

eating wallows

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0SUCWB_0bqw

I guess it’s called space ambient.  Well, it works when there is stuff that needs attention.  How?  Everything is put into a queue and then each item of business is taken care of.  Space music has to be relative, right?  It clears and settles the mind at the moment and then I see ok, let’s do this, this can wait and voila!  I am finished. 

Even though departure plans will pick up I’m sure in a few weeks I’ll start making a visit here and there, it feels today as if I am never leaving this place.  Would that be a symptom of cabin fever?  Transport comes in two and half hours.

I took a Xanax a few minutes ago and if I remember I’ll take a midday one and then one tonight.  I’d like to see if somehow it removes anxiety and lets me be the best I can be under the circumstances and i don't see anxiety among the impoverished displaced could be ok, but if it doesn’t and it leaves me drowsy there’s nowhere to lay down at the campus.  I’m feeling drowsy right now and I no longer like this spacey ambience.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oqLvtlAK81E

This is a little better.   Ok, let’s do something. 

7:22pm—In the office I had a large chocolate donut and an Americano and I just barely made it back to the cloister four hours later.  Good heavens what’s going on with those two?  So now I should eat but I don’t feel like eating.  A bowl of cereal?  A bowl of Heinz beef and veggie stew, I don’t know but I feel like cheerios and a banana.  Some dinner, eh?  No pancakes?  No.  French toast?  No.  Pasta?  Maybe tomorrow.  There’s nothing else.  I do have two cans of corn.  What can I do with these?  Buy some potatoes, heavy milk, I’ll see what’s missing online.  An onion, pork sausage would be nice but, minced meat would be nice but…We’ll see, a veggie chowder is very doable.  I think.

How was the cheerios and a banana?  It was good.  A cup of tea now?  With biscuits?  Will it be enough for the day? Then I’ll eat something else please.

One class today.  Two students came by to see their marks, they thought they would be in the nineties.  Confident but…And another student came into take the final exam.  he passed the class.  And that was it.  One present student today said the class is boring we are going so slow.  Six pages a week.  Six pages 4.5 hours.  The difference between the highest and lowest mark for the last test is 57 to 91.  I don’t know.  I do seem to be going faster but I don’t have additional resources unless I go with the musical exercise starring Tevya. 

Listening Exercise ‘Conditionals’

1.  Record how many times the man says the words ‘If’ and ‘I’d’

I have to think of more questions. 

Ok Moby, I'm ready

strike out and don’t look for answers

absorb without prejudice and never conclude

such dogmas eventually smell

Permanence impermanence

it’s all a crapshoot isn’t it, some

are lucky some are not, most half and half

it’s how it is ya know what I mean

jelly bean?

there’s no measured difference between the past present and future except an action most of the time but you never see yet alone think about it as obnoxiously as I do.

What tool do you use to measure the moment from the past to the present, it’s faster than the speed of light, it’s immeasurable, and it’s the same when the present becomes the future, the three cases of time always move as one and all are in sync with each other until you die or you are mentally ill or something hard falls on your head.

I’m waiting for the right time and I hope it’s soon, to go out and get milk and cigarettes and maybe we’ll see, maybe walk down the road to visit a pharmacist, maybe not, we’ll see.  I think one of everything at night keeps me asleep better.  That being two synthetics and one organic last night and I slept without disruption.

It was a nice morning to walk out and shop for medicine.  The fruit stands look good with mangos, big red cherries, apricots, peaches and the usual.  I bought four safe bananas though the cherries looked good.  And there is no shame in using what you need to get you through the day.  I am my own best doctor and I know not to take a couple of Iranian tramadol an hour or two before I go to the university.  I have no justification for what I’d do or not do.  And it is a relief to find this and Xanax available down the street.  Do I really need to see a doctor to get this in the US?  A man’s character is measured by a piece of paper with the doctor’s name on it.  I will tell you of my character now, buddy, transport leaves in an hour.

2:58pm—At the office the next transport is in an hour and I plan to be on it though my boss is sitting at his desk next to mine.  When did he arrive?  I don’t know, but I know when I arrived and now that what I wanted to do is done what is keeping me here, a student wandering in to see his marks, I’ve been here for three hours and so far no one has stopped by.  What else can I do now to stay awake.  A chocolate donut sounds really good now.

5:32pm—I didn’t eat a donut I returned to the cloister and had a cup of tea, a sugary biscuit and finished h is for hawk.  An interesting read.  And in sitting next to the window on this delightful afternoon in Kabul I started Melville’s Moby Dick.  He wrote it in 1850.  He was 31. 

I felt a little guilty slipping out after four hours but tomorrow I’ll stay longer.  As for the day after that, yikes, I’ll be bringing Moby with me for sure.

And so it goes the eternal desire to be free from myself and everything else around me.  It is no easy task and why would anyone wish to be free from themselves if you’re doing alright with yourself I understand there’s no need but when you live alone for a long time you’re kinda looking for other things to do.  Trust me I understand why people who have at least one person around them you’ll never come to such thoughts and ideas but to live alone a long time sometimes needs a push here or there into illusions of empty air.   How many Xanax boxes did you buy?  One, and I haven’t opened it yet.  I am still unsure about their use during the daytime.  I don’t want to be drowsy.  I think they help me sleep and I don’t wake up drowsy so it must be ok to take one to three during the day, which is how it is prescribed ok, it’s not a drowsy medicine.  I’ll take one now, maybe two? 

The last half hour of sunlight, golden leaves and light with soft winds and a peacock calls in the distance.  How will I use my time tonight I’d like to know but I don’t know.  

 

8:50pm—I’d like to sleep now but it’s too early.  I’d like to read a chapter of Melville but I’m too tired.  Two lame tramadol and a Xanax and a little bit of organic medicine throughout the later afternoon-evening has probably contributed to my fatigue but a cup of green tea ought not to interfere.

The Leuven plan is much easier now I don’t have to travel to deliver the visa pile.  I’m just wondering about them fingerprints. 

oranges in season

After I ate two grilled cheese sandwiches I stepped outside on the terrace with a blue camel and the remains of yesterday’s diet coke and looked up at my patch of sky and there were four orange planets.  I don’t know which ones they could be, I don’t know which direction I was looking in, it was just a nice patch of evening sky with four orange planets.

With my two back to back classes finished I have one class.  That means I have for the next two weeks an enormous amount of time on my hands. 

I won’t get up to see any sunrises here, either.  Four fifteen am now?  Earlier?  It’s an ungodly time to bring light so early.

I guess farmers got no choice, right?  They go to bed around six in the evening? 

This is a cloistered life, living in Kabul that is. Another embassy warning of thugs causing chaos for all things foreign, I was gonna take a walk to the pharmacy when I got back to the cloisters but decided not to.  A seed of terror keeps me cloistered and I don’t like it at all. 

I suppose the best time to go out is at sunset when most are busy thinking about prayer or something to eat or drink, or are engaged in some ancient tradition I am a lesser distraction because everyone is consumed with their own day at that moment.  The sunset.

Or I’ll go tomorrow morning in broad daylight where I can be seen and there’ll be many witnesses to the thugs who tried to force me into a car with a fight of course but none of them will intervene and help me?  Will they just stand around?  Take refuge in your community.

My refuge is dead quiet at nine twenty in the evening.  At this time a week ago the professor from HK would be chopping a vegetable with the dullest knife in the solar system and I’m glad that sound is no longer a possibility. 

I’m not gonna plan anything tomorrow,  I’ll go to the campus for lunch and hang out in the office until it is time to return early and then it will be the next day. 

June tenth will change with the class I’m taking from another teacher.  I will have to be sharper than the dullest knife in the solar system with an inherited bunch toefl students. 

The air conditioner above me outside kicks on and off and I try some old hippy music to end the silence and I turn it low, and?  Is there anything left to be said today?  Everything today has left me feeling Helpless help-less.