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.