The Things We Know

Fall

2010-10-12T02:08:00.000-04:00

October is just over a week old, and the leaves are beginning to turn. I first saw significant amounts of warm colors on the trees along 116^th, and have begun now to notice the change everywhere. This is my first fall in three years, the last of the seasons I was able to experience after more than two years in the monotonous climate of Western Africa, where, always, it is hot; sometimes it rains.

There were many things I missed when I was abroad, comprising all categories of cravings, from the material (albums, books) to the gustatory (artichokes! Subway!) to the spiritual (less gris-gris) to the climatic (snow, different colored leaves). Each yearning had its own level of virtue.

I left Africa in December, dreaming with almost masochistic anticipation of the cold of a Midwest winter, the pure white glint of new snow. I longed to see a landscape muted by white, mounded and rolling, instead of the scarred look of burnt-out cornfields, or the stubble of felled plantations. Even the grease-spotted asphalt of the airport parking garage, the loops and lanes of the highways, were to me like the brush strokes of a master painter.

Winter came and went, the first Christmas back. The New Year in Chicago; a homemade birthday cake in February. Then spring, and the return of the twins from university, the purchase of a quality badminton set. Horseshoes and bocce and all the wonderful lawn games warm weather permits. The mowing of a real lawn with a real lawn mower. Then summer, with its endless sunshine, evening bonfires, tennis matches, and dips in the pool. Fishing in retention ponds and drinking too much beer.

Now, finally, it's fall. The best smelling season. I was worried when September came and the leaves stayed green. After missing the season for three years, I'd forgotten entirely when and what was supposed to happen. But now they're changing, and the stores are selling pumpkins by the ton, and I've been eating caramel apples by the dozens. High schools and universities are holding their homecomings, shy teenagers asking shy teenagers to dinners and dances, twentysomethings sneaking drinks before games. There is reverence and revelry in the air. A calm grasp for the joy of harvest and bounty, before the sobering chill of All Saints Day, the cold of November leading us into winter. I am waiting, patiently, watching the leaves as they fall.

Georgie Was a Friend of Mine

2010-04-18T17:54:00.003-04:00

The drives to the Unisys building from our home in Elgin took approximately twenty-five minutes. It was an agonizing half-hour, but it beat waiting at home for Dad to come back, because then the fun would be delayed twice as long. I remember very little from the drives except the giggly anticipation, the way the evening twilight blended with the streetlights to make everything look exotic, like we'd done nothing before as interesting as this in Carol Stream, Illinois. And I don't remember anything about the Unisys building, really, except the valet-like driveway before the front doors, and the lobby, which I remember being enormous, though I know now that at eight years old I thought so many things were. Gaetano and I spent those tense moments in the lobby pulling on Dad's wrists, begging to know how much longer we'd have to wait, while Dad watched people come out of doors and elevators. And eventually one or the other would open and a tall man with large glasses and a moustache like a dust broom would step out, and my brother and I would terrorize him for hugs while Dad told him how glad he was to see him; George was in town.

Dad and George met in college in New York in the seventies, and had remained great friends ever since, even after my father left New York to settle down in suburban Illinois. George was a groomsman at my parents' wedding. He worked for a company called Unisys, and I never figured out whatever it was he did, but occasionally the company would send him to their offices in Carol Stream, not far at all from our house, where George would stay, under my parents', and eventually their children's, insistence. I don't remember the first time I met George, or getting to know him or anything like that. His visits, as eventful and thrilling as they were, seemed like natural and essential pieces of a childhood.

Gaetano and I adored George for many reasons: with every visit, our toy collection, specifically in the Lego sub-category, would increase dramatically; he would spend a large portion of his time in Illinois on the floor of the living room--a room vast and cavernous, a room suited to space-necessary tasks--helping us put together the new Lego sets he had brought us (indeed, our devotion to George was evidenced by the meticulous care with which we preserved the state of the pirate ships he helped us snap together on one visit, so that we could show him on his next just how much we loved them and that those sets were probably the best presents we'd ever received); and he would speak to us, while studying the how-to-build-'em guides, or while telling us of all the things he'd seen at FAO Schwarz when he'd been shopping for our presents, as though we were no less than two of his best friends in the world, albeit probably the youngest. I never realized until today, reminiscing about his visits, how much influence his manner has had on the way I interact with children now that I, too, am an adult.

I was thinking about his visits because, while our family has aged and we no longer collect Legos, or live in Illinois, and no talk about seeing George again had come up for probably many years, we were informed yesterday that all the times with him have been had; George was dead.

He died of a heart attack. He was sixty. Dad had talked to him only three weeks ago. George's ex-girlfriend Alice called us yesterday to give us the news. Even she had heard about it too late. His funeral had already been held; he is buried now somewhere in a cemetery in Brooklyn. My brother just called and I told him what had happened. We shared a silence over the phone that was unique between us. Our younger siblings never really knew George; we had moved to Indianapolis by the time they were old enough to buy Legos for, and George's company had no offices near us to visit. I guess that makes me and Gaetano pretty lucky. George was the kind of friend every child should have. And for that alone, if nothing else, he was a great man.

The Water Under the Bridge

2010-03-23T21:52:00.003-04:00

Freshman year of college, at nights during the warm months when I couldn't sleep, I'd change into shorts and a long-sleeve t-shirt and go running. I'd run straight out the dorm and down Neeley toward the White River, and then I'd run along the path that led past the river, along the railroad tracks, to the south side of town. I'd race the trains as they came along, or jump in fright at the first bark of a dog. Some nights--at midnight, three a.m., whenever--I'd run as far as the graffiti murals the city had sponsored on the concrete walls abutting the path, on the stretch of the track just past the bridge, where once during the spring the area was so flooded Travis and I had to turn back; the water was up to our hips. I stopped running so late, eventually, after several people were murdered that year.

Quoi?

2010-03-09T20:45:00.002-05:00

Parfois je ne sais meme pas quoi dire. Vous qui savez le francais, je vous demande pardon pour la manque d'accents. Les claviers anglais, ni l'internet, ne me permettent pas m'exprimer en cette langue avec tout soin. Ce soir j'ecris en francais afin de me permettre vous communiquer sans me repeter. J'ai l'habitude d'etre pedant dans mes articles, de donner mon avis comme ce l'est le loi. Je meme comprends pourquoi mes amis me regarde comme con arrogant. Alors, je vois qu'on n'avance pas. Cette explication est inutile. Comme toutes les miennes.

Je viens de regarder "Le Dernier Metro," un film de Francois Truffaut, qui l'a mis en scene. Et pour terminer la nuit, pour me guider au sommeil tranquille, je vais regarder les particularites bonus, les commentaires, les documentaires, etc. Parce que chaque nuit je dors avec difficulte. La plupart je m'occupe des pensees de la mort, la fin de la vie, le but de l'existence. C'est stupide, a mon age, d'etre paralyse par ces choses abstraites, mais je ne peux pas les nier. Elles sont insistente. Je suis embarasse. Voila pourquoi j'en ecris en francais; mais je ne sais pas pourquoi je m'inquiete. Il est sur que presque personne ne lit ce blog. C'est encore une demonstration de mon arrogance a penser que mes occupations de la tete peuvent vous interesser. Je parle en desordre.

Je m'inquiete toujours de quelque chose: ma sante, ma forme, mon intelligence, ma personalite. Qui suis-je? Que fais-je afin d'ameliorer le monde? D'aider quelqu'un? J'avais essayer plusieurs fois a repondre a ces questions, mais je n'ai aucune reponse. Alors, je termine. Excusez-moi cette parole. Je le sais bien que c'est pretentieuse. Mais, quoi faire?

Kill the Humorless!

2010-01-25T20:52:00.003-05:00

There was a while there where I was known for being a real asshole. Oh, not everybody thought that. But a good enough number of folks did that it worried me. And they would tell me this to my face. "Am I really an asshole, like all these jackasses have been saying?" I'd ask. My comrades would tilt their heads slightly and extend, palm up, a hand, to indicate to me just how fucking obvious it was. "That is shocking," I'd say, "just shocking."

I don't mind being considered an asshole, but I do mind being considered an asshole when I have no conception that I am behaving as one. I've always felt like I've had a pretty good prismatic view of the colors of my personality; if there's one thing I dislike about myself, it's that I feel painfully self-aware, second-guessing nearly every thought or emotion. Generally, I feel like I know when I'm being an asshole. So, having a reputation for being one was something I couldn't fathom.

The result of this revelation, coupled with self-doubt following breakup desiderata, was that I felt much like Hal Incandenza toward the end of Infinite Jest, when he loses total control of his facial expressions and, eventually, his abilities to communicate in any form. People look at Hal, who is seriously troubled by a friend's forehead predicament, and ask him what he thinks is so goddamn funny. Today at work, actually, I was unusually pissed off, yet several people, when passing by, asked why I was so goddamn giggly this morning. This only increased my frustration; I wanted to break a mop handle over the backs of the humorless.

Back when this started, though, the direct result of the asshole+desiderata emotional state was that many times when speaking seriously with someone (admittedly, due to drunkenness, those times were rare) I would spend twice as much time assuring them that what I was saying was sincere than I spent saying the sincere things. And the Chinese Handcuffs feeling of it all was that the more I assured them I was totally and completely unironic at the moment, the less assured I was that they believed me. It always reminded me of the time I told a fantastically true story to my aunt, prefacing it with the comment, "This story is absolutely fucking true," which prompted her to scoff and say, "Well, now I don't believe you." And she didn't.

Why The World Needs Superman

2010-01-07T14:13:00.006-05:00

It's been snowing all day, and nobody in the family is working. We've rearranged the living room furniture and, most importantly, taken out the old bulky speaker system and replaced it with a compact Bose version. New settings means we must sit in them; new speakers means we must listen to them. And so we shall. All we need is the right film.

Nick and I turn the volume as high as it goes during the scene in Superman Returns when Clark Kent, who has just returned to the Daily Planet offices, rushes to the street ripping off his shirt to go save the damaged airplane/space shuttle combo--which said airplane/shuttle contains, conveniently enough, Lois Lane.

The score is marvellous. I've never been a big Superman fan, but John Williams' Superman theme is astounding, especially when coupled with the sight of the Man of Steel gently placing a de-winged, flaming wreck of a plane on the pitcher's mound at Metropolis stadium. Nick had goosebumps; I had tears in my eyes. Welcome back, Kal-el.

Of course, now that we've watched Superman Returns, we're obliged to continue the streak. Next will be Spiderman 2, because it's the best of the three. Then probably X-Men 2. I would be up for some Batman, obviously, though I'm not sure which one to pick; they're all just so good. Through every one of these films I'll be cheering and shouting and cringing, because I love them.

During a job interview last week I was asked why I joined the Peace Corps. Because of Batman, I said. Because, as naive and idealistic and just plain silly it sounds, the Peace Corps was my way of being a superhero. I'm already embarrassed that I wrote that, but I'll man up and let you ridicule me. It's what Samurai Jack would do.

And maybe my military friend(s) will scoff, but I bet you that, at least subconsciously, Superman was part of the reason they decided to serve the country in that particular idiom.

Sure, on both sides of the spectrum, there are distinguished histories and inspirational stories--true ones--that more directly influence a person's choice on how they serve their country. That's why the Peace Corps has such cool looking propaganda posters; that's why we have the Military Channel. But reality can only take us so far.

Modern Americans don't have anything they would consider mythology (outside of their religion). The story of the fishes and loaves is as real to certain people as the story of Prometheus was to the Greeks. And I like both stories, I really do, but that doesn't necessitate I be a Christian any more than I be a pagan in the Ancient Greek tradition.

I am no longer a Catholic (I'm not even a Christian anymore) but I really appreciate being brought up as one. I like the values of the system, the morals, the call for sacrifice as a means of both personal and public redemption. The problem with religion, though, is morons. So I've distanced myself.

However, I wonder now, as I think into the future, a future I hope to be replete with a large and boisterous brood of offspring, how will I raise my kids with those kinds of values but still keep them out of the clutches of people who think Leviticus 18:22 is the most important rule in the Old Testament? The answer, as I see it, is comic books.

Comic books are modern America's mythology. And it's a beautifully serpentine system of mythology, because everyone living at the time of this mythology knows it to be false; but that doesn't stop people from believing in it.

That last sentence is not a paradox. I don't really feel eloquent enough to explain it, so I'm going to rely on reader identification. I mean, I know Batman isn't real, Superman isn't real, Spiderman isn't real, but because they stand for everything worth standing for in this real life, they are just as important to me as policemen, firemen, Marines, and development workers.

This is especially apropos for little kids. A child might not grasp the gravity of the situation in Sudan, or of people blowing up planes, or of Robert Mugabe being a fucking maniac. They know that evil exists in the world, but that evil is not palpable until it is distilled into the Green Goblin or Lex Luthor. And all the people who sweat and struggle and die to combat the evil in the world are in no way slighted by being represented to a child in distilled form as a comic book superhero.

I am not a comics scholar, but I know that one of Superman's biggest roles in his early years was as a seeker-outer and ultimate-punisher of Nazis. Same with Captain America (why do you think he was even created?). Same with any number of superheroes who have been remembered or forgotten. Thanks to them (and to Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, and any cartoon character in a propaganda film) war bonds were bought, national rations were strictly followed--and people signed up to fight. As wars ended and comics evolved, evil villains went from Nazis to moronic hoodlums to the Joker. The superhero genre became more symbolic. More mythic. More capable of tackling the big theme of good v. evil. In this way, more lasting. Nazis die. The Joker can live forever.

One of the things that pained me while I was in Togo was the lack of a disseminated mythology. Being in Kabye country, I was interested in their creation myths, in whatever stories they might have that would help explain who and why they are. Whenever I asked after these stories, though, all I got were Bible chapters.

These stories do exist, but none of the youth know them, and few of the old. This frustrated me so much because cultural identity (usually linked to cultural pride) is essential for a people's development. Many folks I spoke with, young and old, held such a sense of shame of being Togolese that they gave up believing they were capable of being any different. Imagine the cultural divide. I come from the land of Paul Bunyan, Pecos Bill, Daredevil, and the Batman. Thanks to them, I believe I can do anything.

The fact is, we need mythology. We need it to tell us, unequivocally, what we are capable of. Real life has so many shades of grey that it is absolutely necessary to distinguish between good and evil, right and wrong, in strictly monochromatic terms. Religion can't satisfy those needs; if Muslims are going to hell according to Christians, and Christians are going to hell according to Muslims, we have a very confusing situation. But the Joker will always be evil. Lex Luthor will always have an ulterior motive. And Superman and Batman will always do what they've done best--stand for truth, justice, and liberty, and inspire people to do the same.

On How I Don't Write Letters, Before Devolving into an Assortment of Subjects, None of Which Offer a Unifying Theme or Satisfying Conclusion

2009-12-14T03:13:00.005-05:00

Oh, I'm terrible at keeping in touch. I remember before I left thinking that I was going to write to friends and family all the time, multiple letters a week, a day even. I remember making that promise, too, to several people. I didn't keep the promise. My parents didn't care, though. The Dudes didn't care. I don't think Laura cared too much either, though she did always say it was nice to see those envelopes, rare as they were, fingerprinted with dirt. Vina and I don't ever really need to talk; we always seem to understand each other.

Andy and I talk about girls still, though at our age I suppose we should start to say 'women.' Same subject with Tim and Justin and Mike and my brother. Sometimes it makes me feel immature. I'm not sure how to get over that, though, so I just keep plugging along.

The first night back I couldn't sleep. I was up all night, wandering around the house, wanting desperately to go into the spare bedroom and sift through all the drawers, find out what I'd left behind that I'd forgotten. I finally fell asleep the next morning around nine, on the couch, a dog nearby. I woke up an hour later, with no idea who or where I was. Dad said I called for him, though; I think it was just instinct. I poured myself a glass of juice, my hand shaking the entire time.

I've been going to bed late lately. Tonight I haven't gone to bed at all. Tim lent me a Batman comic, The Dark Knight Returns, one of those Frank Miller's from the mid-80s. For some reason it made me think of death. I tried to turn out the light and sleep but the sky was the brown of a decaying orange and my cat was staring at me instead of sleeping, the little light of the night catching and turning green in her eyes. I was terrified by it. I could feel a panic attack coming. I've been able to control them for a long time now, haven't had one as potent as I used to when I was a kid. As soon as I feel one coming I block all opportunities for it to take hold. Sometimes this means listening to music, which I can do in the dark, with my eyes closed, until I fall asleep. Sometimes this means staying up all night to find other distractions. Maybe when I'm done here I'll make some pancakes.

I saw Chris the other day, which was nice. I'd forgotten how much fun it is to hang out with people who love literature. I mean, really love the stuff. Not just people who read and enjoy and recommend, but people for whom writing has serious weight, who sigh at the good lines, who laugh in admiration at the better ones. We talked about flash fiction, publishing. We drank beer, ate lunch. We watched Muppet videos.

Two days after my return Andy and Justin and I drove ten hours to Philadelphia to visit Vina. We were there too long, and Vina was busy with classes, but we had a great time. The first night, at a hookah bar, I met a Moroccan waitress, and we talked to each other in French, over the heads of my friends. While Vina was in class, the three of us went to Independence Hall, where the Founding Fathers came up with and signed the Constitution of the United States. The tour guide spoke of how Lincoln had stopped in Philadelphia in 1861, on his way to assume the presidency. He quoted Lincoln from memory, something about the importance of the Union, the solemnity of the signing of two of the world's most influential documents, and I began to cry. After the guide liberated us, we went into another building where we saw one of the original printed copies of the Declaration of Independence, and another of the Constitution. I squeezed in front of the woman taking no-flash photos, and in the low light of the display, found my favorite lines:

"We, therefore, the Representatives of the united States of America, in General Congress, Assembled, appealing to the Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitude of our intentions, do, in the Name, and by Authority of the good People of these Colonies, solemnly publish and declare, That these United Colonies are, and of Right ought to be Free and Independent States.... [W]e mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor."

Again, I cried. And then I had one of those moments, one of those beautiful moments when you step outside of yourself and realize how wonderful everything is, when I felt so damn welcomed, so perfectly right to be back in my country. It was a good way to come home, I felt.

A Sun Came

2009-12-09T15:26:00.009-05:00

Before leaving Togo, I sat down with the medical officer to go over some final paperwork, discuss the voucher system for getting my teeth cleaned, etc. I still had a few questions that went unanswered during my final medical exam a few months before. That exam was done by a Nicaraguan woman the Peace Corps kind of just hired as a temp while the PCMO was on vacation. She could do the technical stuff, but when it came time to talk about the depression and the insomnia, I got the feeling she wanted nothing less than to talk about something as scary as emotions.

So I asked the PCMO about the depression and the insomnia, even though then, two days before my departure, they were no longer problems. She said those are pretty standard pre-au revoir symptoms. Though, she said, if they recurred when I returned to the States, looking up members of a Returned Peace Corps Volunteer network could help, to have somebody to talk to, or at least to get contacts of other people who are good to talk to when you get back home and feel like a stranger in your own country.

No thanks, I told her. I didn’t exactly have the greatest time for the past two years. I think the last thing I’d want to do is talk to somebody who probably thinks Peace Corps service was the pinnacle of their young adulthood, if not their entire life up to date. I don’t regret doing the Peace Corps, but I sure as hell don’t want it to define me. It is something I did because of who I am. It is not who I am. That may seem like a thin line, but it’s a significant distinction.

I was speaking with a volunteer once who asked me if I could ever imagine marrying someone who had never been in the Peace Corps. The guy’s a great volunteer, and fairly intelligent, but that’s one of the dumbest questions I’ve ever heard. Just because someone didn’t serve in Togo or some other shitty place doesn’t mean they’re not interesting.

I told all this to the PCMO, about how I kind of worried about this indifference I have to the past two years of my life (when I say indifference, I mean to say that I’m glad I did it, even though I didn’t exactly enjoy it, but I’ll never do it again; and I don’t mean to imply that being in Africa had anything to do with it, so those of you inclined to racist inferences can just shut the fuck up; you know who you are) and the PCMO said that, well, maybe re-integration won’t be as much a problem for me as it is for others. The ones that have the hardest time, she said, are the ones that just can’t get over the fact that they were volunteers. Those poor bastards, I said. Yeah, she said, tell me about it.

- -

Halfway across the Atlantic Ocean, four hours into an eight hour flight, the captain puts the fasten seat belt sign back on and the flight attendant gets on the intercom to say, in three languages, that we’ll be hitting some bitchin’ turbulence, and that we are strongly advised to fasten our seatbelts and not walk around the goddamn cabin, s’il vous plaît. The woman in the seat next to me, a Moroccan who has been living in Boston for the past fifteen or twenty years, is terrified. She’s been nervous the entire flight, but now she’s just kind of silently flipping out beside me, and I do my best to calm her down. It’s all that strong ocean air, I tell her. We’re at the crossroads of the west-bound currents and the east-bound currents, it’s always really bumpy this far away from land. I don't know if this is true, but she stops shaking, at least, so I put my headphones back on and try to close my eyes, because now, thanks to her, I’m freaking out. Two years, I think, of riding in overloaded, poorly maintained bush taxis on shitty roads—including that time the brakes went out coming down the mountain from Kara—and this is what finally gets me. No, I tell myself. I deserve, if nothing else, to see my brother and sister. Whatever is in charge of the universe won’t cheat me of that.

Now, I have a firm belief that God, in whatever form he may take, does not listen to human prayers. I don’t believe in predestination, in fate or kismet, and I don’t believe that he will save anybody from death, no matter how good that person is. We are, as individuals, far too insignificant to have any pull with the big guy. But since I am a hypocrite, when faced with the fear that my life is in danger I raise my spiritual voice. Like that time I biked eighteen kilometers in the rain, with lightning striking along the roadside. Like right now on this airplane, with a Moroccan woman convulsing beside me.

We make it, though, alive, to JFK. I wait for about four hours at two different bars, drinking inordinately expensive beers. Finally it’s time for the plane home, and I get on, and now I’m the one shaking, but with excitement. Because after two years and three months; after bush taxis and failed projects and a feeling of complete social impotence; after bribes and poverty and that one time I got stopped by the police with JT; after a project I paid for and never saw; after all those sorcery deaths; after two terrifying flights to get off that continent; I will be home. We take off and level off and I spread out on the seat next to me and sleep away the last three hours of this long exile.

- -

The airport was clean and comfortably empty and just the right kind of cold. The terminal was a long tall-ceilinged hallway with large glass walls looking out on the empty boarding alleys folded up like accordions. The Indianapolis airport had been remodeled since I'd left. I didn't recognize anything unique, anything outside of the generic airportness of the place, to tell me that I was Home. A security guard was seated at a podium-type desk at the point of no return for arrivals, a tall black man with a clean navy blue sweater, and I had the desire to walk up to him like a little nine-year old and tell him, just to keep him up to date, that I'd been gone for two years and now was home. In the week that I've been home, I've been getting this urge a lot.

I was trying to take everything in, doing my best to not miss a single detail, which meant I missed it all, because suddenly, as the hallway I was in zeroed down to an arched opening leading to some kind of massive lounge, the woman standing next to the potted tree shouted, "Oh my God, it's him, I hardly noticed him!" Hello, Momma. Nick ran at me like a Welshman. Dad had his camera out and snapped photos. Something hugged me around the middle, and I looked down to find Anna, my adorably short sister. Waiting behind them in a polite line, with the kinds of smiles people wear when they don't want to appear too happy, but, of course, actually are, were four of my best friends, Justin, Mike, Andy, and Tim. I was ecstatic. But, strangely, I was remarkably calm. In every daydream about my homecoming, I imagined myself blinded with tears (of joy). I don't know if it was the fatigue of travel, or simply the great sigh of relief of being home, but instead of tears I just felt exhausted, immeasurably content, and, actually, a little hungry. So when Dad put down the camera and pulled a sack full of Arby's roast beef sandwiches out of his coat, everything was fine.

The Land Where They Let the Children Cry

2009-11-16T16:11:00.000-05:00

*I like the title game; you guys did a good job last time; Newg was remarkably swift with his response. So I ask again, where does this week’s title come from? Hint: it’s not a film. Also, quick note: I was writing this on the stoop when the last paragraph actually happened. It is not a device; those were my thoughts when I heard the notes rise to my ears.

It makes me laugh, sometimes, hearing the children cry. Especially the young ones, the under-fives, the ones who speak in squeaky voices, with no conception of grammar. It’s even better when there’s more than one and their voices chorus and Doppler, wobbling in and around each other, like the sound of a tuned guitar string ringing over that of an un-tuned one. I like this sound, this shrieking choir; I smile whenever I hear it.

Because the kids are young, malleable, prone to eating dirt and running into walls, and usually (at least the ones I’m around) well cared for by their families, I know when they cry that nothing, really, is all that wrong. A scraped knee, perhaps, or porridge for dinner instead of rice. At the worst, the kid’s bit his own tongue, or peed his pants, or was pushed by another crier (who, though in tears him/herself, is automatically disqualified for cuteness due this habit of pushing other children to the point of tears).

I like the way these kids cry because, really, it’s just so honest. I know that whatever they’re crying about isn’t a big deal; I also know, and this is what makes it so damn poignant for me, that these kids, these little children—who will remember probably nothing before their fourth birthday, who have absolutely no frame of reference, who are absolutely and excusably naïve—they believe that whatever hazard has shown itself (including, but not limited to, any of the scenarios listed above) to be the most devastating tragedy they can imagine. There is sincerity to their tears, an emotional honesty that cannot but be beloved and admired.

I admire this so much because it is corrupted so quickly. Though character varies from child to child and cannot really be categorized by age, I lump the six-to-ten year olds in the group Children Whose Tears Annoy and Anger Me. Children in this group cry even when they know they have not been wronged, or that worse things have happened or will happen. These children are attention seekers, standing in the street like Pharisees, there for all to see. For them, crying is not a form of self-expression, as it is with the adorable ones; rather, it is a way of manipulating their (weak-willed, likely morally corrupt themselves) parents. These budding con artists are easy to spot. Their eyes remain calm in their distress, and all cherubic features are hideously distorted (needless to say, cute cries look even cuter when they cry, like my little buddy Pilakyem, whose face squishes together so that his nose looks like a chocolate raspberry ready to pluck); they also exhibit tantrum symptoms, like The Throwing of Rocks at Others’ Shins, The Slamming of Doors, the tell-tale Unnecessarily High-Pitched Screaming, and the give-away No Visible Nose Running.

In my compound Theo and Bien-Être are the con artists. They cry when it is convenient, when it is too quiet, when, simply, they have not heard a plaintive wail for what seems to them too long. They can turn it on and off at will. They hit their mothers and defy their fathers. They are not welcome on my stoop; I will not stand such behavior.

Thankfully, though, the little dickheads are balanced by Pilakyem and Martine. Not once have the tears of either of these kids upset me, except to direct my wrath toward the other two who, inevitably, either pushed them down or stole something from their tiny, beautiful hands. You really should see them cry, Pilakyem and Martine. It’s almost too cute for words. Pilakyem, with his skinny legs and his big brown eyes; Martine, who I suspect is retarded, with her chipmunk cheeks and her skin like creamed coffee shining in the sun.

Whenever I hear them begin to sob I want to run to them, sweep them into my arms, cover them with kisses. Which, come to think of it, is all I ever really want to do to them; but when they cry, the instinct is irresistible.

Ah, there goes Pilakyem right now, crying from the other side of my fence. I will go to him. I will lift him to the sky, his scrunched, distraught face shining down on me. I will pull him close, and hug him, and tell him everything will be fine. Oh, I will hold him, notched above my hip. I will hold him, wrapped around my belly, while he snots in my shirt. Yes, I will lift and comfort this beautiful, beautiful child—unless, of course, he’s peed himself again. In that case, well, I’ll let his mother handle it.

This Town Needs an Enema*

2009-10-29T06:41:00.005-04:00

*You tell me what movie this quote is from, I'll get you a present from Africa, like amoebas, or guinea worm; also, this post contains foul language, and really bizarre subject matter, and may not be appropriate for infants.

When my next door neighbor died and we found out it was the devil himself that took him, we were all a little upset. Knowing what scheisters those devils are, the family called upon all of us present to pray for the giant's survivors, that the devil might not take it in mind to attack them, too, and collect his due. Within a week, it was confirmed that we hadn't prayed hard enough; the giant's twin daughters, adorable, feisty ten year olds, were apparently just ridden with the sonsabitches. And to prove it they summoned a black poisonous snake onto my compound-mate's terrace, just to give him the willies.

Snakes aside, they were fairly benign devils. The girls were still allowed to come over and watch TV, provided they sit outside, and I would take turns singing and dancing with them evenings when I was bored. They got a little pushy in their demands for candy, though, and I didn't hang out with the twins for some time.

The twins' grandmother, now, there's a real sweetheart. Slightly crippled, French-deficient, she is nonetheless one of those people I really enjoyed saying hi to in the mornings. Back when I went to Spain, she asked me what I would bring her as a gift; I told her a handsome young man. When my cousin came in May, I introduced him as 'that gift I promised.' The old black cheeks actually blushed.

But here's the trouble: for the past two months she's been bed-ridden. I haven't seen her, but my neighbor's tell me she's in a bad state. The girls stay home from school a lot so they can help take care of her. I can't say I'm surprised. Even back when the giant died, I figured she wasn't going to be too far behind. She's been hanging in there, though. She's a tough old broad. I mean, she is African.

But now so here's where things start to get interesting. Because she'd been sick for so long, her family was starting to wonder just what was up. The traditional medicines weren't working, and neither were the modern medicines. They decided to call in a charlatan to see if there were any bad spirits about that might be to blame. I bet you can guess what the verdict was.

Devils. A fucking lot of them.

So, here's the geography of the situation, to help clarify things. If you stand at the baobab tree near the old kitchen foundation and look to the west, directly in front of you would be the old lady's house, where she lives with the twin imps, plus Felli, and Felli's mother. Felli, for those that don't know, is the adorable little girl who enjoyed the Gettysburg Address in the video I posted on Facebook. Okay, and then next door on the right is my compound, where I live with the Laos and the Bamazis and various combinations of the Kpekpeous. Looking next door to the left (of the old lady's house) is the house of the old woman we call La Maisoniere. This is the lady to whom I pay my rent, because her youngest sister, rich and fat and living in Kara, owns all three of these compounds.

So this lady, La Maisoniere, she's kin to the ailing, devil-riddled old lady. She decides to call the village chief, an old, dignified man, to intervene on behalf of my old neighbor. Cast the fuckers out, as it were. The chief, well, he used to romp with these chicks, so he accepts the invitation. But little did he know...

... that fucking Mani was back in town! Actually, he did; I exaggerate a little. A lot of people knew Mani was back, because Mani had dropped out of school and disappeared about a year ago. Everybody assumed he was trafficked to Nigeria (which he was) and had been killed by the Ibo (which he wasn't). He came back with a radio and some funny hats, and started working in the flour mill just down the path from my house, the one housed in the abandoned former school building. So Mani, right, he's around twenty years old, he lives with the sick old crippled woman, and he's been helping out around the house a little, cooking some of the food, pumping some of the water, beating the possessed children. Etc.

So why is Mani's presence bad news for the chief? Somebody just go ahead and throw out a guess here. Go ahead, say it out loud. Did you say devils? Congratulations, my friend, because you are spot-fucking-on. Mani, unbeknownst to the rest of us, contracted a powerful strain of foreign devils when he went to be a slave in Nigeria. So, when the chief comes to scope out the situation with the old lady, Mani attacks the old man. Stories branch off at this point. Some say he simply cast devils at him, others say Mani physically attacked the chief; I don't know the details. Nonetheless, the chief grew gravely ill, and the whispers in village were that Mani and the devils were trying to decide who to kill first, the chief or the old lady. While all this was going on, by the way, my compound-mates were freaking out. It's all they talk to me about, still, and they end pretty much every sentence with, "Well, faith in God will protect us." I don't have to worry, because supposedly this kind of sorcery can only be used against people within the same ethnicity. Devils just don't attack white people. Or, as Bamazi put it to me, when white people have devils, they do good stuff, like build skyscrapers.

Sunday morning: I wake up around five or so and lay in bed till six. I do my push-ups and sit-ups, sweep my yard, brush my teeth. Last night was the attack on the chief, so there's a buzz in the air. I've got nothing going on, so around eight o'clock I decide to head to the boutique and have a few shots of sodabe. When I leave my compound, I walk by my crippled/ill/bedeviled neighbor's house, and there is a huge crowd seated on benches filling the entire compound. It looks exactly like it did when the giant died, and so my first thought is that the old woman has passed. Kicking and screaming, no doubt. I am in no mood to hang around, given the nature of all this new shit that's come to light regarding my neighbors and the status of their souls. So I skip on down to the boutique. The lady pours me a shot of sodabe. I ask her about the weather, the crops, the army of demons running rampant. DG shows up. DG's real name is Kossi, but he's always on top of things, so we all call him Directeur General. If anybody knows what's going on with the collection of people occupying my neighbor's yard, it's DG.

DG says that since Mani infected the chief with his devils, the village charlatans were performing a ceremony to exorcise the chief. Only the chief. Charlatans charge a lot of money for the ceremonies they perform, and the chief was the only one with enough francs to qualify for treatment. But they have to perform the ceremony at Mani's house (the old lady's house, the house between mine and the Maisoniere) because that's where everything happened. They're in the middle of the ceremony, actually, DG says, and he has to go back. I tell him I'll wait around the boutique, he needs to swing by when all is over and give me a full report. He slams back his sodabe, and says he'll see me in an hour or two.

This conversation with DG, actually, is where a lot of the details I've just given came to my attention. I knew there was sorcery trouble, but DG provides me with all the hard data. I'm a little bowled over by it all, so I decide to have another shot of sodabe to pass the time until DG's return. When he finally does come back, this is what he says:

The ceremony went off well, freeing the chief of his demons. The charlatan had to do inventory, though, and shake out any demons that hadn't yet been identified. Like a thirsty cowboy with a dowsing rod, the charlatan pointed to the old lady's bedroom. There are devils in her, he says. Then he turns to Mani. There are devils in you, too, boy. What have they made you do? At this point, Mani declares that he's been busy with a lot more than infecting the chief. Mani has an invisible Lhoso airplane--I've heard about these planes in the past--and during the night he gets in his plane and proceeds to fly over the village, stealing people's souls while they sleep. He then transports the souls to an all night voodoo spirit market in Niamtougou, about 150 kilometers to the north. At the market, sorcerers buy parts of these peoples' souls, and then, before dawn, Mani returns in the plane and redeposits whatever souls/parts of souls he wasn't able to sell. Well, I'll be damned, boy, the charlatan says. Where, by chance, did you get the plane? And I'm sure Mani must have said, in whatever mangled, demon-ridden Kabiye he was speaking, that the charlatan only had to point that dowsing rod a little further amongst this crowd to find his benefactor. The charlatan did as he said, revealing none other than--

--At this point I am just fucking blown away. I can't even believe DG is telling me all this with a straight face. He's sober as a pigeon. I'm on my thirt shot of sodabe, because frankly, I need it. The boutiquiere is clucking along to the story. The cluck is the sound we make when something is just unbelievably sad and true, and somebody should have known better, and one demon is understandable, but this many demons just borders on carelessness, and--

--La Maisoniere. What? La Maisoniere, DG repeats. Wait, I say, you mean the short old lady who collects my rent every three months? Yup. La Maisoniere had had devils for some time, the charlatan discovered. She and Mani were working together to steal souls at night and take them to the market. She was the one who bought him the plane! I interrupt DG again and ask him, did Mani say where he kept the plane during the day? You betcha. It's parked in an acajou tree just behind your house, Tony. I've eaten fruit off that tree, I think.

Then, I asked the inevitable question, What Happens Now? Well, DG said... the chief's fine... wouldn't accept anything you haven't prepared yourself from your neighbors... don't let the kids in your house... you know, the usual.

I'll admit, as much as I pitied the family and all its troubles, the only thing going through my mind at that point was that in a month I have to get a legally valid signature from La Maisoniere acknowledging that I don't owe her any more rent, and, boy, won't that be a joy to recover?

DG had to leave then, so I went home and huddled beneath my mosquito net, coup-coup under my pillow.

The next day I was with Nabede, my best friend. We were going to reclaim some wood a carpenter had stolen from me (long story) and on our way to his house we decided to have a few calabashes. I asked him if he'd heard all the news about my neighbors. He had. I asked him if he believed it. He did. Then I asked him about the plane. If Mani only takes peoples' spirits, and not their bodies, and if the plane is invisible, how can there be any proof that this story is in any way true? Well, he said, a few years back there was a similar situation in Adjengre. Young feller, invisible plane, soul theft. The charlatans and the villagers discovered what the boy was up to, and when he confessed to the plane, one of the elders asked him to prove his story. Show us the plane, he said. Well, I can't do that, said the boy, the plane's invisible. In fact, it's here right now, you just can't see it. Well then, said the elder, get in and fly it. Nabede said the boy stepped up into the air and was held aloft. And he kickstarted it, or turned the key, or spun the rotor, or whatever the hell he had to do to get his invisible spirit plane going, and suddenly there was a blast of heat, a roaring sound in the air, and everybody present was knocked backwards off their seats from the force of the lifting craft. They never saw the boy again.

That night, I went back to the boutique. DG was there, the nurse from the dispensary, and... the chief. The chief doesn't speak French, and I don't know what kind of questions are taboo following an exorcism, so I didn't try to ask him anything about the day before. DG was talking to him, though. The chief scowled as he sipped his sodabe, and DG asked him something in Kabiye. I heard Mani's name, but he spoke too quickly and I couldn't catch the question. The chief finished his drink, licked his lips, and said, in a voice that negated any need for translation: "Fuck that kid."

A Disordered Post

2009-08-18T09:01:00.002-04:00

The writing of a new post is taking a long time. I want to describe the emotions of being at the end of my service, the strange twist of desires to both stay and go, and I just can't get around to making it sound right. I need more time. But since I'm in Lome, I wanted to get something posted.

My time in village now is spent pretty much just relaxing and hanging out with kids. I've planted just over a hundred moringa trees at the dispensary, but that's about it. Whenever I'm in village, alone, I'm fine with this, but when I'm around other volunteers, and they talk about their garden projects, or the fifty thousand trees they planted, or the special week-long day camps they put on, I get depressed, and feelings of failure and worthlessness come creeping back in. The plain and simple fact is that I was not the volunteer I wanted to be. Some of this is my fault, much of it is the village's. I don't really want to go into it, so if it's all right with you I'll just skip it.

My summer has been spent, like I said, mostly at home, but for two weeks, including this past week, I've been at our training site in Pagala, working with Camp UNITE. Camp UNITE takes four groups of kids--Boys Apprentices, Girls Apprentices, Boys Students, and Girls Students--and trains them for a week in "Les Pratiques d'Une Vie Saine," or, the practices of a healthy life. Themes include self-confidence, communication skills, family and future planning, HIV/AIDS prevention, and sexual harassment and rape. Depending on the group, the angle of approach for each session is different. I did camp for Boys Apprentices and Girls Students, and the session with the biggest difference was Sexual Harassment. With the boys we had to emphasize that a lot of what they do is wrong, and they need to stop it. With the girls we had to emphasize that they don't have to take it, that the law is on their side, and we tried to encourage them to just keep saying no, to be firm, to never give in. Other sessions are different, too, but you get the idea.

I had only signed up to do Girls Students, but last-minute circumstances left the coordinators in need of another volunteer for the Boys Apprentices, so they called me and I went. Young Togolese men are not a very appealing demographic, so I wasn't expecting to enjoy myself. Never before in my life have I so poorly misjudged something as that week of camp. I had more fun than I've had in a long time, and I came to respect the boys, and believe in them, and see the changes in them as they were happening. I could talk forever, but since I don't want to I'll just say that I was really proud of those guys.

So then this past week I did Girls Students, which means that I've fallen in love with fifty underage Togolese girls. I can't even begin to describe how fantastic these kids were. The energy level was amazing, especially after Wednesday night, when we did presentation of traditional dances. The participants and even the formateurs are divided up several ways. Every person has a cabin, an animal, and a color. Sessions get juggled between animals and colors (all the lions over here for AIDS, all the greens over there for Rape, etc.) but challenges are always colors, and then small discussions are always the same animal of the same color. Traditional dances, though, are by building.

I was with a group of girls in the Davie building, and we renamed ourselves the Belles-Fortes (which means The Beautiful and the Strong; there's a beer here called 'Beaufort,' or, Handsome/Strong, so we played off of that). The idea behind the dances is that the girls learn songs from outside their ethnicities. For the Belles-Fortes, we danced Akposso, Moba, Kabye, Ewe, and Lhosso. I danced with the girls, and they wrapped me up in pagne just like they were. It's an incredible thing to watch, because after the dances, the solidarity amongst the girls just goes through the roof.

Thursday and Friday, then, you could see a big change in how the girls behaved. Even though they were happy and participated well, they were still a little timid. But at breakfast on Thursday, girls came to the mess hall singing songs from the night before, songs from camp, standing up and dancing around the tables. At lunchtime you couldn't talk over the roar of voices chanting "Camp UNITE ne perira pas," or "Tire bananes, tire tire bananes!" At dinnertime, every time you sat down to get ready to eat, somebody else jumped up with another song, and the dancing started again. This energy showed itself during the sessions, too. Girls who hadn't answered a question all week were raising their hands; small group discussions went from counsellors talking to participants talking; nobody wanted to go to bed.

My favorite girl from the week, a bottle rocket named Delali, would run up to me after sessions to teach me songs she knew in English. My favorite moment with her was when we were playing ping-pong on Friday night, after the girls' big presentation of dances and skits; she asked me to teach her a song. We traded verses on "Stand by Me."

Same thing as before: so much to write about, I need to get it all clear in my head. So I'll just say one last thing, and we'll end it there, disordered and long and not very specific. When we were leaving Saturday morning, the girls grouped around the taxis going to the five points of Togo. The energy from breakfast was subdued, and their faces took on grave expressions. Eventually, one of them broke down and started crying, silently, but with full tears. This started off the others. When we were all in the cars and leaving the center, the weeping turned into full-blown sobbing. After a week of fun, a week in which they were respected and loved, not harassed and ordered around, they were going back to their homes, back to boys who don't leave them alone, back to sweeping and cooking and laundry and babies on their backs, back to fathers who don't listen, mothers who guard traditions. I turned my head to the window and pulled my cap low over my eyes, so they wouldn't see me crying too.

Jean in Sokode

2009-07-09T02:41:00.001-04:00

We had heard that the president was on a tour of the country, a short, three-day trip that would take him from Lomé, the capital in the south, to Dapaong, the capital of the northernmost Savanes region, though not the northernmost city. My village was on the roadside, and we could have seen him easily from the small boutique where I drank at night with the old farmers, tobacco-stained men in sandals made from old truck tires, carrying around their radios in the dark. We decided, though, to go up to Sokodé, the capital of our Centrale region, thirty-six kilometers to the north. There was a nice bar there along the road, and if we staked out the day there we could eat and drink and most definitely see him.

We left my village early, while the sounds of small brooms sweeping the dirt were still loud in the air. As the driver pulled into Sokodé we could see groups of red-bereted soldiers on the side streets, not directing traffic, but diverting it by their presence. The driver let us off near the market, and we walked up the road to the bar.

The sun was higher now, and the heat of the day established. All my days in Africa have been hot, the state of the heat monotonous, its intricacies describable with only a handful of adjectives. Muggy, dry, or blazing, it is always hot. Only during and for a few hours after heavy rains will it cool down enough to put on a sweater, or zip up a jacket.

The bar ladies were still sweeping out the porch when we got there, but the door was open and the tables set up. Two grills, each made from a half of a fifty-five gallon drum, stood at opposite ends of the bar’s porch. Both grills made the same things, roasted chickens and beef kebabs, but I preferred the meat from the grill on the southern end. The cooks arrived. The older one, who wore lopsided glasses and a dirty wool snow cap of indeterminate original color, established himself in the small enclave between the bar and a phone cabine, to start killing and gutting chickens. The other, a slim, smooth-headed younger man, lit the coals and began slicing the beef into ribbons and skewering it.

We sat down at my normal table in the lower corner near the meat men, and arranged the chairs so we were both sitting against the wall of the bar, watching the road. Across the street the breakfast ladies were scraping the bottoms of their large marmites for the last of the rice and beans they dished out in the mornings. One of the waitresses, a tall, flat-faced woman with her baby wrapped to her back, was finishing off a hunk of fish under the breakfast ladies’ small lean-to. The other waitress, her hair in a kinky ponytail, brought us two beers without being asked, and we began our stay.

We were hardly halfway through our bottles when a man I know, a French expatriate living in the city, rode up on a moto taxi. Jean is a tall and skinny man from the Basque region, with thick, curved glasses, and a lanky shock of greasy, sun-filtered hair. He raised his hand to greet us, and then shouted one of only two English phrases he claims to know, “Oh my God!” He pulled up another plastic chair and sat down with us.

Jean has been living in Togo for twenty years. I go to his house sometimes, in the Lohso neighborhood, and we sit on his porch drinking whiskey while his Togolese wife brings me pictures of them taken in the bar they used to own in Lomé. He was handsome when he was younger, but now, at the age of thirty-six, the African sun has dried and darkened his skin so that he looks eternally as though he’s just gotten out from under a car and has not yet taken a shower.

The waitress brought him a beer, and he plied fifty francs in her hand and sent her to a small stand down the street to buy him cigarettes. It was around nine-thirty now, and the walking vendors were out, trying to sell us watches or screwdrivers or DVDs. It is always a pleasure to watch Jean with the vendors. He has both the arrogant knowledge of an expat that this is not his only home, as well as the experience of someone who has spent twenty years not living in a walled compound with servants and chauffeurs. He terrorizes the vendors with his knowledge of the proper prices, and will barter with a boy until the kid thanks him profusely for his business, apologizing about the initially high price. Jean knows everyone in the city, it seems, and makes fast friends with those he doesn’t.

“So,” he said to us in his rapid French, “what brings you two into the city?” We told him about the president’s journey, and how we wanted simply to get out of my village, and see the convoy.
“Ah,” he said, “he won’t come until late this afternoon, most likely, so you might as well stay the night. Come to my house later, and I’ll cook for you, real French cuisine.”

Jean makes his money by traveling back to France every summer and cooking in a restaurant owned by one of his friends. Each trip he takes ready made pagne outfits and sells them to European tourists as traditional African wear. Despite the fact that most of the cloth in Togo is printed in Denmark and China, it really is the kind of stuff that the Togolese wear on a daily basis. Most non-Africans I know in Togo, no matter how dedicated to their Western couture, have at least one pagne outfit.

We told him we’d love to stay for dinner, and he finished his beer and said he had to go home and tell his wife so she could get to the market before it closed. In honor of the president’s arrival, the market would be shutting down at two-thirty this afternoon. He stood up and made to pay for his beer, but we shouted him down. “Merci,” he said. He held out his hand, and we both shook, and as he was leaving we heard him shout the second of his English phrases, “I go swimming naked on Tuesdays with my cigarette!” before he disappeared up the road.

We stayed at the bar all day, getting up only to go into the back and piss in a hole in the floor. We ordered platefuls of kebab meat, which the meat men mixed with grilled onions and tomatoes, and small mountains of ground red pepper. Vendors came and we politely refused them. Children walked up to beg for change, and we sent them to buy us cookies to earn their money. Around two-thirty, Jean came back, and said that everything was ready for dinner tonight. Along with the food, he’d bought two bottles of whiskey, so that when the sun set and we were full and comfortable, we wouldn’t have to leave his house for anything. The three of us then ordered new beers, and settled in to wait for the president.

By three-thirty, the clusters of red-berets we’d seen earlier were spread out along the road, directing cars and moto taxis into side streets to either find their way home on rock-ridden dirt roads, or to wait until the president’s motorcade had passed. Looking out from the bar, the soldiers formed a line up and down both sides of the street as far as we could see. Most boutiques and bars turned off their music, and people walking around looked continually up the street, hoping to be the first to spot a car.

Finally, around four-fifteen, the first car came. It was an olive green military jeep with a mounted machine gun, packed with soldiers. Two more of these followed, and then the cumbersome motorcycles of the gendarmes led into view a black river of SUVs, windows up and tinted. The president’s limousine sat in the middle. Spectators strained from behind the linked arms of the red-berets, trying to see in through the windows for a glimpse of the president. The three of us, the only white people I could see in that part of the city, sat unconcerned at our table, able to see over the heads of the people from the elevated porch. After the last SUV, there were more gendarmes on motorcycles, and then again three jeeps with mounted machine guns. Ten minutes passed, and the first taxi came down the road. The red-berets found benches in the shade and waited for a transport truck to pick them up. The Togolese shook their heads and continued on.

“Well,” Jean said, “what did they expect?” He lit a cigarette and leaned back against the concrete wall of the bar.
“I heard he threw money from the sunroof in Kamina.”
“Can you imagine your president driving around, throwing five dollar bills into the crowd?” Jean asked.
“No,” I said.
“Exactly,” Jean said. “That is no way to save a country.” He nodded to himself. We finished our beers and got up to leave. The waitress came back with our change. Jean handed her a tip of one hundred francs. “Merci,” she said. He winked at her.
“Oh my God!” he shouted, and we walked up the road.

Daydream in the Rain

2009-07-09T02:25:00.002-04:00

It’s overcast and has been raining off and on all day. The paved road running through the village is wet and deep black and steams when the sun comes out. Along the road the air has the stink of worm/amphibial carnage. I remember walking from my house to the bus stop when I was a kid, a quarter-mile hike up and down a long hill, seeing the flattened bodies of nightcrawlers and toads. One toad I found had his guts spilling out of his mouth, the back half of his body completely flattened, painted cartoon-like with the imprint of a tire tread.

Here, though, in the sandy, tropical soils, worms are rare, and rarely as fat or long as the nightcrawlers of my youth. And while toads and bullfrogs can be heard chorusing in the night, their corpses are never found on the road post-rain mornings. Here it’s the crushed, snot-like bodies of snails splayed out along the rumble strips and the crumbling asphalt edges. Nights during the rainy season are murder for squeamish folks making frequent latrine sorties. Try going out without a flashlight or other illumination and the crickets’ rhythm will be interrupted on nearly every footfall as the full-bladdered person steps on innumerable escargots. They pop like lightbulbs. I shined my torch before me once during one of these excursions and found an uncomfortable amount of snails carpeting my little bit of grassless yard. Two or three at a time were gorging on my mucuna bean plants, leaving trails of worm-like shit and slime to dry over the leaves. My neighbors’ kids come into the yard often to collect the snails, and when they’ve got a decent amount stored under an inverted basin in their yard, they shuck them from their shells, skewer them and grill them. I’ve declined every invitation extended me to these feasts.

But so okay I’m on the road to go to the boutique to buy cookies, because there’s nothing better to do in the rain than to sit huddled under my paillote hidden from the kids to munch on biscuits, little drips of rain falling from the brim of my hat, my hand curled over the cracker, the crumbs tumbling and whirling through the air. I’m in a zip-up hoodie sweatshirt I bought in Spain in January, and I’m wearing it not so much because I’d be cold if I didn’t, but because during a rain wearing it doesn’t make me too warm. The temperature doesn’t ever really fall below 65 ° F, so I take whatever chances I get to bundle up.

My two years are officially over 6 December, but I’ll be able to leave no-questions-asked thirty-one days before that, so really I’m out of here like mid-November. Which means four months left in Africa. Twenty-two months spent here. I have dreams about icicles hanging from the eaves over the pick-up/drop-off areas of the Indianapolis airport, the defogger on my parent’s car wheezing with exertion, my teeth deliciously chattering despite every layer of elemental protection I brought with me, which, in the face of a Midwest winter, is nil.

The dream continues with arrival at the house, the yard lost beneath snow, perhaps a distress snorkel sticking up through the white, the only indication of a misplaced pet. A trip to the Marsh to pick up two cases of Budweiser, which we’ll bury in the backyard’s white mounds, while inside the house delicious-tasting things go through various stages of preparation and mastication. When everybody’s gorged and satisfied, me and the family go outside and hunt for twelve-ounce cans like Easter eggs, cracking them open and enjoying what’s inside. That’s my daydream. Cold weather and snow, good food utilizing more than two ingredients, and delicious beer served in reasonably sized containers. That’s what I miss, material-wise.

And but so like let’s snapshot me here, though, crossing the route to the boutique, watching a couple of kids in oversized windbreakers kicking empty tomato cans around beneath a palm-frond awning. I’m not unhappy. I’m wearing tan pants with brown piping down the legs and the imprint of a rooster perched between the words ‘Le’ and ‘Coq’ on the front in the left thigh area. I’ve got my grey hoodie, and a blue Texas Rangers hat given me by a recently departed volunteer. I’ve got a believe-it-or-not beard, which my family laughed at me over the phone when I said I’d managed to facially grow something resistant to a cat’s tongue. I’m twenty-fucking-four. Gasping for breath. When I left home I was un-tan, totally smooth visage-wise, and a sprightly twenty-two. Way ignorant in terms of third-world realities. I had a pretty quality digestive system. Etc.

Larissa and I had been with the new group of trainees on Wednesday, to talk to them about Volunteer mental health, how to avoid becoming an alcoholic, how to be a good listener. At the end of our presentation, there was time for interfacing, and a new-but-older trainee and I were talking about how the big advantage of Peace Corps service is internal, i.e., it changes you, and if you’re lucky you can step outside of yourself every now and then to observe these changes. The crux of the discussion was that it’s naïve to think that these changes or personal revelations are always pleasant, or conform to the propaganda Peace Corps uses to recruit people. The advantage of your service might be to reveal to you that you have no interest in doing stuff like this. Or that you’re way more cynical/conservative/racist than you thought. Ahem. Just speaking generally here.

So like then let’s return here to me snapshot crossing the road, at what is approximately revelation-time in terms of service, for me. I’m not unhappy. I’m disappointed in the way the ‘development’ work went (or didn’t). I hate the inability to blend in, the conspicuousness of my skin. When I say hate, I mean like loathe with my very core. I nearly had a nervous breakdown while biking from Sokodé to my village, shouting “I’ll fucking kill you!” at everybody that called me 'Anasara.' Women and children, too. I’m embarrassed, but I have to admit it. I probably would have really snapped if my village had been any farther away, because just when I felt I couldn’t take it anymore, on the edge of the teak trees that divide Babadé from Nima, somebody I didn’t recognize looked at me and shouted, instead of the ‘Anasara’ I was expecting, he shouted he said, “Mazabalo, bonne arrivée!” Mazabalo is my village name. And so then but like every single person I passed from him to my door waved to me and said “Bienvenue, Tony!” or “Bonjour, Mazabalo!” I felt like I’d let go of a breath I’d been holding in too long. I was back in village. I was home.

Not that I’m not impatient to get out of here. Every morning I draw a little symbolic X through the day before, arriving ever closer at the symbolically circled mid-November day of departure. It’s more like I’ve finally relaxed and realized that nobody is mad at me because there are things I didn’t do. They are happy with me because of the things I did. I know who they are, what their lives are like. They know the same about me. This makes being here a lot more pleasant and relaxing, realizing this does.

And but so like now I’m in the boutique. I’m unfrozen from the middle of the road. The kids kicking the can are pulling their jackets up to their ears while they say hello. The little one holds up her arms and says in her squeaky voice, “Tony!” I hold up my arms and say “Elli!” and bend down to give her a hug. Their mother is behind the counter, listening to some guy on his third or fourth shot of sodabe talking about himself. She sees me and straightens up and asks me if I’m cold, is maybe why I’m wearing all these limb-covering garments. I say I’m just pleased to be here. She smiles and asks me what I’d like. I hold out my money and simply say, “You know me.”

The Lightning

2009-07-09T02:17:00.002-04:00

Many months before, the uncle of one of my good friends had died. He was old, but not old enough that his death was considered a joy, as are the deaths of the crippled women I often buy drinks for when they hobble in to the boutique, supporting their weight on a large teak branch. My friend’s uncle was an important man, a teacher and a middle school director, well known in the community, and equally liked. According to tradition, following the internment of the body, there was no funeral. Now, in March, the tail end of the season for such effusions of grief, it was time.

I had been in the capital for many weeks before the funeral. In truth, I hadn’t known about it until my return to the village. I was weary from the journey, and my pockets were considerably lighter. The local cuisine has a bland, usually fishy taste I cannot get around to enjoying, and even when meat takes the place of fish, the fat and the cartilage attached to the normal edible bits turns me off as well. Nonetheless, unwilling to cook, and having nothing really with which a proper meal could be made, I decided not only to go to the funeral to pay my respects, but to capitalize on the food.

My friend, whom I call by his family name, Nabede, welcomed me and bade me sit inside his house, where there was a television. I would have been content to sit in the circle of small stools, most of which were occupied by the village’s older men, doing much the same as I and scraping back all the food their hosts were willing to offer them. Perhaps it was my fatigue, or my desire not to make any kind of scene, but I did not protest to remain with the men, and allowed him to seat me on an uncomfortable high-backed chair in his parlor. The walls of the house were of mud brick, and the roof was the standard tin sheets nailed to a central support beam. In the afternoon sun, the room was stifling. There was no fan, and the breeze through the small barred window flickered feebly in through the lace curtain. He turned on the television to a sports channel and left me.

His wife, a couturier in another village, came in to bring me a calabash, a dried, hollowed out bowl-like gourd, of tchouk, the local beer brewed from millet. She left and returned almost immediately with a large plate of rice mixed with overcooked spaghetti. The sauce was thick and red, and a fall of palm oil dribbled down from the sauce into the rice. There was a dark brown hunk of indeterminable meat.

I ate and watched a recap of the previous year’s European Cup. By the time I had finished, I could hear thunder in the distance, and the sunlight was fading into the alkaline clarity of a semi-obscured twilight. I wiped the sweat from my forehead and stood up to leave. I shook the hands of all the men on their stools, and thanked my hosts. I walked home alone, watching small rolls of lightning in the clouds against the horizon.

I awoke the next morning to a muted world. It had rained in the night and no one was out. The houses were calm, the green of the verdure so fierce it seemed the world was plugged in. I felt comforted by the scent of wet soil, the air on which you could actually taste the filtering effect of various trees.

I put on some shorts and went outside. Lidao, the ten-year old son of one of my neighbors in the compound, was sweeping my portion of the yard, pushing the papaya and palm leaves that had fallen in the night into a compost hole I’d dug. “Bonjour,” he said, and then he asked, “Did you hear about what happened last night?” “You mean the rain?” I asked. “No,” he said, “the deaths.”

Over the next few days, everyone I asked gave different versions of the story. Some say the people had been outside, dancing in the rain; others said they were huddled under the small eaves of the roof; yet others averred that they had all been sleeping inside the house. Whatever the details, though, the story remains essentially the same. After I had gone home, the rain arrived. The rain here seems to be one of Nature’s angrier forces, for it rarely falls with the monotony and disinterest that is common in temperate zones. Nearly always the rain is accompanied by fierce blowing winds which, despite my efforts, blow water in through the wooden slats of my windows and under the space beneath my door. Then there is the celestial lightning, and thunder that shakes the water in its cisterns.

That night, aside from the driving rain, the lightning was low and rolling in the clouds. I remember watching it before going to bed; it seemed as tumultuous as a sea storm, and washed down from the north with frightening speed. All recounts of the story agree that, despite the rain and the lightning, the sound system and the large speakers were not only not disconnected from the main power line, they were not turned off at all. As the rain fell and the lightning broiled, the funeral attendees continued to dance.

Around midnight, according to Nabede, the only people left dancing were a group of about fifteen adolescents. As I said, what exactly they were doing at the time the lightning struck is disputable. Even the exact site of the lightning strike is unknown. Nevertheless, what happened is irrevocable and only too painfully known. All the houses branched on to the power line in that area had their light bulbs burst or burn out; meters were fried and the numbers frozen; those with televisions still plugged in had their sets destroyed. But the brunt of the electrical force was directed at the children. Whether dancing in the rain, huddled beneath the eaves, or sleeping under the tin roof, the lightning struck them. Two, a twenty-two year old lycée student, and a fourteen year old elementary schoolgirl, were killed. Four were seriously burned, to the point of disfigurement. The rest were burned on their hands, chests, and heads, painfully but superficially.

When Lidao finished his version of the story I went to speak to Lao, another compound-mate and good friend. He told me his version, and we sat on the steps of his terrace in near silence, speaking intermittently about what happened. “They say it is because God is angry,” he told me. “We have defiled the funeral ceremonies for too long, and now God has punished us.” Kpekpou, another neighbor, said that it was not God, but the fetish priests who were to blame. Somebody, he said, associated with the grieving family, must have angered the priests, and to punish them the priests had called down the lightning. It could simply be bad luck, I said, but they clucked in disapproval of my theory.

I made my way to Nabede’s house. His wife welcomed me in, but she was withdrawn, and immediately went to lie down again. Nabede was sitting in a chair, hunched over, wearing nothing but a pair of shorts. His eyes were bloodshot from lack of sleep. He vaguely indicated the burn marks on the walls of his home, where the surge had scorched the mud behind the power lines. His light bulb was intact but burnt out, a dark black smudge coating the interior. He had been this morning to help dig the graves. Now he was trying to rest, but he could not sleep. I told him about what my neighbors had said, that it was either God’s punishment or the work of fetish priests. He shook his head. “It’s just Nature,” he said. An explanation all the more incomprehensible for its simplicity.
“What happens now?” I asked. He looked up at me as though he did not understand the question, or the impertinence to ask it. “Nothing,” he said. “La vie continue.”

The next day, Monday, I was teaching troisième, the oldest class at the middle school. The director came in and made his way over to a student who, I had not noticed before, was burned on his forehead and his left hand. “Don’t you know better,” the director said, “than to play near electronics in the rain?” It’s the question I’d wanted to ask, though he posed it with considerably less tact.

Class ended at noon, and the students got up to file home for the long break until afternoon classes. I called the burned student over to look at his wounds. His skin was split open along the knuckles of his hand, the flesh pink and beginning to dry out. There was a small split in his forehead. The surrounding skin was a dark purple color, and the outer edges of the burn were the green of an old penny. He said he felt fine. The only people left at the dispensary were the four who were severely burned.

I didn’t hear any more of the incident for the rest of the day. It had been a bad month, with several deaths, and despite the grotesque nature of Saturday night, the sadness was subdued and it seemed as though the incident would go the way of the storm, leaving nothing for memory but a slowly eroding imprint on the ground.

The next day I had no classes, and woke up late to the sounds of people conversing in the compound. Every day, several women in the village make tchouk, and people go from house to house to drink. The woman in my compound, Lidao’s mother, whom I also call Maman, makes what I consider to be the best tchouk in the village, and the benches she arranged around the fence securing my part of the yard were filled with men, farmers either on their way to their fields or coming back from them. A few were discussing the lightning from Saturday night. Most, though, were lamenting the state of their fields. It was not yet the rainy season, yet they were already decrying the lack of a strong downpour. That seems to be the way with the farmers. Either there is too little rain or too much. Rarely does Nature get it just right.

I spent the morning drinking with the men, and by noon I was lightheaded and exhausted. Though it might not be the best way to become known, I’d built up something of a reputation for being able to drink like the villagers. When I first arrived, I would slowly sip one calabash while they would chug back two or three. I’d finally gotten used to the taste, and could drink just as fast and just as much as the men. My record for a day is nine calabashes, a feat which most people only attribute to the village drunks. I may have had four or five that morning, so I made myself some lunch, and went to sleep.

I woke around four o’clock, which is essentially the end of the day. By this time, afternoon classes are over, the men are done in their fields, and even some of the women are beginning to make dinner. I got dressed and decided to head to the boutique to see if any of my friends were out, starting on their nightly round of sodabe, a moonshine brewed from the sap of palm trees. On my way out of the compound, Madame Lao was sitting in her kitchen, a small room separated from the rest of the house so that the smoke from the fires does not become a nuisance. “Good afternoon,” she said, “are you heading up the road?”
“What’s up the road?” I asked.
“The judgment,” she said, “for the sorcerers who killed the children.”

The sky was already turning to twilight, an orange-purple glow infused into the atmosphere. The green of the mango leaves faded into the darkening sky, blurring the line where the trees ended and the night began. At the boutique, I asked the owner’s wife about the judgment. “C’est finis,” she said. Up the road, lines of men were heading in our direction, among them my drinking friends. Magi, a thin old man with a tobacco-stained beard, led the column, and was the first to turn into the boutique’s yard. “I just heard,” I said. “What happened?”

That afternoon, the chief was approached by two people, an old, stooping woman of nearly eighty years, and her son, a disfigured man I’d noticed in the village before. They’d presented themselves to the chief as the sorcerers who had called down the lightning during the funeral. “They said that they hated those kids,” Magi said, “and had been performing a ceremony for many months to have them killed.”
“Why would they confess to something like that?” I asked.
“They wouldn’t have,” he said, “but ever since that night they haven’t been able to sleep. In their dreams the children come to them to ask, ‘Why have you done this?’ They confessed so that their spirits would leave them alone.”

The chief then called the sub-chiefs and the village elders, and they held a judgment. The woman and her son were questioned and beaten, questioned and beaten, until the entire truth had come out.

“The old woman started the ceremony,” Magi told me, “and her son finished it for her.” There was no real motive given for the killing. Perhaps it came out during the judgment and was lost in the retelling, but I doubt it. People here are not concerned with motive, simply with deeds and their consequences, with crime and punishment.
“This is bizarre,” I said.
“But it all makes sense,” Magi said. The son, a man of about fifty, is noticeable in the village because of his deformity. It’s as though his face had been smashed and then smudged to the side like wet clay. He has no nose to speak of, just a lumpy scar over two nostrils under the inside corner of his right eye. His mouth, more a gaping hole with teeth than a usable appendage, starts in the middle of his face and slides into where his right cheek should have been. Magi said, “His face is like that because of his sorcery. He eats the bodies of his victims.” This was such a crime against Nature, he explained, that the man’s features contorted to reveal the depravity of his soul.
“What happens now?” I asked.
“Tomorrow they will be beaten again, and then they will be banished. They’ll never be allowed to return to Babadé.” I stopped my next question before I could ask it. What about the gendarmes, or the police? What about justice? But they could do nothing. This is a case of sorcery, something the government formally denies no matter that every person I’ve ever spoken to, peasants and functionaries alike, believes in it. The best justice we can hope for is that these two will never hurt our village again. For the people of Babadé, that is enough. Grief resides in the unknown, not in the inexplicable. Sorcery is derided by the West, and missionaries have done there best to replace voodoo with Christianity, but in the end, what’s the difference? Voodoo is a religion as any other, with tenets and beliefs and practitioners; it is a gathered set of mythology and ritual used by people to give meaning to the unknown.

The next day in the village people were discussing again the lightning strike, the dead and burned children, the man who ate his victims, the mother who began the spells. Their tone seemed as grotesque as the crime itself, for there was an air of relief palpable in all the conversations. What happened was terrible, the explanation bizarre, and, in my opinion, all the more frightening, but hey, thank God we know what happened, right? I had never believed in the talk of sorcery in my village, and though when my neighbor died I had to accept the verdict that the devil had claimed his soul, I never really took it as validation for all the other stories I’d heard. This, though, was something else. There was an accident, wholly explicable by nature and electricity and human negligence; there was no inquisition, and no wish to begin an inquisition; yet there it was, the confession. We did it, we killed them. We cast a spell and called down the lightning, we killed those we wanted to kill, on the night we wanted to do it. How can I deny this? If I subscribe to the insanity of the sorcerers, I must subscribe then to the insanity of the entire village, and that is not possible. I have to do as my villagers have done, and be comforted by the fact that it was not God or Nature or the ignorance of the children and soundmen. It was sorcery, which can be controlled, either by an expulsion of the source, or, more common in less serious cases, by more sorcery. I won’t try to seek any logic behind it. Crime and punishment; that will have to suffice for me now.

It's All Happening

2009-04-29T03:19:00.003-04:00

As most of you know, there was a wedding ceremony between myself and my girlfriend Larissa on April 11th. We aren't what you could call married, exactly, certainly not legally. If you saw any of the photo albums on Facebook, you probably noticed the word "Fwedding," our barely creative euphemism for "Fake Wedding." The best way I can think to explain the purpose of having the ceremony would be to say that it was a celebration of our relationship in its Togolese context. Obviously, that's its only context currently, but the future is better left to itself than to speculation.

We showed up to Agou on Thursday, two days before the wedding. Larissa had been just a few days before, on Sunday, to give money to our wedding planner, the neutral Edith, to start buying supplies. Between Sunday and Wednesday, though, there was a bit of a spat between our host mothers and Edith. This was the first thing we dealt with on Thursday. Sitting the mothers down at the Afrikiko bar, we explained that Edith had done nothing wrong, and that where we are from we use a third party wedding planner. The moms felt that the responsibility (dispensing and holding our money) lay with them, and not someone outside the family. We quelled the unrest pretty easily, and from there on, it was all smooth sailing.

After spending the rest of Thursday and Friday shopping for food, the alcohol for the dowry, etc., Saturday arrived, and with it plenty of our volunteer friends to help us celebrate. As the morning turned into afternoon and the hour of the ceremony approached, Larissa retreated to her mother's house with her bridesmaids (and one bridesman) while the other volunteers, including my groomsmen (and one groomswoman) hung out at the bar. I got dressed in a white lace pagne outfit that had been made on the quick by the tailor next door to my mom's house.

When it was time, Maman Afrikiko kicked everybody out of the bar and took up place at the head of the procession with me and my mom and the women carrying the dowry. An old woman had the alcohols in a bucket on her head, and two teenage girls wearing traditional skirts and palm frond ankle bracelets, their skin dusted with chalk, carried the pagne. David, a groomsmen, had some sweet iPod speakers, so we marched to Larissa's house dancing to various Michael Jackson songs. When we arrived at the house of her uncle, where the ceremony would take place, the guests took their seats, and my mom and I, along with a host-uncle, sat down on one of two couches facing each other. The other was reserved for Larissa and her family. At the first sound of the fanfare, the drum and brass band of the village, David stopped the music and we listened as the sounds of Larissa's procession grew louder. She finally entered with her entourage, the fanfare on their heels, aunts and other host-moms tossing confetti into the air.

The ceremony was pretty cool. The chief supervised, speaking in Ewe, and a man in the audience translated for us. The chief spoke about the connection between individuals, and how our connection to each other was the result of our connection to our families, and the connection of America and the beautiful Agou-Nyogbo. The chief then requested that the dowry be presented. He gave it his approval and Larissa was asked to choose one of the drinks from the amongst the liquid portion of the dowry. There were gin, whiskey, a wine called Dubonnet, rum, five liters of palm wine, four liters of sodabe, three types of beer, an orange soda, a fruit cocktail soda, and a Coke. Larissa got up, picked the orange soda ("Because it's your favorite," she told me later) and put it on the table. The chief declared that by picking the orange soda, Larissa was ensuring that our home together would be refreshing and sweet, and that we would always remain even-tempered and calm.

Now, he said, as Larissa sat back down, we have heard that the son of Hadzi [me], has found a beautiful flower in the village of Nyogbo, and he desires to pick that flower to guard with him forever. But, he continued, in a village like Nyogbo, there are so many beautiful flowers. Which one would he like to pick? Because even though he has indicated the beautiful flower sitting across from him, it is necessary that we verify this for the village. The chief then invited all the "beautiful flowers" present to get up and present themselves to me. The fanfare began playing and one by one, two of Larissa's bridesmaids, two volunteers from the audience, and my groomswoman got up, bowed before Larissa, and then danced in a circle around the table between our couches. They lined up near where the chief was sitting. When they had all danced, Larissa got up and made her twirling way around the table and in front of me, shaking her hips to the rhythm of the big drum. When she was lined up in the middle with the other beautiful flowers, the chief invited my mother and I to indicate to the village which flower I would like as my own. When I took Larissa's hand in mine, the audience exploded in applause, confetti was thrown, and the fanfare upped the rhythm. We then went back to my couch, where my host-uncle left his seat and Larissa sat between my host mother and me.

Now the floor was open, the chief said, for people to speak. David, my best man, gave a brief speech, and then Golda, Larissa's maid of honor, got up to speak. David's speech was a standard best man speech, good, touching. Golda's was a little different. As these two begin their lives together, Golda said, we want to make sure that they keep no secrets from each other. If there are any secrets from their lives before they were together, let those secrets come to light, so that they will not spoil their future. Then, one of the male volunteers stood up, walked up to Larissa, and sheepishly threw a pair of underwear into her lap. The audience roared. He sat down and yet another guy stood up, walked up to her, threw underwear. Hearty laughter turned into a rumble of approval. A third volunteer walked up, did the exact same thing. Larissa was laughing to the point of tears, the chief was chuckling in his seat, the whistles and the applause from the audience were deafening. Again, a fourth male volunteer stood up, walked in front of Larissa. This time, though, he sheepishly threw a pair of underwear into my lap. Explosive, uncontrollable, nobody-can-breathe laughter.

This is wonderful, said the chief, stifling further giggles. Now, he said, because you [talking to me] have taken the daughter of the Koffi family, they must be assured that she will be happy always with you. Larissa's host-father then rose, draped in his traditional kente cloth, and said, "You have taken our daughter, and we are happy that she has accepted you. In our home she received all that she required, and in your home this must also be so. We must know that she will never go hungry; that she will never be cold for lack of clothes; that these clothes will never be allowed to turn to tatters and rags; that you will not in any way harm this flower you have picked; that you will never neglect her for another woman. If you guarantee these things, we accept with full gratitude, the union of our families." Naturally, I said yes.

He then reached into a bag he had kept under the couch, and pulled something out and walked over to us. He presented us with a wooden chain, the ends of the chain being small wooden statues, one of a man, one of a woman. "Take this chain," he said, "as the symbol of your bond." We each took the statue of our respective genders, and he said, "Now, ensure that, no matter what force may arrive, this chain, and this bond, will never break." We pulled against the chain. It held tight, and the fanfare erupted again.

After that, the rest of the dowry was opened, starting with the gin, and then quickly moving into the palm wine and the sodabe. Shots were poured for nearly all present, and the fanfare played, and everyone was invited to dance. When the gin was gone (that took like three minutes) Larissa and I led the procession from the ceremony all the way through the village and down to the house where, when we first arrived in this country, we used to do our training. The fanfare followed, with the volunteers and the village, dancing, singing, laughing.

At the house, Larissa and I were arranged on a couch, and chairs were set up facing us. Someone read a small bible passage and prayed, and then my host-uncle made a brief speech. Following that the cake was presented to us. We cut it together, and, as is custom, shoved it into each other's face. Food and beer were then passed out, and the cake was cut for everyone. When everyone had eaten and drank, our bridal party declared that, according to American custom, Larissa and Tony had to arm wrestle to see who would have the power in the relationship. Once again, laughter from the audience, cheers when I let Larissa win. More beer was passed out, and the families and the volunteers retreated to the back yard to take photos. The ceremony was over.

The villagers had, for the most part, retreated to their homes, or to their small stands along the road. The volunteers headed up to the Afrikiko, and began the party that would last most of the night. Larissa and I went to our respective homes to change before heading to the party. Maman Afrikiko had set up a grill, and her son/employee was grilling beef kabobs, chicken, goat. Throughout the night volunteers would come up to me, put their arms around me, and say, "This was one of the best things I've ever been a part of." I told them for me it was the best thing. And we left it at that, our faces hurting from the smiles that refused to leave our faces.

The Demon and The Giant

2009-04-05T08:44:00.002-04:00

Two days ago my next door neighbor died. He was only in his early thirties, immensely tall, quiet. The last time I had seen him, reclining on his chair beneath the baobab tree on Tuesday the week before, he seemed healthy. I was going to Sotouboua. “Bring me back some bread,” he said. “You bet.” In Sotouboua the bread ladies refused my worn-out bill and I came back empty-handed.

He died around five o’clock on Friday, they said. That night, I looked out my back window before going to bed. The compound had never had electricity, even though the owner of the houses, Tchao’s sister, was well off enough to install it. He didn’t want to pay the monthly bill, he said. But Friday night I was attracted to my window because of the almost neon glow of a halogen bulb coming from the compound. Sitting around the courtyard were all his female relatives. No one was speaking. I went to bed, and woke up twice during the night, as is my habit. Both times the light was still on, and the women were outside, though now they were sleeping on the wooden benches instead of sitting upright. They were like that until the morning.

On Saturday I dressed and shaved and went next door. Benches were arranged outside the compound for people to sit on. No one was really speaking. At that hour, there were only two rows of benches, so I greeted all the men, and then went inside to where the women were waiting, and greeted them. They led me into the room where Tchao was being kept. His wife sat at his feet under the window, and another woman sat at his head, waving a plastic fan over his face to keep the flies off. He was covered up to his chin in a purple blanket patterned with gold. His head was cushioned on pagne.

I haven’t seen many dead people. Only four. Two in America, two here in Togo. Three of those bodies were clearly devoid of life. The skin looked plastic and painted, the muscles seemed to have shrunk and fallen from their bones, the proud jut of their chests had crumbled and caved in. But Tchao looked normal. When I saw him he’d only been dead about fifteen hours. I even thought I saw his eyelid twitch. It made me think that children’s responses to death are the most honest, much more honest than the wailing and the tears of the adults. Death to me is just very confusing. Sad, yes. But mostly just bizarre. Silence is the best response I can think of.

The crowd outside the house grew larger but stayed silent. I stood in the shade of the baobab. Around ten-thirty an open coffin was brought. On the bottom were two handlebars, one at the head, one at the feet. They set the coffin down at the entrance to the compound. They brought the body from the room, leaving the purple blanket behind. The woman began wailing again. The wails of the women are throaty and wavering, and they rise and descend like a song. Just before they’d brought the body out the deceased’s mother had been scolded for not mourning properly. She immediately began her song, and soon was sobbing. Unlike her scolder, I never doubted her grief. But she is an old woman, arthritic, slightly handicapped, usually in pain. No doubt she feels that her death is near as well. As I implied earlier, I can understand why she felt no need to weep.

They placed the body in the coffin and covered it from head to waist with an animal hide. Tchao was a tall man with large feet, and his toes stuck up over the rim of the coffin. A group of men bent down and they lifted the coffin onto the heads of two other men. Their heads were padded with palm fronds woven into fat green donuts. They then loped toward the cemetery, and the village followed. Periodically the men carrying the coffin would grow tired and a new man would take his place. The cemetery was half a kilometer from the house. It is not cordoned off or indicated by any plaques. A passerby sees only the concrete and tile tombs resting in the dubious shade of teak trees, the ground bare of undergrowth, covered only with the dried mantas of old leaves.

When the procession reached the cemetery the women turned around. It is forbidden for women or children to view the actual internment. I continued with the men. A hole had been dug in the ground about four feet deep. It was half covered already. Logs had been placed over half the hole across the width, the cracks filled with rocks and leaves, and then a large pile of dirt placed atop. The men who had dug the hole were standing barefoot in shorts with no shirts. They removed the hide from over the body, then lifted it out of the coffin. One man was already in the tomb, hidden by the half-covering. He received the head, and the men placed the body gently in the hole. One by one they made an effort to turn the body on its side and tuck the thin faded blue blanket under his whole body. The feet were still exposed. I couldn’t see the head. When the body was arranged they climbed out and handed a hoe to the dead man’s uncle. He grasped a handful of dirt in the bend of the hoe. He gave a brief eulogy in Kabye, which I did not understand, but which I’m pretty sure contained the promise that we would all meet again on Judgment Day. He tossed the dirt into the hole. The spectators were all invited to take one last look on the deceased. Then logs were placed over the remainder of the opening, and the tomb was covered. It was only at this point that I noticed all the other mounds around us. I’d thought that every family built a concrete tomb, and had been a little skeptical about this hole in the ground, with stray roots stick out from the walls of earth. When I looked around I saw at least twenty mounds of earth, all covered with rocks. I left before they finished the mound.

On Saturday after the internment, I was walking with one of my students, a fourteen-year old in cinqieme. He had been bitten by a snake a few months ago, was on the verge of death himself, but his father and some charlatans had healed him. I remember seeing him at school; the whites of his eyes were blood red. His skin was still an ashy grey. He looked like the snake that bit him.

When we were walking together after the internment, he mentioned the snake bite. It had been sorcerers, he said. His father had gone to the village chief, and together they’d performed a ceremony to find out if there were any reasons behind the boy’s being bit. They’d found out that it was revenge sorcery, and the name of the man who had gone to the charlatan to make sure it was done. “What about our friend’s death yesterday,” I asked him. “Is that sorcery?” He said that we don’t know yet. “But we’ll find out tomorrow,” he said.

That night it rained. The sky was clear most of the day, but toward three o’clock we could hear thunder in the distance. The sky took on an orange tinge, but not the tinge of Midwestern sunsets I know so well. It was the hue of coming rain, of disparity between heat and humidity, a drop in the pressure. Around six o’clock it began to rain, just as the sky was losing all traces of twilight. The rain was heavy and straight, but the wind was fierce and wild. I closed all the windows of my house, and the front door, but the rain blew straight through it, and a large pool of water collected along the base of the north wall. The lightning was bright white, not a trace of blue. We could hear branches and fruits falling from the trees, whole woody fronds dropping from the palms. One of my chicks, and three belonging to my neighbor, drowned.
In the morning there was the ceremony to find out how Tchao had died. When Lao had told me of his death Friday night, he said that Tchao had been gravely ill for about a week. But what brought on the illness was unknown. Two charlatans were hired, one by the widow, one by the uncle.

Like the day before, many among the village were there to watch, arranged on benches enclosing the open space outside the compound. The chiefs were there, the widow and her sister-in-law, their kids. Most of our quarter of town. Two women were leaned against the wall of one of the compound’s buildings. One was tapping a calabash with piece of wood, the other was tapping a hunk of concrete with a piece of steel. Tap-clink-tap-clink. The charlatan was moaning and wailing lightly. He came shirtless out of the compound wearing on his head one of the frond donuts used in the procession the day before. On top of that sat a ceremonial bow, loosely strung, and a chunk from the husk of a baobab fruit. The charlatan was rubbing his crotch, and his arms shook like ribbons of water. The uncle, an old limping man who leaned heavily on his cane, came up to the charlatan, lifted the piece of husk and placed it on the ground. Then the widow walked up, picked up the husk, tapped it three times to the bow and donut, and replaced it on the ground.

The charlatan began speaking. It was not in tongues, just Kabye. A man sitting in front of me slipped out of his sandals and went to stand face to face with the charlatan. They spoke in short bursts, finding a rhythm alongside the tapping women. I could understand nothing except the occasional “What did you say?” and frequent grunts of confirmation. At one point the chief took over the dialogue and the other man sat down. After about twenty minutes altogether, the charlatan stopped speaking. The chief sat down and the charlatan tilted his head back to let fall the donut and the bow. Some water was brought to him, and he washed his face. Then he left.

My friend told me that the vision had not been clear. “He gave many reasons for the death. First he said Tchao had had the devil in him. Then he said someone in the village had killed him with an evil song. Then he said that it was not an evil song but an evil object. He just wasn’t clear at all.” What would happen next? “Now the second charlatan will come. Hopefully he will be more specific. If he isn’t, the family will find a charlatan from another village, and they will perform the ceremony privately.”

I thought then about the whole business of sorcery. I told everyone I didn’t believe in it. I’d been saying that for awhile back when I’d first heard about its prominence in my village, and after of few of these declarations one of my friends took me aside and told me I needed to stop it. “You don’t have to believe. But you can’t tell people that what they believe is lies.”

In about five minutes the second charlatan came. He was young and thick, whereas the other had been old and thin. He took his shirt off behind us, near the lime grove. He began whistling shortly and slapping his body. His chest, his back, his shoulders. He whistled with his upper lip hooded over his lower, blowing short bursts of breath out to make a sound like the women make when they prepare food with the grindstones. While he was doing that, one of the men from the crowd, a carpenter, stood where the other charlatan had stood, with the palm donut on his head. When the charlatan approached him, the carpenter gave him the donut, and the charlatan entered the atrium of the compound. He continued to whistle and slap, hitting himself in the armpits, pulling his skin and rubbing it. Like the crotch-work of the previous man, it looked vaguely sexual.

The charlatan came out of the compound with the palm donut on his head, and he stood where the other had stood. Two different women than before were beating out the rhythm on the calabash and the concrete. The uncle hobbled over, picked the husk of baobab from the ground, tapped it on the charlatan’s head, put it back on the ground. The widow got up, tapped the husk three times on the man’s head, and again replaced it. Then a new man from the crowd stood before the charlatan, and they began to speak as before. Again, within twenty minutes the ceremony was over. The charlatan washed his face. The people began to disperse. I turned to my friend for the translation of all that had been said.

“This time it was clear. The man who died had the devil in him. He was of a mean nature, and he signed a contract with the devil. He was supposed to pay the devil with alcohol, and food, and to sacrifice to him sheep. He did not fulfill this part of the contract. The devil came and took him.”

Before everybody had left, the uncle stood up and walked to the center of the circle of benches. He spoke in Kabye, and my friend told me this is what he said. “I am sorry to find out that Tchao died like this. But it cannot be changed. Let us give what thanks we can that it was only of his own hand that he died. And let us hope that his pact with the devil will not return to act malevolently upon his family.”

Once again, my only reaction to all this is confusion. I cannot understand this. I cannot dismiss this verdict as superstition, though neither can I declare my belief in it. I just know that Tchao died mysteriously. He rarely smiled. He seemed often tired, and not just from the fields. The kind of things that seem to line up after the fact, but would never have aroused suspicion without this bizarre declaration. Nobody could tell me what he was supposed to receive from the devil according the contract. I can’t think of anything myself. The only thing I can think to say, if you were to ask me if I believe this, is, “I kind of feel like I have to.”

The Cold and the Spanish Sun, pt. 2

2009-01-26T07:50:00.008-05:00

We finally got the hotel room, complete with cable television, hot showers, and a free voucher for the buffet lunch, which included veal, bow-tie pasta with a creamy sauce, salad bar, and a fruit platter, amongst other things. We took a nap, and then went down to check out and catch the shuttle back to the airport. Some Nigerian travelers who were in a similar situation as us were already on the bus. One of them was in the front-most seat, where on the ride to the hotel the baggage had sat. The driver, an Egyptian named Mohamed that Larissa and I had determined was "a nice guy," asked the Nigerian to please move to the back so that he could load the luggage up front. The Nigerian didn't like this, and with a sharp look to his two sycophants, they began to ridicule Mohamed. He, Mohamed, shook his head and Larissa and I threw him our spiritual support. We were not fans of the Nigerians.

When we got to the airport, the Nigerians beat us to the EgyptAir counter, where a representative was holding all our passports. The Egyptian, a large-nosed younger man with close cropped hair, was sitting in front of a computer. We assumed he was taking care of something for the Nigerians, so we didn't say anything. After a moment, the man looked up, saw us, and asked us where our transfer was. "Casablanca," we said. He picked up our passports, walked out of the office, and said, "Follow me." As we turned to be led past security and into the proper terminal, the Nigerians' eyes followed us in disbelief. Their jaws dropped. They had been totally ignored.

The flight to Casablanca was nice and uneventful. We landed at 11:40, twenty minutes before the last train to Tangier, where we needed to go to take the ferry into Tarifa, Spain. We got my bag from the claim, went through customs, and headed to the train platform at the base of the elevators. The conductor was walking towards us from the platform. "Come on, come on," he said, "we go now. You pay on the train."
"We don't have any cash," we said.
"Oh. Sorry. Tomorrow morning, then."
The next train, then, was at 7 am. It was midnight. We decided to sleep in the airport. The unheated airport. For the next seven hours. We piled on our clothes, huddled together on a leather bench in the check-in area, and shivered in our sleep.

The next morning, still cold, we got our tickets and boarded the train. Since the three-car train that leaves the airport only ever goes as far as the main Casablanca terminal, we had two hours to kill in the central part of town before our six-hour train ride to Tangier. It was a cold day, but the sun was bright, and silhouetted the clock tower of the station before us. We headed to a small cafe along the main road, and Larissa got a grilled cheese and egg sandwich, and I got a yogurt. We ordered orange juice, and the man squeezed it in front of us. When we finished eating, they brought us some complimentary tea, which Larissa used to warm up her nose. Then we walked down the street to a small park with tended lawns, clean benches, small trash cans, and palm trees. We like Morocco, we decided.

We spent the last thirty minutes waiting for our train to arrive at the station sitting between two women. The woman on our right just stared at us and the woman on the left covered her face with a shawl and stared at us. Although slightly warmed by the sun, Larissa was still shivering. The woman on the left offered her one of her gloves for two minutes, which Larissa accepted. Finally our train arrived and as we got ready to board, the glove-lender raised her hand as if expecting some change for her two-minute one-glove lending service. We both feigned ignorance, threw her some of our best innocent grins, and boarded the train.

A brief note on Moroccan winter dress/fashion: these people know how to battle the cold. The women wear brightly colored shawls, while the men wear hooded robes that look like Franciscan monks had their winter coats designed by Klansmen. They are dark or light brown, go all the way to the floor, and have hoods which remain remarkably pointy, even in the wind.

The train ride was nice. We slept for most of it. Morocco is in the middle of their rainy season, however, and through the windows of the train we could see the whole countryside, covered with a green velvet sheen. Herders with their meager flocks sat amongst their grazing sheep, cows wandered over the countryside, donkeys loaded with vegetables made their way to market.

We finally made it to the Tangier station about three in the afternoon. We took a taxi from the station to the port and bought tickets for the ferry which would take us to Tarifa. At the customs desk to get on the ferry, a man had hijacked all the disembarkation forms. To fill one out, you had to give your passport to one of his flunkies, who would then fill it out for you. At first we thought they were officials who did this for a living, but their jump suits said "Sanitation," not "Immigration." They were janitors, and when they were done, they held out their hands for a tip.

The thing is, though, that we'd spent all our Moroccan dirhams on the train, the taxi, and the ferry tickets. All we had left were one dirham coins, about 12 and-a-half cents. We held them out to the janitors, and in their Arabic accents they said, "One dirham? You give me one dirham?" They shook their heads in disgust and let us past.

And then we were on the ferry. A thirty-minute ride across the Strait of Gibraltar was all that was left of the journey to Spain. My parents, who had flown into Madrid on Saturday and rented a car, were waiting for us in Tarifa. Since we had no way of contacting them, and since they had been expecting us since the morning in case we'd gotten that midnight train, I was nervous as the sun set over the waters, the blue of day turning into the purple of twilight and finally into the inky black of night on the sea. But when we got off the boat, they were there. So excited to see us, they waved with all their hands.

The Cold and The Spanish Sun, pt. 1

2009-01-25T07:38:00.005-05:00

After some trouble with a money-changer at the Togo/Ghana border, Larissa, a husband and wife combo from PC/Niger, and I rented a private car from Aflao to Accra, a three hour drive. The beginning of the road was similar to Togo. Potholes and dirt, the flora along the edge of the asphalt painted burnt ochre by dust. But as the road became smoother, the painted lines whiter and crisper, the mud huts and the tin roofs gave way to massive fenced-in factories, signs for local farms, and finally subdivisions and duplexes. I felt like I was in a suburb of Ft. Lauderdale.

In Accra itself there were overpasses, exit ramps, readable signs, working traffic lights. Larissa and I got out along the highway, and crossed the road to the mall, to spare the driver a time-consuming turn through the highway's cloverleaf. In the mall we ate fast food, played Wii in a bookstore, checked out the movies playing in the theater, and shopped in a real grocery store. When we were done, we took a taxi to Champs, a sports bar, and feasted on Nachos con carne, washed down by draft beers and a whiskey on the rocks. Except for the occasional piles of trash, and the ever-present little black market sacks, it was hard to believe we were in Africa.

The airport seemed slick and shiny, with clean plastic check-in counters. The attendants were polite and helpful, and we got our tickets and checked our bags with no trouble. The only "African" experience I had during those hours in Ghana was at passport control, when the attendant asked me to give him one of the books I was reading. I told him no, so he gave me his phone number and told me to call him when I got back, so that we could be friends.

At 11:15 pm, our flight to Cairo was announced. We all walked outside into the little bus that carried us across the tarmac to where the plane was waiting. We boarded, met a Yale business student who knows a former volunteer we know, and then fell asleep in the cold recycled air of the plane, the lights flickering into dimness, the hum of the engines steady and true.

We landed in Cairo at 7 am, with thirteen hours to kill before our flight that evening to Casablanca. The Egyptian sun rose later than in West Africa, and the air was so cold our breath escaped in clouds. When we finally made it to the transfer passengers waiting area, we were told our complimentary hotel room would be ready within an hour, and if we could just sit inside the waiting area to the left, they'd call us when it was ready.

While I was in the bathroom, trying to jump out the door over the mop of the tip-hungry bathroom attendant, Larissa was approached by a representative from EgyptAir in charge of QuickTours, who offered her a pamphlet with possible tour options during our layover. When I got back, Larissa brought me up to date as the man came over.

"Hello, Hi, my name is Ahmad." He told us the options we had in lieu of a hotel room. For only $70 each, for example, we could visit the Giza pyramids and the Sphinx. If we threw in an extra $30 each, he'd throw in a tour to the Egyptian Museum as well.

"Hmm..." we said. "We'll have to think about it."
"Okay, I'll tell you what I'll do." Ahmad sat down and straightened his tie. "I'll go talk to my people and see if, since you are Americans, I can bring ze price of ze pyramid trip down to just $55 each. " People think it's just the French who say 'the' with a z, but apparently it's the Egyptians, too.

And then he rushed off. He came back fifteen minutes later with our other options:
"Okay, so, you can take ze hotel room and just rest. Or you can take ze tour, for only 55 US Dollars each, for both ze pyramids and ze Sphinx."
"Well..."
"Or, you can forgo ze hotel room for free visas, so zat you can walk around ze city yourselves."
This option made me a little curious.
"So, I have a question. If we just take the hotel, does that mean we have to stay inside the hotel, since we won't have these visas? Or are we allowed to leave and walk around?"
"Oh, yes, you can walk around, zat is no problem."
"Then why would we give that up for the free visas?"
"Tell you what," he said, "I have another choice. If you want to leave right now, you can skip ze hotel room, we go to ze pyramids and ze Sphinx for 55 dollars each, and I will cook you breakfast here."
"What? At the airport?"
"Yes, yes."
"Tell you what," we said. "We'll do the pyramids and the Sphinx for 55. We'll just need to exchange a little money first."
"Okay, zat is no problem, I will make ze arrangements."

What we didn't know, though, was that none of the exchange banks in the airport, and really, throughout most of Africa, accept traveler's cheques these days. And they also wouldn't exchange Ghanaian Cedis, or West African Francs. Between us, we only had about 40 USD. So when Ahmad came back, with a sign-up list (or maybe his breakfast menu?), we had to tell him that, really sorry, we just wouldn't be able to do the trip, so could we just get that hotel room please?

Ahmad disguised his disappointment well, and said that, yes, no problem, he would take care of zat right away for us.

Thirty minutes later, however, Ahmad came back to sit down in front of us. "Okay," he said, "I have one final option. You see zese people over zere?" He nodded behind him. Yes, we saw them. "They have signed up for ze tour, but zey are only three, and the tour needs at least five. If you would like to go with zem, immediately, you pay only 25 American dollars each, and you leave right now."
"Sorry, Ahmad," we said, "But it's the same problem as before, we just don't have the money." He nodded and said okay. As he was getting up to leave, we asked again about that hotel room. "Oh yes," he said, "I will take care of zat right away."

Two hours later, we are sitting in the same seats in the waiting area. Other EgyptAir employees have been calling people by their destinations, taking them to their complimentary hotel rooms. We have heard nothing about us, about anyone going to Casablanca. We have not seen Ahmad since his last promise to us two hours ago.

Around 12:15 Ahmad walks into the waiting area. He's not wearing his suit jacket, however, and he doesn't make eye contact with anybody in the room. He's carrying a sandwich. He proceeds to eat it. He finishes at 12:45. He gets up and leaves.

A few minutes after he leaves, I find Ahmad and ask him about that hotel room he said he was going to work out for us.
"Oh yes," he says, his shoulders slack in their disinterest. "Well, you see, zat is not my department. You must go over to zat desk right zere."

Tony Peeks Under His Own Hood

2009-01-09T09:00:00.004-05:00

Sometimes I wish I'd studied something in college a little more practical than English. Like physics, or some short-bus version of engineering, or biology. Although, I doubt I could biologize, or physicize or even engineer as easily and readily as I can write. Maybe it's not such a big deal that I don't write as much as I think I should. What do physics majors do with their free time? I'd probably juggle a lot, to admire gravity. Or shoot a hose at a high arc, google-eyed and slouch-jawed about the molecular structure of water, which really is probably the most pleasurable thing I can think to watch.

Or maybe another language, studied in detail, till the point of fluency. I speak French pretty well, and I have enough interest in it that I know I'll speak it pretty well for a long time after I'm done using it in Africa. Honestly, I'll probably speak better French when I leave here. I try to read novels in French sometimes, and I get them, I understand them for the most part, but I never get that suck-in-your-breath feeling like when I read DFW or Jonathon Safran Foer or Saul Bellow. But I'd like to, you see.

And then there's all the kinds of handy skills I wish I knew. Horse-shoeing, metal-working, complex carpentry, even plumbing or being an electrician. And what about brick masonry?

I feel like if I were younger, still influenced by the Romantics, still taking myself way too seriously (it's actually pretty embarassing how seriously I took myself from, like, 10-16; it got better after that, but I'm still a bit of a self-important weirdo), I'd consider all these desires as an indication of the question, "Who am I?" But, you know, I feel pretty comfortable with who I am. I've got a good grasp on that, like an old woman gripping her morning mug. I just want to make the me that's here and now a better person for whatever might come up in the future.

Also, I'd like to be the kind of guy who can reference a funny anecdote whenever the occasion calls. Like when people interviewed Kurt Vonnegut, and instead of responding directly to their questions he'd say, "Well, you've heard about the man who fell off a cliff, right...?" Or something like that.

You want to know how to tell if a friend of yours is a genuine person? Feed them a Sloppy Joe. The cleaner their hands at the end of the meal, the less you can trust them. That's a fact. Like, right now, I'm eating a sandwich while typing this, and let me tell you, it's hard to see my shirt through the breadcrumbs. I'm a man who keeps his word.

Speaking of Kurt Vonnegut interviews, I just read an old one I found on McSweeney's, and the interviewer mentioned a movie in which the afterlife was individualized, with every person reliving one memory, just one, for the rest of eternity. Vonnegut said his would be this:

"I think it would be the moment where I was doing everything right, where I was beyond criticism. It was back in World War II. It was snowing, but everything was black. The trucks were rolling in. I was surrounded by my buddies. And my rifle was between my knees, my helmet on my head. I was ready for anything. And I was right where I belonged. That would be the moment. It would have to be the moment."

What would my moment be, if I had to choose right now? I can't think of a specific year, but it would have to be one of the many Fourth of July corn roasts at the Lake. What would yours be?

Passing Thoughts

2009-01-07T08:08:00.006-05:00

On Saturday I go to Spain with the gf. To meet the parents. I'm in Lome now, getting my Ghana visa. We're flying out of Ghana. Into Cairo. Layover. Into Casablanca. From there, if all works out, the midnight train to Tangiers, and then the seven-thirty ferry to Tarifa. Where the parents will be waiting with a rented car, not likely red of color, eating tapas in the shadow of a church next door to the restaurant.

Tim and I have been emailing dreams. How we'll make money once I get back home so that we can go to Japan. The book he wants to write, how he wants me to be a part of it. It's a travel book. I told him I'm in. I haven't told him that travelling abroad secretly scares me. Visas and passports and WHO cards with all the proper vaccinations. The conversion of money, the unknown market prices. Some people tell me that travelling in West Africa is harder than in other places. I wish I could be comfortable knowing there are things I don't want to do. But I just feel a kind of personal weakness.

Have you heard? I am having a wedding. With the gf. The dowry is: two bottles of sodabe, four bottles of whiskey, a case of beer. My host mother wanted to get it town to just two bottles of whiskey. The gf thinks she's worth all four. Maybe five.

At the Ghanaian Embassy, two middle-aged Canadian missionaries were filling out visa applications. I said, "Hello, fellow North Americans." The man, looking out of place in Africa in a baby-duck yellow polo, said, "We're from Canada actually, but close enough." I think he misheard me. The wife was nicer.

I walked from the Embassy back to the Bureau. That's a taxi ride of about 800 F CFA. That's pretty far, for a white kid. Or so they tell me.

The thing I most want to do in Spain is to go bowling.

Monday night, before leaving village, Lidao and Adele came to hang out with me before I left. I had to grade papers, so I set up my little laptop and put on Kung Fu Panda. Theo came in shortly after. I couldn't concentrate on grading. I kept looking at the backs of those little black heads as they shook with laughter. They were beautiful.

Maman and Daniel

2008-12-26T11:53:00.004-05:00

When I was helping with the training group in Agou at the end of November, I didn't go eat as often with Maman and Daniel as I had when I was there in October. I'd gotten a little sick last time, and by the end of the week wasn't eating any of the food that Maman was preparing, so this time I didn't want her to waste anything on me. Nonetheless, I would go over there when I could. Daniel was out and about most of the time, or wandering around the courtyard searching for something he wasn't sure he'd lost. I helped Maman make the couscous she served me one Tuesday, and when I couldn't find an egg sandwich on the side of the road, she insisted one night that I buy the necessary ingredients so she could make it for me at the house. She really is a great mother.

I've recently come to enjoy fufu, the pounded yam dish that is a staple of the Togolese diet. A few days before we were to leave Nyogbo for the swear-in in Lome, I asked Maman to prepare it for me. She says she'd eat fufu every meal of every day if she could, so I wanted her to eat with me, instead of just serving me my couscous or salad at the table and then retreating to the kitchen to make her own lunch. Okay, she said, and we agreed on the next day.

She let me pound the yams along with Daniel and the little girl she took in shortly after Gerson died. When it was done and the sauce was hot, she scooped blobs of the white pasty yams into aluminum bowls and poured the sauce all over it.

We sat in the mini courtyard in front of the kitchen, in the shade of the overhanging tin roof. Daniel was off playing in the abandoned church next door, the little girl was washing some clothes in the yard, and the trainee was studying in his room. We ate in silence at first, my fingers burning against the sauce, my tongue scalded by the chicken. It was delicious.

It's not a Togolese habit to talk and eat at the same time, but Maman knows me well enough to humor me with conversation. She's a lively discussionist, her face a panoply of expressions. We were probably talking about the training, the upcoming departure, my work in village. Whereas before it was I who would steer the conversation towards Gerson's death, this time Maman picked up the thread.

"I still don't know why he died," she said. Her confusion is both physical and existential. The doctors have been unable to tell her what killed Gerson; she cannot understand why God would take such a good man so soon.

"They say," I said, "that only the good die young." It was weak, but I had nothing else. "Maybe God takes the best of us early because he needs them with him."

She didn't like the explanation any more than I did. "He had so much left to do here," she said. Then, in a voice a little more broken: "Why would he leave me?" I didn't look up to see if there were tears in her eyes, but I heard the sniffles.

"I don't know, Maman. But he was a good man. We were the ones lucky enough to be here with him. We have to remember that." My eyes were moist now, too. Maman wiped her nose silently on her apron.

"I worry about Daniel," she said. "He doesn't want to study. He doesn't want to go to school. I tell him to go to his uncle's house during the breaks, but he refuses."

"He's afraid to leave you. He's afraid he might lose you too."

"He used to be first or second in his class. Every year. But now he doesn't care. I said, 'Daniel, why have your grades fallen?' He says because now that Papa has died, no one will buy him a bike if he gets first, so he doesn't try. He's looking for his father, and he knows that he won't find him."

"Maman," I said, and I looked up at her. "You don't need to worry about Daniel. He's a good kid. A great kid. And I know this for two reasons: he had a great father; and he still has a great mother."

She was no longer sniffling. Her face was constricted, as though she were slightly in pain. She was looking away from me, into the fronds of a palm tree behind us. Her voice was shaky now.

"Lately I've been waking up at night from my dreams. In each one I'm some place I don't recognize. I'm surrounded by people I don't know. I get scared, and in the dreams I start to cry. I go into a corner to try to hide, and I hide my head in my hands, wanting to escape. And then I hear a voice calling 'Maman, Maman!' I see Daniel. He's waving at me, running toward me. And I know that he's coming to protect me."

We finished our meal in silence, and I helped Maman with the dishes. "Do you want me to get you some plantains for when you leave again?" she asked.

"No, Maman. Then I won't have an excuse to come back here and eat with you."

"You need an excuse to come back here?" She looked at me with her not-really-insulted smile.

"Never, Maman," I smiled, "Never."

AIDS Ride

2008-10-25T16:38:00.003-04:00

On the last day of biking for AIDS Ride Centrale, both teams headed from Wassarabo to Agoulu, stopping in one village each along the way for a morning sensibilisation. The road was hilly and rocky and beautiful, and some of the bikers had to walk up the hills. Those that pedaled up stopped at the top for breath. Going down the hills was absolute, wonderful terror.

AIDS Ride consists of groups of volunteers and Togolese counterparts riding to hard-to-find villages and giving sensibilisations about AIDS prevention. Each region coordinates their own routes, and how they'll perform every sensibilisation, but we all do it the same week. Funded by two organizations here in Togo, we were 'required' to sensibilise at least two hundred people at every village, the majority of them from the target demographic, which group is obvious when I tell you that we handed out lots and lots and fucking lots of condoms. It was tons of fun.

The two Centrale teams ate together almost every meal every day, but we rode to different villages to maximize the number of sensibilisations per day. Each group did one in the morning, one in the afternoon, with the time between spent biking or eating.

On Wednesday, orange team did a morning sensibilisation in a Muslim village (no alcohol), and then headed two kilometers down the road to our village for the afternoon, where there was, while not a bar, a small boutique with Flag beer and a fridge. We ordered some beers, and sat under the big ugly tree in the center of village, where in two hours we would do our afternoon performance.

Depending on the day, I either hate kids in this country or love them. As I rolled up under the tree on my bike, a group of about twenty kids had gathered round the rest of the volunteers already seated on straw mats on the ground. One of the easiest ways to amuse ourselves in this country is by chasing little kids, so I rode straight into the group, dispersing them, and then hunted one down to give him a pat on the head. The fear in his eyes was entirely real, and the laughter of the men and women sitting on the fringes of the public square echoed between the mud walls of houses.

One rule of thumb when dealing with kids is to never pay attention to them if you want them to go away. Thanks to my little pursuit on the bike, the group had swelled to at least fifty kids. I opened my beer, and saw several little ones smiling and pointing at me, so I casually got up and then chased them on foot, capturing one, who was crying when I reached him. This, naturally, made even more kids want to come around. By the time I reached my mat and took another sip, there were well over a hundred children encircling us.

It's a feeling I always hate, even if I provoke it: being trapped by children, stared at like a zoo animal. They smile and laugh and call us Whitey, they point and imitate and ask each other questions, but the moment you approach them, no matter how calm your walk or benign your intentions, they scatter in utter fear. I've seen kids too scared to even run properly, and in the melee they stumble, nearly trampled by their peers, while the very white man he or she was running from comes over to pick him up and dust him off.

I decided I would no longer chase the children, so as they crept closer and closer to us, I tried calling them over. Only one was brave enough to come, and when I shook his hand the rest of the kids giggled. I get a real kick out of speaking to them in English, so I started telling the kid a knock knock joke. He started repeating me, and did pretty well with it, especially the word "banana." I noticed other kids in the crowd mouthing along, wanting to get special attention as well. I started the joke again, indicating to all the kids to repeat, which they did. Call it a simple pleasure, but that was one of the funniest things I'd heard in a while, and I was so giddy when they finished that I just had to chase them again.

Since white people can hold a kid's interest for hours, we decided to change the strategy from trying to run them off to trying to wear them out enough to go home. Another volunteer taught them freeze tag; I taught them the hand jive; we played a rousing round of the Hokey-Pokey; the freeze tag guy, Marcus, taught them Red Light Green Light, which they didn't understand at all; at the end, just as the hour of our sensibilisation approached, Marcus just started clapping his hands, trying to work them into different rhythms. When syncopation failed, he went with the classic Queen stomp-stomp-clap. By the end he had all the kids singing "We will rock you."

Things have been going well for me here, and AIDS Ride was amazing in all its aspects, and that afternoon with the kids gave me enough happy memories to last for a little while now. School has started again, and I'm much better prepared for it this year. I'm teaching the kids how to write expository and persuasive essays, so that they can articulately express the concepts they learn in class. Tomorrow I head off to Agou, to spend a week with the trainees. I saw the gf for her birthday, and we 'celebrated' our one-year-together mark on the twentieth, while she was sleeping in a dispensary in some small village and I was sinking into the cushions of a couch at the volunteer's house in Tchamba. There exist every day small and large frustrations, and the desire to get this second year over and done with is big. But I understand things better now, I'm more patient, less influenced by smooth talkers, and I've begun cutting my own hair. Things have, if not gone on the upswing, at least levelled off. I'm hoping to keep this up for awhile.

p.s.
I haven't written any letters at all in a long long while, so to those who think I've forgotten about them I say "Nay." You are just as loved and missed as before.

A Brief Entry on Health, With No Theme

2008-09-18T12:24:00.007-04:00

Yesterday, instead of going to the Embassy to meet with the relevant secretary, I spent pretty much all day sleeping on the couch in the volunteer lounge, or shitting out my guts in the volunteer lounge bathroom. Whereas in the States, bodily waste is either number 1 or number 2, here in PC/Togo we have 1,2,3, and 4. The first two are the same; 3 is when you don't so much shit as you piss out your ass; 4, which is more common than I care to reflect upon, is when you both shit (either type-2 or type-3) and puke at the same time. Yesterday I held steady at number 3. This was accompanied by extreme abdominal pain, extreme headache, extreme nausea, and general weakness that left me either unable to get up or on the brink of fainting every time I did.

Today, however, I am fine.

In terms of health, I'm probably one of the most resilient volunteers here in Togo. There are other volunteers who rarely get ill, and when they do their illnesses last only for the short term, and require little medication but lots of rest. There are also those who have had no health problems but who then become gravely, frighteningly ill.

I can't really accurately say what the average health/sickness cycle is for most volunteers, because many of the illnesses (amoebas, giardia, other shit living intestinally) last for a long time (often due to lack of treatment due to unwillingness on volunteers' part to go to the med unit) and become part of the daily ignorable routine. I do know, however, that my girlfriend gets 'sick enough' about once every month or so. Not so sick that she has to be rushed down to Lome, but sick enough that she's in pain/on the toilet for more than one day in a row. Not to reveal anything too personal, but she was the first person to define number 4 for us, from experience.

So I consider myself lucky, when it comes to health. The sickest I've ever been was the night of a cluster-mate's going away party. The four of us in the cluster got matching bubus, with are like mumus, and then had ourselves a beer and tchouk crawl. I personally drank 3 liters, 30 centileters of beer, and three calabashes of tchouk (chugged; we were racing against some Togolese dudes at the tchouk stand). Needless to say, the rest of the night was immemorable.

My relatively good health here in Togo, in conjuction with my capable language abilities, often leaves me (usually while sitting at a bar) thinking to myself that, yes, I can handle being overseas. I can survive living in Togo, or another part of Africa, or even a place a little more 'accepting' of my skin color. But right after I have this thought, I realize that I don't want to survive in these countries, I want to go home. This always leaves me feeling slightly guilty.

Guilty because it brings up the questions that I sort of addressed in the last post, about privilege and luxury and all the aspects of zero-sum theory, which, at its most basic, says that one cannot have without depriving another. My good life in the States must is directly correlated to the poor life of someone somewhere else. If I'm totally wrong on my interpretation of zero-sum, I apologize, and would look forward to explanations helping me understand it further.

I try not to let the guilt overtake me. Dave Eggers wrote, in, I believe, You Shall Know Our Velocity!, though it might have been AHWOSG, that being born into privilege (in my case, white middle class in the United States) is so far beyond the choice or guidance of the individual that to feel guilty is useless. What are you going to do, give away everything you have, become poor and suffering on the side of the street? Sure, you could, but being a semi-utilitarian, I think you should never throw away the opportunities you already have. After all, my privilege has brought me to Africa, in an attempt to help an apathetic populace (my remarks are very editorial), which most people would say is a good thing, which deep down I still believe has merit and value, despite the reality that I've seen here face to face.

The other thing that eases my guilt is the simple and plain fact that I love the United States. Geographicall, socially, politically (despite some really frustrating shit), and emotionally. I am not a European, or an Asian, or an African, I am an American. It's weird how I'm just now beginning to get comfortable with that. When I was young (like, 22 and below) I thought so highly of people who spent long stretches of time living overseas. I thought that any capable, intelligent person would not only be able to live in a foreign country, but would choose to do so, and that those who could not, or would not were missing some key element in their lives. I no longer hold the expats in such high regard (though neither do I fault them; to each his own). It's both humbling and comforting to realize how important my life in the States is to me, and that I don't ever want to let it go again.

Je suis dumbass

2008-09-18T12:24:00.006-04:00

Also, I just found out that 'quotidian' is an English word used much like the French word 'quotidienne', which I misspelled in the email post.

An Email to My Friend, Which I Decided to Share With You All, Except for the Juicy Parts

2008-09-16T12:44:00.003-04:00

I've been away from my village for sixteen days now, and I'm loving it. Kara, Lome, Agou, Atakpame, and now back in Lome. I don't really want to go back, to have to start again teaching sixty kids to a class, with their inability to spell or form complete sentences. But the money won't last me here in Lome, and as much as I hate my village, I suppose I'm committed to helping them out. After all, it's only one more year.

I hate to harp on things, even, if not especially, good things, but our AIM conversation the other week really pumped my spirits up, and I guess this little email is my attempt to carry on a conversation with you again.

I'm alone in the Peace Corps bureau, which is rare. There is a volunteer lounge, most definitely the filthiest part of the building, because sometimes upwards of fifteen or twenty volunteers occupy it at one time. There are couches, filled bookshelves, a water cooler, bathroom with a shower, and a computer room, as well as sixty or so lockable cubby holes that volunteers countrywide use to store Lome-usable-only items. On the coffee table at the center of the square of couches is an internet hub that those with laptops use since the two computers in the computer room are almost always occupied. At least, that's how it's been every day I've ever been in here, until today.

I'm not in town just to dick around, though most of my time is spent doing just that. Yesterday I got some information about funding sources for a palm plantation I'm trying to get started, and I touched base with my boss about revamping the technical information binder that every volunteer in my program gets, in preparation for the new group of trainees, who arrive Saturday.

So, this morning one of the tech. trainers and I went over the binder, pulled out what was useless, added what was missing, made the necessary recopies and adjustments, and then by two o'clock sent the final product to the general secretary so that he could ship it off to the printers before the week is out. Tomorrow I have an appointment at 9 a.m. at the U.S. Embassy to have the palm plantation project proposal 'edited' by the woman who reviews them for the ambassador, and then I'll spend the afternoon sending out requests for funds from private donors, because I'm almost positive that the villagers won't get the amount of money they've asked for from the Embassy. And then Friday I'll head back up to village and start teaching again. I'll have two breaks, the last week of October and the last week of November, when I'll be at the training site, teaching the young 'uns about Togo's educational system, and approaches we can take to implement environmental education into the curriculum.

If that sounds exciting, maybe it is, but for me there will still be plenty hours of boredom in between the occasional one or two hours of real work each day.

As you went through life did you ever ask yourself the question, When will I really grow up? You get your driver's license and think, this must be it, this is responsibility; but then you hit eighteen and graduate high school, and realize that this time it's for real, that is until twenty-one comes along, and then a year later college is over and now, really, this time you know you're a competent, knowledgeable adult. But time goes on and your confidence in this conviction rises and falls, is one day at one end of the spectrum, another day at the other end, passing back and forth like a sunflower following the sun. So you sign up for something responsible, like a job, or the Peace Corps, saying to yourself that now you'll take the time to really think about the future, to put off adulthood with this little excursion, that once this is done you'll be ready to accept whatever comes your way, no surprises, but then--well, i'm still in the middle of this last part, so I don't really know what comes next.

One of my favorite authors recently died. It was a suicide, hanging. Obviously, I never knew him, but you know what it's like when you really admire somebody, someone who, through every piece of writing, every interview, every televised reading, comes off as one of the most genuine people you could hope to know. You get sad, and you begin to doubt once again what you thought was a sure thing, no matter how simple. For someone who has given up religion, it shares whispers and shadows of the kind of mental devastation that comes with a loss of faith. I'm not incapable of continuing to believe in his writing, but now every time I read something he wrote, I'm going to interpret that curiosity and penchant for minutiae as the search for some kind of truth, a search not desperate, but casual, accepted, like a blind woman's gentle hands on your face, feeling out your features. He wrote a lot for Harper's Magazine, and right now they're offering an in memoriam of all his articles they published, so my time will be long occupied with that while I'm still here in Lome. If you want to check it out, go to http://harpers.org/archive/2008/09/hbc-90003557. I recommend reading, at the very least, Ticket to the Fair, about the Illinois State Fair. It's absolutely hilarious.

What really gets to me, though, is that I would consider myself searching for the same kind of thing I imagine he searched for. A reason, unbreakable and without caveat, to believe in humanity, and purpose to the universe. He believed in God, though I don't know exactly how, and even though I believe in a thing you could call God, I still think that he's not the answer to the worth of all that he has laid bare before us. I wasn't planning on finding any solution in my time, but I was buckling in for what I figured would be, as most would probably glean from his writing, an amusing and wacky journey into the quotidenne, which is French for 'daily,' and I'm sure used as incorrectly as its English equivalent would have been in that sentence. So if someone as intelligent, capable, and seemingly comfortable as DFW was unable to find anything to keep him around, I worry about the eventual fruits of my future labor. Granted, according the newspapers, his problem may have been chemical, as he was on anti-depressants for many years, and I, fortunately, can disengage myself enough from disappointment and frustration that I could never be honestly labelled as 'depressive'. But that's kind of what bugs me, too. It's kind of like that blog post I wrote a while ago, about how you have to leave behind your thoughts to be happy, and if that's the kind of existence you have to lead, then why lead it? That post was in a very Togo-specific setting, but when I think about how in the States I can think all I want and still be fine, then I wonder about luxury and excess being the breeding ground for idle thoughts, and the injustice of the world, the zero-sum game of resources and development, racism, jingoism, obesity, genocide, teen pregnancy, famine, global warming, injustice--and then I take a deep breath before I pass out, and search for a bar.

I Believe in You

2008-09-15T06:33:00.005-04:00

Maman had heard we were coming, but she hadn't the credit to call me and confirm it. When the Peace Corps van rolled into Nyogbo, Maman was at the end of the driveway, standing behind a table containing bowls, colognes, and expensive woven shirts. I waved to her, and she stared at me, which I always take to mean, "Oh, really, so you're back now?" but which I like to think is just Maman's way of saying, "You're home, and this is good, this is what normal should be."

Catching up started as it always does; I complained about my village, Maman gave out the locations and status of my host-siblings, all away on summer break except Daniel. Daniel was shy at first, like he was at the funeral, but he remembered me, and after some minimal prodding he was showing me the completed pages of the coloring book I'd brought for him a year ago, as well as his new cat, Chance. "Tony, regardes." He picked Chance up by her back, turned her upside down, and without hesitation threw the cat feet up into the air. When she landed on her feet and tried to slink away, he laughed and grabbed her and repeated the trick six or seven more times. Daniel's smile is more space than teeth.

We were in town for just three days, designing the training program for the new group coming soon. I'll be teaching them about the joys of working in the Togolese school system. Yippee. Because we were there as volunteer trainers and not trainees, we slept at the tech house, and not with our host families. Many of us ate from fufu stands along the road, or grabbed cent francs of koliko and fried plantains. Aside from a communal trip to a fancy restaurant in the nearby bigger town, and pizza night at Edith's house, I ate every meal with Maman and Daniel. Couscous with fried chicken and veggies; rice and tuna spaghetti sauce; koliko and fried plantains with spaghetti and chicken; etc.

Meal time was Our Time during training. If I wasn't helping prepare (they only let me do that rarely), I was always sitting on a small stool in the kitchen, talking to Maman, Kommi, and Angel while they cooked, playing with Daniel while we waited to eat. Then, because the children ate apart from us, and Papa usually enjoyed his meals in the living room, Maman and I would sit across from each other at the table and go over the day's events. This visit, things were no different, except, of course, that Papa was not there.

I'd been wanting to ask her about how she's been since his death, but didn't know how to approach the subject. On our last day in town, eating the spaghetti she'd prepared for me the night before, not knowing that I was at the fancy restaurant, I saw an in to the subject and took it. "Since he died, I don't understand anything," she said. Well, I said, all we can do is keep living. God knows his affairs.

It was at this last comment, a common one in Togo, that she looked up. She seemed tired, like a person who has finally settled for an argument by giving up her side completely. "Do you believe that?" she asked. "I guess I have to," I said. She stared at her plate, resigned, and said simply, "Oh."

One of our big lunchtime discussions during training had been about religion. Maman had pried out of me that I didn't go to any church, and that this was a conscious decision. We had a conversation eerily reminiscent of one my grandmother and I had had years ago, and almost as reassuring. God was what she loved, church was just the easiest way to get to him sometimes.

The distance between these two conversations is a long and disturbing whisper. I don't believe in religion, but I believe in Faith, in the comfort and necessity of believing in something beyond yourself. Often, we rely on this Faith, attribute to it powers, make it divine, expect it to let things ride when all is well, and to support us when times are hard. It is there to explain the inexplicable. When it can't, there is no hope, simply devastation.

DFW, 1962-2008

2008-09-15T06:08:00.002-04:00

David Foster Wallace is dead.

There's the old cliche which has now reared its head with the news of his death: "His writing meant so much to me." I can't see any way to get around that.

It was just so damn good. I've recommended him to anybody I've ever met who likes writing.

I'd like to write more, but I never knew him beyond his writing, and I think speculation on his final thoughts (which I can't help but to do) would be grotesque and insensitive to put in writing on a fan's stupid blog.

Read him.

So Shines a Good Deed in a Weary World

2008-07-07T03:04:00.008-04:00

Gene Wilder is a genius. On my two most recent trips to the regional transit house, I've watched the old Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. I love the song "Pure Imagination." My favorite scene is the one I hated most as a child: on the boat, going through the tunnel, images of insects crawling across people's faces, of a chicken being decapitated; Wonka reciting, at first calmly and lyrically, but then hysterically, madly:

There's no earthly way of knowing
Which direction we are going
There's no knowing where we're rowing
Or which way the river's flowing
Is it raining?
Is it snowing?
Is a hurricane a-blowing?
Not a speck of light is showing
So the danger must be growing
Are the fires of hell a-glowing?
Is the grisly reaper mowing?
Yes, the danger must be growing
'Cause the rowers keep on rowing
And they're certainly not showing
Any signs that they are slowing

Absolute madness. In one of the next scenes everyone (save the chocolate-drinking German boy and his mother) is passing through a room with strips of fruit-patterned lickable wallpaper. Wonka is giddy as a child. "The strawberries taste like strawberries! The snozzberries taste like snozzberries!" Veruca Salt, the little bitch, turns to Wonka and says, "Snozzberries? Who ever heard of a snozzberry?" Wonka grabs her spoiled little face by the cheeks and says "We are the music makers, and we are the dreamers of dreams."

I've taught the children card games. Togolese kids are absolute murder to a deck of cards, but I won't begrudge them a little over-enthusiasm as long as they're having fun. They've learned Egyptian Rat Screwer, and two forms of Speed, and they play them remarkably well. In turn, I've learned the game Huit Americaines, which is a bit confusing at first, but lots of fun. We often all play together under the paillote, sitting at old school desks in various stages of disintegration. The chickens run around the yard, stalking beneath our feet for discarded peanut shells. The women of the compound prepare meals, or serve tchouk, or sit and watch. When somebody new wants to learn, I have the kids teach them. Nowadays both the women in my compound and even a local pastor can sometimes be found sitting on a small stool in a circle of children, slapping doubles, and sweeping up cards.

The first day that the kids learned to play, one of the professors at the primary school came over with some friends to drink. I am not a fan of this man. Two wives, ten children, overweight, and unfunny. The boys were playing as he sat down, callabash in hand. Adele, who had just served him, came back under the paillote to get into the game. "What's she doing?" the fat man said. "She doesn't know how to play." This man often walks into my house without knocking, and his idea of a joke is to tell me he's going to sleep with my girlfriend. "She knows how to play," I said. "C'est toi qui ne sais rien." Adele slapped in, and won the game.

It sounds crazy to make this connection, but I believe that the card games have given Adele more self-confidence. She smiles more often, and won't let the boys cheat her when they play. I haven't even seen her get hit in a long time. She still gets yelled at occasionally, but no more so than the boys. And when the brat cries, he's left to cry.

Even the village seems to be nicer. Recently, a middle-aged man was watching the kids play, and when the game was finished, he took the cards to teach them another game. It was a partners game, and he put two of the boys together, and set Adele at his side. Many of the things I wish to describe seem so lame in words, but imagine if you can, the impact of this move. With the man as her partner, Adele came into a position of power. Not a significant position, and you could argue that it didn't continue following the end of the game. But whereas a week ago somebody was saying she didn't know a thing about cards, now somebody took the time to teach her, and declare her, by making her his partner, his equal. I only wish the first asshole had been there to see it.

On occasion I get five or ten francs pieces as change, usually when making a photocopy. They're annoying to have because there's little you can do with them except buy candy. Therefore, I usually save them until a night when I need something from the boutique across the street but am too lazy to go over myself. I'll call a kid over, give him/her the money for the spaghetti or soap or whatever, and then squeeze a ten francs piece into his/her hand. They usually buy the milk candies, little white chewy squares without much flavor, but which are still delicious.

A few weeks ago I'd promised Adele that, since I hadn't brought her anything back from my little trip (I went to Atakpame, or Sokode, or someplace; everybody asks you to bring them something back, it's a cultural thing), I'd get her a sucker from the boutique, which is a whopping twenty-five francs a pop. For some reason I'd never found the time to sneak her the money without the other kids seeing it, or to go myself and get her one. Last Tuesday she was hanging out, doing nothing, and she asked when we could go and get the bonbon (candy). Let's go now, I said.

We looked all over the shelves of the boutique, on the front counter, in the clear buckets, but the suckers were nowhere. "Ils sont finis," the owner said. We had thirty francs on us, so we bought six milk candies instead. "Now," I said to Adele as we walked back home, "I'm going to take one, because I'm hungry. That leaves five. You can share them if you like, or you can have them all to yourself, but if you do that, just make sure you keep them in your pocket so the others don't get jealous." Naturally, I assumed and expected her to keep them for secret treats at night.

We continued in silence, the air sharp and delicious with the scent of the lime trees along the path. After a moment, Adele handed me another candy. "What's this for?" I said. "I want you to have another," she said, "and then I'll give one to Lidao, one to Theo, one to Maman, and keep one for myself." She stored three in her pocket, and took the one she'd reserved for herself, unwrapping it carefully, and bit into it deliberately, neither devouring it, nor savoring it. Her eyes wandered over the corn in the field, the women at the water pump, the fruits hanging from the baobab, and when she looked at me, her mouth broke into her shy smile and she giggled. And let me tell you, I could have stayed right there with her forever.

Il y a la fatigue

2008-07-06T09:57:00.002-04:00

How are things, you crazy Americans?
Things here? Okay, I guess.
Don't really feel like talking.
Going to Europe soon, I hope.
Ready to get out of Togo for a bit.
Have stories to tell.
But don't want to write them now.
Au revoir.

Hugs and Kisses

2008-06-09T12:04:00.002-04:00

Tomorrow, my little brother and sister will turn seventeen. They have jobs and drivers licenses and interests in the other sex. They will be seniors in high school come August. This all freaks me out just a little.

After giving birth, Mom was laid up in bed, exhausted and whatever else women are after having twins. I was six years old. I'd just finished kindergarten, was going to start first grade in the fall. I don't know what Gaetano was doing with his time. Dad, obviouly, was at work.

Mom and Dad had decided to use reusable cloth diapers from a service in lieu of the disposable ones they'd had for Gaetano and me. I don't know if it was the diaper service or the hospital who'd given it, but as I was wandering one day, alone as far as I can remember, bored because those tiny human apostrophes were sleeping, I found an instructional video. How to strap the baby seat in the car. How to burp, I think. And how to fold the cloth diapers.

I guess this is the long of way of telling you that I was the first one at home to change Nick and Anna's diapers. I remember teaching Mom how to do it. Honestly, for all I know, Mom and Dad had done it before and were humoring me, or maybe I just don't remember this well at all. But anyway.

We pushed them around in a twins stroller, a long basket in which they could both lay down. It was a light sky blue, the color you see behind wispy clouds. There was a mosquito net. I remember a day many years later when we all gathered to look at that stroller, and nobody could comprehend how those two were ever tiny enough to fit inside. I still can't imagine it.

We have pictures of their first birthday, when Nick blietzkrieged his cake and Anna negotiated with hers like a one-year old Neville Chamberlain.

I look at recent photos of them, remembering their dirty and dainty birthday faces, and can't help but wonder what the hell's been going on in the past sixteen years that made them decide to grow up.

Anna is still short. When I was in college, if, when I would call home, Anna answered, conversations were often like this:

Hello?
Hey, kiddo, how's it going?
Good.
Still short?
Yup.
Alright. That's all I needed, talk to you later.

One time she actually said, "Okay," and hung up on me.

Nick is gangly; skinny, but muscling out (at least since the last time I saw him). He and I used to lean on the counter in front of the answering machine, thinking of stupid shit to record. If you called us anytime in the past five or six years, you probably heard some of it.

The point is, seventeen is no longer a little kid, though it's not the adult they think it is. But for some reason, no matter how big they get (save Anna), they are always, in some way or another, the tiny little babies sitting in that stroller, in diapers I likely folded around them.

I love those kids. I once made a list of the people in my life I loved the most. Number one was Grandma. Tied for second were those two.

Happy birthday, kiddos. I miss you like hell, and then some.

In the Ground, On the Mind

2008-06-09T08:03:00.004-04:00

Land disputes led me to essentially abandon the field for about two weeks. The president of the community development committee, the group that had given me the land, croaked his way through an angry explanation. I've never really been able to understand him, and it's worse when he's pissed. He said he'd put sticks in the ground at each of the four corners of my field. He said the quantity of land would not be diminished.

Last Monday my homologue took me to the president's farm, since we hadn't been able to catch him at the house. He took us, speaking only in Kabye, to where my land was. There were no sticks. The size had been cut by more than half. He showed us the northeastern corner. "Where are the other limits?" I asked. He waved his hand in a southerly direction and spoke in Kabye. "What'd he say?" I asked my homologue. "Over there, over there."

The next day I went to the director of the CEG to ask him for several students to help me cultivate. What followed was a patronizing conversation about just what the hell did I think I was doing out there? If the village gave me the land, the villagers should help me. If the students are going to be cultivating, the school must receive the harvest. But, wait. I must not have understood, he said.

After twenty-five minutes of calling in other professors--all whom bitch about the director as much as I do--to agree with him, I finally understood that he was asking me just what would happen with the trees I was planting after I leave. You know, a year and a half from now. I don't know, I told him. I guess that's your problem, not mine. He wasn't buying that.

In the end, I got the students. They worked, turning up the earth and sweating and talking about me in Kabye. They worked through the rain. They worked till an hour before dark, and then we left.

I spent all of Thursday and Friday in the field, sowing seed. Rows of trees, rows of corn, a few sunflowers. Tapping small holes in the dirt with a branch I cut from a tree in the field. Throwing in two or three seeds, tapping the dirt back into the hole. Friday night I could barely move my wrist. My skin was more red than brown, hot to the touch. My eyes felt sunburned. Next week I have to finish the second half.

Had this been a few weeks ago, the president and the director would have pissed me off to no end. Maybe it's the new medication, maybe it's realizing that these assholes will always stand in the way of my work, and there's no way around it. Regardless, I didn't give a shit, and it was nice not to.

A Togolese friend and I were washing my clothes one day. I was quiet, fuming, having been kicked off the very land I was cultivating that morning. Land where I'd transplanted trees, raised seedlings, watched pigs and cows trample and eat my garden beds. "Thoughts," he said, "make a man crazy. Leave the thoughts, hold your sanity." Not too long after that, following several straight days of inebriation, the emotional crisis of a friend, and Papa's funeral, brought me to my regional capital. I took my friend aside, and told him what my clothes-washing Togolese buddy had told me. "Sure," said my friend, "but what kind of life is it, when to enjoy it, you must not think about it?"

He's right, maybe. But I'm not going to ponder on that too much. I want these good days to ride along for awhile.

I don't have everyone's email. That's why there's a blog.

2008-05-22T10:06:00.001-04:00

Here's a mass email. If you didn't get it, I'm too lazy to look up your address. So here you go.

Dear y'all:

I have not written in a while. And now that I am writing, and am using an American keyboard, I keep typing as though it were a French keyboard. "Some" becomes "so;e" and my name looks like Qnthony. If I wanted to type "wezelo," the Ewe word for welcome, it would be "zewelo." Those French are loony.

That notion is reinforced by the story I found in the "Readings in Intermediate French Prose" book I liberated from the essentially abandoned library in village. It's clearly a donated book, published sometime in the 60s. It was in between a history of the United States (in French), and old homework assignments past volunteers assigned to kids. All was surrounded by rat shit.

I've been reading this book to improve my French, obviously. I learned the word "desespoir," the opposite of "espoir;" the latter also has its synonym "esperance" (they both mean 'hope,' though espoir is masculine and esperance is feminine; please excuse any lack of accents). Within this book I found a story of a Frenchman who decided that too many people died on shipwrecks. After months of research into the nutritional content of seaweed, the amount of ocean water you can drink, etc., the maniac set off in a rubber raft with a bottle of water, some string, a knife, and a hook. He lived.

I decided to read this story to my troisieme class, to give them an example of the importance of being well-acquainted with the environment. I sent three kids home early, and stopped reading to make the kids put their heads down on the desk. I hate teaching.

That's the real reason I haven't been writing. The truth is I've been miserably depressed for about a month now. The only things I have to write about are my frustrations, and I was tired of sending out letters like that; they made me even more depressed.

To cap off this month, I'm going back to Agou-Nyogbo, the village where we trained. That really is a beautiful place, and I did love it there. During our Thanksgiving field trip the girls made a superlatives list, and we all voted. I was elected Most Likely to be Adopted by my Host Family. Daniel was as much my brother as Gaetano or Nick. My host mom used to call me "TH," for Tony Hadzi (their last name).

But when I called Maman last week to tell her I would stop by to see her, neither of us were too excited. "Ca va?" I asked. "Ca ne va pas," she replied. Papa had died.

While my bond with Maman was as strong as my bond with my real mother, Papa and I were not quite as close. Nevertheless, Papa was a good father, and the only Togolese man I've ever seen horse around with his wife. We used to sit and listen to the radio together, watching soccer on Ghanian television. The day I left Nyogbo for good, he called me into the living room. He looked me in the eye, through his crooked glasses with the prescription sticker still on, and he said, "Tony. Stay healthy. Stay happy. The work will follow from there."

I don't ever ask this, but if you could, whether it be by prayer or some hippie method, send good vibes to Chez HADZI this weekend. Maman is a good woman, with good kids, and she loved her husband as he loved her. They have been the best part of Togo for me, and Papa's death is taking its toll on Maman, and I'm sure the kids as well.

Sorry for the downer email. I'm changing malaria meds, so hopefully the hallucinations and depression will stop. Then I'll be able to write positively "instead of bitching to [my] ever so supportive and beauiful and wonderful girlfriend all the time."** Till then, toodles. I hope you're all doing well.

-Tony

**quote forcefully inserted by said girlfriend

Adele, part two

2008-05-18T13:27:00.000-04:00

The next day was normal. School was cancelled in continuation of the May Day celebrations. I don't remember anything that I did.

Towards evening, the sky clouded up. It had the texture of hand-whipped cream, and the color of a quiet pebble. Monsieur was standing outside the compound. He'd spent the day playing board games beneath the rafia tree. "Que pensez-vous?" I asked. "La pluie va tomber?" He was positive that it would not. I decided that I would not walk to the field to water the trees.

The night before I'd heard Monsieur chastising the boys. It was in Kabye, so I didn't understand it. There was no punishment doled out as far as I could see. Monsieur is a good man, but a product of his culture. Punishing the boys was not necessary. Warning them not to do it again would suffice.

What kills me about the whole thing is that those boys did something terrible to her. Adele is not a crier. I've never seen anybody weather the injustices doled out to her with such dignity or patience. To find her drenched in tears, shaking with sobs, barely able to breathe because of it, I knew whatever happened had been bad. I told this story to a volunteer friend, and she asked if I'm sure hitting her was as far as the boys had gone. I don't want to entertain the notion. Besides, I think those boys are homosexuals.

Back to Friday, the day after. After quizzing Monsieur on the weather I piddle around for a bit in the house. It's tchouk day chez moi, so several of the old men in the community have stopped by to drink. I tell them I'll join them as soon as I take a shower. As I shiver under the first callabash of cistern water, the rain begins to fall.

While I'm inside changing, the boys and Adele are running around the compound, putting buckets in strategic spots to catch the rain water. I close my windows against the wind and head under the paillote to wait out the downpour with the old men. Everybody is under some sort of roof.

Pretty soon the wife of the history professor is yelling across the compound. "Adele! Adele!" A bucket of insufficient size has been placed under the gutter runoff on the roof near their part of the compound. She wants Adele to empty the bucket into the cistern. Adele does not protest, but sprints across the compound and takes care of the job. When she puts the bucket back under the gutter, the wife tells Adele to wait for it to fill up again. She does not invite her inside.

I'm wearing jeans, a sweatshirt, and my fleece jacket, a clothing combination unheard of in this climate, but I'm freezing. Adele is under the gutter; the wind is blowing the rain straight at her. She is dancing, hopping from foot to foot, her hands clasped together across her body, trying to keep warm. Her skirt and thin blouse are completely soaked.

She empties the bucket into the cistern again, places it under the gutter, and continues to wait. Nobody in the compound is paying attention to her but me. She's absolutely freezing. And I decide I hate this place. I hate that a day after what must have been a heartless beating, if not worse, Adele is called out in the rain, tiny and shivering, to empty water from a bucket she did not place into a cistern she will not use. I hate these people and their customs. I hate the mentality that says cultures aren't wrong, just different. I want to wake up Adele one night when she's fallen asleep on the concrete patio, wrap her in a blanket and take her home. I want to give her sisters, and friends, and coloring books, and a day with no chores. I want to save her, but I have no idea how.

As I'm watching her, as guilty as any of the indifferent men under the paillote, I wonder what she's thinking. What she must wish for in the face of a life like this. Then Adele takes a stutter-step running start, and dives on her belly across the smooth concrete porch. She must have slidden ten feet. I can't help but laugh out loud. She gets up, turns to me, and buries her hands in her face. All I hear is the sound of the rain, and her giggles. She smiles at me, checks the bucket. She dives again.

Adele, part one

2008-05-17T12:03:00.004-04:00

She stays with Madame and Monsieur, but she's not part of the family. Eleven years old, the only girl in the compound. She usually walks around in just a skirt, no shirt; she's not developed yet. Her hair, like that of most Togolese children, is close cropped. Her head has a long shape to it in the back, which counterbalances the bulge of her under nourished belly. The scar under her left eye is thick and off-angle, and looks more like an accident than the ritual scars of the others. She is a beautiful girl. Being a guest in the house, she does the majority of cooking, cleaning, and laundry than any of the other kids. She is also the scapegoat when anything goes wrong. Madame frequently smacks her, usually on the back of the head, or on the arms; once across the face that I've seen. The boys pick on her mercilessly. She is forbidden to touch any of their possessions, and they exclude her from most of their activities; or they would, that is, if she wasn't constantly occupied by chores. Sometimes they hit her, too. I had never seen her cry.

The May Day party ended and I went to water the trees. When I came back to the compound, no one was around. The only sound in the air was the static and music blasting from the speakers in the abandoned school building which now houses the mill, and is a favorite site for parties and pick-up soccer. As I came toward the rear of the compound, I heard the rapid hiccough of air that signifies crying. Leaning against the wall near the shower stalls was Adele. Her face and chest were soaked in tears; her body was shaking. I knelt beside her and put a hand on her back. "What happened?" They hit her. "Who?" She wouldn't say. I told her to come sit down with me, have a mango, drink some cold water, calm down. "I can't," she said. "I have to make dinner."

The Moon Was Bright

2008-04-17T16:22:00.006-04:00

It was okay with Sam that I stay over at his place, but when we got back to the compound I decided to make the trek. Only four kilometers back to my village, a heavy moon, nothing to worry about. When I got back to the compound it was near ten o'clock. The other families have stayed up later before, but this was a school night, and the door was locked. Blame it on whoever you choose, but I was never given a key to the front door. Rather than wake my compound-mates, I decide to vault the wall. Not wanting to leave my bike in plain sight by the door, I wheeled it with me to the corner, where it would be hidden. A gap in the roofline provided the perfect place for scaling the wall. I locked the bike, intending to retrieve it in the morning, and placed my hands on the concrete, ready to hoist myself up.

I'm flat on my ass, my back against a tree stump. Despite the dark and the shock I can clearly see half of the concrete wall, about three feet by four feet, lying on top of what used to be the front wheel of my Peace Corps issued bike. I telephone Lao. There is irony.

The next morning M. Bamazi asked me, essentially, "What the fuck were you thinking?" Kpekpou said the same thing, sort of, with, "You should have knocked on my window." Despite their assurances that the only important thing is that I wasn't hurt, the general feeling was that I was a dumbass.

This all came at a bad time. Following two great weeks in village, with attentive classes and significant farm work, things began to decline. A visit from a stranger searching for plastic bags (for a tree nursery), that just had to be bought from my boss. A short and crowded weekend with the girlfriend, held in the regional capital instead of her village, as originally planned. Her mild illness, and thusly affected mood. A second visit from the stranger, who spent 600 CFA in travel to ask me a question in person; the answer: "No." And then a flat tire, which, due to a faulty hand pump, took me a total of three hours to patch and pump on Tuesday morning. Yet, by Tuesday night things were better. Tchouk with Sam's friends, dinner and beers at a local hotel (which is too expensive for local people to ever use. One room, with AC: 9,000 CFA a night. The average salary of a waiter, which is a damn good job in that village: 12,000 CFA a month). And now this.

I could blame the sudden destruction of the wall on sorcery, if I wanted. Two weeks ago was the first time I'd heard anything about my village's history with with the dark arts, but since then, I've heard nothing else. Even the CEG science teacher, who declared that he doesn't believe in God because of the Truth of Mathematics, stated (not ten seconds later) that sorcery was the only unknown to be feared in this world (where was God, he asked, when the sorcerer made that boy's penis disappear? [do you want to know the details? No.]) But in the end, when I tell the story to other volunteers, the consensus of the cause seems simply to be Togo.

Once again, I'll declare that what I'm writing comes after a period of intense dislike of, well, everything. This is, I've heard, simply how life is going to be for the next two years. It never really levels out, or gets any easier to deal with the frustration. The thing to do is remember there's always a bright side. I've got tree nurseries and sensibilisations planned in two other villages. As soon as the rain hits for real, my six village volunteers are going to start our agroforestry experiment. And despite my stupidity with regards to the destroyed wall, and thusly affected bike, there is still something to smile about: somewhere in village there's a mason wondering just how the hell a white man ever got the best of his handiwork. Right now, I'll take whatever satisfaction I can get.

Some pics

2008-03-19T07:20:00.002-04:00

To Clarify

2008-03-18T05:36:00.003-04:00

Rereading the previous two posts, I detect a certain negative spin. I would like to first mention that anything and everything I say is my opinion only, and does not reflect the hopes, thoughts, etc. of the Peace Corps or the United States government. I'm required to say that. Weird, huh?

Secondly, those posts were written on a friend's computer late at night in my village, after frustrating, long days. My friend lives 26 km away, and does not have electricity, so she lets me keep her computer. Last week I biked to see her, and was 'harassed' on the way back. I use quotations around harassed because it's something that bugged me but may not necessarily be a problem. The 'harassment' consisted of a Togolese man following about six inches behind me on his bike. This happens nearly every time I go on a long ride. I don't know why. Following uncomfortably close behind white people just seems to be the thing to do.

Normally I slowly come to a stop, let the man pass, and wait for him to stop fifty yards ahead of me, and turn around as if to ask, "What's taking you so long?" Then I stare until he goes away. But this time, thanks to a combination of heat, lack of water, and a frustrating meeting that morning, instead of slowly stopping I slammed on my brakes. The man crashed into me, knocking my saddlebag off the rack. He looked at me with his mouth open, pointing at his front tire. "Fais attention! Tu vois?" There was nothing wrong with his tire. "Ne pas suivre," I said. I mounted and rode off. A few minutes later he overtook me, pedaling furiously, elbows and knees flapping out to the sides, his back hunched over the brakeless handlebars of his undersized pink bike.

The whole point of this story is that later that night I wrote three pages about how Africa will never develop, using the bike story as a leadoff. What I wrote is not the truth of Africa. The truth of Africa is that there are extremely frustrating difficulties faced by development workers, especially those like Peace Corps Volunteers, who have to rely on teaching life-skills classes, or talking about women's equality to a group of drunk men at the tchouk stand, and for two years nonetheless, instead of building schools and wells and leaving before they fall into misuse and disrepair.

It's hard not to become frustrated when not a single house in village has running water, but nearly everyone has cell phones. Or when walking into the internet boutique I have to sidestep a goat shitting in the street. Or when I pass a child standing in nothing but dirty underwear, rubbing his swollen belly, as he watches a soccer game on satellite TV.

The fact is that the retention of sanity relies heavily on the ability to see the big picture. What do villagers want? Buildings and funded projects. What do we give? Sustainable farming techniques and lectures on AIDS. So we feel like we do nothing to benefit our community, because they feel like we do nothing. But in my village all the PLAN (an NGO) buildings are abandoned and in shambles, yet my 5eme students are doing a garden project totally independent from me. The buildings failed, but the gardening techniques, likely taught to them two or three volunteers ago, continue. So there's still hope.

Okay. Gotta go. Au revoir, mes amis. Je vous aime. Vraiment.

Some Africa Thoughts

2008-03-18T05:32:00.003-04:00

Little trees with little leaves and long seedpods sit spaced in fields, the distance between like the steps of Jack’s giant. Afternoon and the sun fuzzy behind dust. Fuzzy like the fruits of other little trees with little leaves. A goat between the forgotten sorghum rows, chewing whatever he can find. I am there. Watching the goat spray little BB pellets of shit into the dust.

Waking up is never much fun. I dream of the States, of luxury, of running water, of being able to find nearly anything I want within three hours and fifteen miles thanks to malls, small stores, and my car. But the chickens are loud and the dust comes through the windows—protected only by iron bars and screen, both of questionable quality—and they settle inside my thoughts and my mouth. I have to get up because people notice when the only white man in village is gone. And my mouth is dry.

In the mornings during the dry season they talk about how cold it is. “If it were any colder,” they say, huddled inside nylon parkas and two or three t-shirts, “we’d die.” Occasionally someone will add, “This is why there aren’t any black people in the United States.” He is then ridiculed by the others.

I wish I’d brought my yo-yo. Both for amusement and symbolism. The spin of the world, the up and down of emotions. Three days wanting to quit and go home. One day thinking I’m really doing something. An hour hating everything that brought me here. Another hour glad that life worked out the way it did. I’d do that cradle move. I’d walk the dog. I’d do around the world, thinking of places I’d rather be, or glad I wasn’t.

A circle of men beneath a mango tree. The sky orange and thick with dust. Trucks on the Route, rusty and half-broken, overloaded, driving too fast. Children walking nowhere for no reason. Women sweeping, selling, singing. Drinks. Sitting on warped benches, tree stumps. When the pail is empty, they leave.

We talk about what to do. Each conversation ends with, “But there’s no money. You see?” All these ideas, but no way to carry them out. No way at all. Because there’s no money. And no time, either. Never mind the two and a half hours of repose every day, nor the four or so months of (male) idleness between rainy seasons.

Neruda. Only a partial quote. Maybe a misquote. “We don’t get far, though, beyond these teeth.” I think that now I know what that means.

The G,B, and U in Togo

2008-03-17T13:37:00.003-04:00

The Good

After two and a half months at post (twenty-six rotted tomatoes, fourteen spoiled carrots, two bowls of day-old rice with a foul taste) I bought a fridge. I'm one of the few volunteers in country with electricity, which is rare to begin with, but even more rare for an NRM volunteer. Two shelves, no fruit drawer, nothing on the door to hold jars or ketchups, but a good fridge nonetheless, and a good price thanks to a fast-talking but honest young entrepreneur based in Sokodé. Now, no matter how frustrating the days become, I can return home to ice cold water, cool cucumbers, even last night’s meal.

The Bad

The night Affo arrived with the fridge I went across the street to the little boutique to stock up. Babadé is a small village along the Route that seems to exist simply because people farm here. There are only two boutiques in town, providing soap, tomato paste, spaghetti, and cigarettes. Other fairly regular, but not guaranteed-in-stock items include red onions, small bags of peanuts, sugar, salt, and dried red peppers. In an attempt to pump money into the local economy, I only travel to outside towns to buy what I cannot find here: most major vegetables, oil, flour, butter, processed cheese, tins of corned beef hash. For all the rest I visit the boutiques, most especially the one across from the abandoned building next to the path leading to my house. The boutique’s compound also houses a coiffeuse, and the CEG French professor, a friend of mine. Aside from the short walk, the appeal of this boutique (as opposed to its only competition 500 meters down the road) is that the proprietor regularly stocks bottled beer, Coca-Cola, and orange Fanta. It was amongst these last three items from which I chose the night the fridge came. One bottle of Lager brand beer, one bottle of orange Fanta. The following week consisted of two Coca-Colas, after which the ‘vendeuse’ was all out of sodas. I’d drank myself silly over the weekend in one of the regional capitals, and so did not want beer again. “Next week,” she told me, “we will have Coca.” I left for the weekend, to another regional capital, anticipating some ice-cold luxuries for after classes Monday night. When I returned Monday morning, however, the boutique was closed.

The Ugly

I greeted the tchouk maman who lives in my compound. She was heading home, I was off to the boutique. It was near noon on Monday, and I wanted some Fanta for the night. The vendeuse had told me she’d go to the bar in Adjengré over the weekend to pick up some more sodas. Halfway down the path to the road, I saw that the boutique was closed.

Back in the compound, the tchouk maman asked me why I was back so early. “La boutique est fermé,” I said. “À cause du repos.” It’s hard to find anything in Africa open between noon and two-thirty. Schools, banks, hardware shops, the occasional marché maman, all take a break. Supposedly, it was the African who first said, “Only mad dogs and Englishmen go out in the noon-day sun.”

“No,” my tchouk maman said. “Ce n’est pas à cause du repos….” She explained the reason, but maman doesn’t speak French well enough for me to understand it all. Maman is a woman of indeterminate age. She blinks a lot and is beautiful all the time, but especially when she laughs. My favorite outfit is her Tuesday outfit: a white t-shirt and a pagne wrap for a skirt. The t-shirt has a black and white outline screen-print of one woman tying a corset onto another; both are in their underwear. “Les benois,” she said, “Un problème avec les benois.” Still blaming the noon-day sun, I nodded and went to my apartment, hands empty.

Later that night, after classes, I passed by the boutique, but it was still closed. In my compound there was only the young coiffeuse who lives with her husband in the apartment next to mine. Her shop is in the same compound across the street as the boutique. I asked her why I was being prevented from stocking my new fridge with glass-bottled sodas. The story that follows is a mix of what she told me, and the details that I picked up from others over the following days; it incorporates responses to questions I asked after being told what happened.

“There was a zed-man [taxi-moto driver] who lived in Aouda [4 km north]. His parents live there too, but he drove to Adjengré [4 km south] to work. This weekend he was stopped by a Beninois who wanted to go to Blitta [about 30 km south]. The zed-man took him. It was along the way that the Beninois killed him.

“Because of the murder we are hunting the Beninois. We are going to do to them what they have done to us. The vendeuse who runs the boutique is Beninoise. She has left, along with the others like her. That is why the boutique is closed.

“After the murder, over the weekend, we found a Beninois man, and we beat him. Probably he will die. We hope so. The vendeuse hides because she does not want to be next. But we do not want to be next either. What if she kills one of our children? The Beninois are nasty, dishonest people. They come to Togo with no money, and after two months they open up a shop. How did they get the money? They make counterfeit. They steal. Eventually they kill. All of them are like this. So, when one Beninois kills a Togolese, we find one and kill him. It does not matter if it is the same one who committed the first crime. There are no innocent. They are all guilty.”

Brush Fire Thoughts

2008-01-01T11:14:00.000-05:00

The sky, if I could see it, would be blue. Instead there is the color of a robin's egg picked up from the dust, the cool, cotton-candy color of five p.m. clouded by sand from a desert wind and the rising smoke of brush fires. I'm sitting next to my homologue on the sidelines of a soccer game. A little girl in a purple dress, the daughter of the French teacher, fidgets between us. I am miserable.

Say something, I think. What better time to talk about the dangers of brush fires than right now, with the flames licking across the field directly behind the soccer pitch? Well, pitch may be too strong a word. The boys are running on khaki-colored dry spots that haven't seen green in years. Where there is grass, it is tall, and scrapes the tough skin of their shins. A southern slope to the land gives the younger boys the advantage of momentum.

A triangle of flame attacks a teak tree just behind the field. The flames are violent and unhinged. But how, three days into service, do I gather all these spectators, rip them away from their fun, and lecture them about an activity they've done every dry season of their lives? I don't. Several weeks before, late at night, protected by darkness and a mosquito net, the air cool after a rain, I'd asked L what she was thinking. "Nothing at all," she said. "I'm just enjoying the moment." I think of that here, while the trunks of trees char and the older boys celebrate another goal. I have two years to work. I can enjoy a soccer game tonight.

2007-12-08T05:06:00.000-05:00

At the mattress place today ("AllFoam" brand, the store nothing more than a dusty room in the side of a building, a dirty wooden desk on the left, mattresses stacked on the right) the man with the triangle scarring between his eyes would not leave us alone. Luckily, while he'd been showing the others around a store across the street, I'd been able to talk with the patron. "Monsieur, ca c'est combien?" A two-place mattress, foamy, soft enough to drop an egg on, hard enough to last two years. "Quarante-cinq mille." 45,000 FCFA. I don't bother doing the conversion anymore; just because something's cheap in American dollars doesn't mean it's a 'bon prix.' "C'est cher," I said, "Diminuez le prix, s'il vous plait." He said maybe he could work it down to 40,000. A GEE volunteer had told us yesterday at the beach party that a good mattress would run about 37,000. "Je peux payer trente-cinq mille," I told him, 35,000. "Probablement les autres acheteront aussi, pour le meme prix." I got the okay before triangle-head returned.

Mensah, our driver, said the price was good, if I liked the mattress. I told the others, and twenty-minutes and much confusion later, five of us bought. L tried to diminuer the prix to 30,000 but the vendor wasn't having it. Triangle-head, who we're pretty sure worked for nobody, and was just trying to skim a tip out of the silly Yovos, kept interjecting the discussion, saying he'd give us the mattresses for just 40 mille. The patron, a tired-looking young man well over six feet, stayed faithful to ourprice, though he did nothing to throw triangle-head out.

When we got back to the hotel, we saw that the mattress guys (the legit ones wearing yellow t-shirts with "AllFoam" written in red across the left breast) had done a poor job of tying our purchases to the roof. Any more bumps and the two on top, which were now just barely beneath the ropes, would have been lost. Most everybody, after unloading the mattresses, hopped back into the cars to go to the grand market. Too tired to care about plastic buckets or straw mats, I headed to the bureau.

These past two days since swearing-in have been decadent. Instead of fufu or pate, I've eaten Lebanese, Chinese, and Italian cuisine. Move-in money, which others are spending on cutting boards and wall-mats, goes toward my stomach's pleasure. The furniture I will have made at my post, and pots and pans are readily available at the markets in the neighboring villages. While others have slept, I've spent hours at the bar, or here at the bureau, writing these posts. Every time I sit down to write those mass emails, my will fails me, and I end up here instead. So I apologize.

2007-12-07T05:35:00.000-05:00

2007-12-07T05:23:00.000-05:00

My Speech From Peace Corps Swear-In

2007-12-07T04:15:00.000-05:00

Excellence mesdames, messieurs le ministre,
Excellence Monsieur l’Ambassadeur des Etats-Unis au Togo,
Messieurs les représentants des corps diplomatique,
Madame la Directrice sous-régionale du Corps de la Paix à Washington,
Madame la Directrice Nationale du Corps de la Paix au Togo,
Madame la Directrice de formation,
Honorables invités, Monsieur le Chef traditionnelle,
Chers collègues, nouveaux volontaires,
Mesdames, Mesdemoiselles, Messieurs.

C’est un grand honneur pour moi de m’adresser à vous en cette soirée solennelle en Français. Quand nous sommes arrivés au Togo le 22 Septembre 2007, à peine je pouvais dire une phrase en Français. Pour la majorité de mes collègues c’était pareil. Par exemple, André, les quatre premiers jours de notre arrivée, demandait aux gens, « Avez-vous un lit pour mon cigarette ? » Mais aujourd’hui, voilà, il peut demander une allumette et aussi peut enseigner le réchauffement de la planète. Et pour nous autres volontaires de la Gestion des Ressources Naturelles, nous pouvons répondre à la question « Que puis-je faire dans la gestion de l’environnement ? » Et les volontaires du projet Education et Promotion de la Fille peuvent parler d’une femme émancipée, ce qui n’était pas facile à notre arrivée.

Grâce aux formateurs de langue nous pouvons parler Français. Mais ça ne suffit pas. Il faut savoir les concepts et les pratiques de nos programmes. C’est là où la contribution des formateurs technique et des volontaires formateurs a commencé. Ils nous ont donné les connaissances dont nous avons besoins pour être des volontaires efficaces. Pour les volontaires des ressources naturelles, notre travail est plus ou moins concret : nous pouvons voir les cultures en couloirs, par exemple. Alors que pour les volontaires de l’éducation de la fille cela parait plus abstrait : ils traitent avec les droits des femmes qu’ils ne peuvent pas voir concrètement. Mais, à la fin de notre service, notre récompense sera un accomplissement équitable : un meilleur Togo. Grâce aux formateurs techniques nous sommes plus prêts que nous ne le pensions.

Pour vivre en harmonie avec les Togolais afin de bien mener nos activités nous avons été sevré avec la formation en adaptations culturelle, aliment de base pour bien vivre au Togo et en même temps un ingrédient passe-partout. Il est en formation de langue, en formation technique, et surtout dans les familles. Au premier contact avec nos familles nous ne savions pas comment nous intégrer. Mais après onze semaines tout le monde a une nouvelle famille. Golda et sa mère ont dirigé même ensemble une entreprise des biscuits. Maman AFRIKIKO n’a cessé de nous souhaiter la bienvenue à longueur de journée. David et André ont eu à tuer des poulets eux-mêmes. Et une nuit Ruthia a dormi à l’hôpital à côté de son frère, qui était malade. Au nom de tous les nouveaux volontaires je remercie très sincèrement toutes les familles hôtes non seulement pour nous avoir hébergé, mais pour avoir fait de nous leurs enfants. Nous ressentons beaucoup de tristesse à quitter autant nos familles Américains que les familles de Kumawou et de Nyogbo.

Avant de finir, je voudrais parler un peu de mes amis du stage. Ils sont les plus authentiques gens que je connais. Avec leur énergie et enthousiasme, il n’y a aucun doute de leur réussite pendant les deux ans à venir. Je sais que nous serons sérieux à propos de notre service, en même temps que nous garderons notre bonne humeur. Je sais que ça c’est vrai parce que quand nous avons demandé à Monsieur Adri, notre formateur de technique, « Est-ce que notre stage est le meilleur du monde ? » Il a dit, « Je ne peux pas dire. Mais, je m’amuse bien maintenant. »

And Now We've Reached the End of the Beginning

2007-12-06T01:14:00.000-05:00

Before you know it eleven weeks go by and people back home are shoveling snow and thinking about Christmas break. You've been in stage (pronounced stahge, long 'a'), and December is the beginning of the dry season, and when you wake up at night to sweat, the thought of winter seems like just another Mefloquin dream. While everyone you know is looking forward to the holiday break, you, on the other hand, are just beginning to work.

They say the first three months at post are the toughest. No host family to cook for you, no other Americans hanging out at the tech. house, spending the better part of every day with you, speaking your language, talking coherently about the things you want to talk about. Now it's toothless farmers and tchouk-drunks and a chef who doesn't speak French. It's rowdy CEG students, and weather too hot and dry to cultivate. Do you start sensibilisations? What do you know well enough to gather your villagers together and try to teach them? Sure, you could try soap-making, but without an in-depth feasability study, you'd just be pissing money away if you can't sell it for the right price. So what do you do?

Here's my plan: I'm gonna paint my house. And order my furniture. And travel around the prefecture, taking my bike along the Route Nationale. My region is like a mix between Florida and Kansas, and for some reason this combo makes me feel like I'm in Ohio. The tall grass plains are dotted with oil-palm trees, banana trees, mango trees. Sorghum, dancing in the Harmattan wind, rises like oversized corn, and the red-tipped stalks stoop like old Togolese women.

I'm gonna talk to my community. The best way to be an effective volunteer is to be bien intégré, and that requires knowing the people you live with. My house is in a compound with three other families, so I'll start there. And one of the mamas sells tchouk Wednesdays and Fridays, bringing in many of the toothless farmers, who happen to sometimes be tchouk-drunks as well. I could talk to them about vitamin-rich Moringa powder, Neem pesticide, or alley-cropping with Albisia, which is less labor intensive than Lucuna. We could all buy each other a round, a callabash per man, and by the end of the night we'll love each other, and I'll be too drunk to care that I have to take my shits over a cockroach infested latrine.

It is now 0642h and I'm in the Peace Corps bureau in Lomé. In ten hours my fellow stagiaires and I will become official Peace Corps Volunteers. Anna, from GEE, will be giving a speech in Ewé, one of the most prevalent local languages in the southern part of Togo. I'll be giving a speech in French. I'm as honored as I am nervous.

I must go, since diarrhea is calling, but I want to say one thing first: I am incredibly happy here. The past eleven weeks have been spent with a group of individuals I can only think to describe as genuine. We are Peace Corps Volunteers, not hippies or raging tree-huggers. We are here to work, and we know it, and we've talked about this for over two months now, and we feel lucky. With the energy and enthusiasm that I've seen from these people, there's no doubt in my mind as to our success over the next two years. Naturally, this will be a pleasure as well. As Adri, our lead tech. trainer, told us when we asked him if this was the best stage ever: "I can't say anything except that I'm having a lot of fun right now."

Updates on Tony

2007-10-15T15:46:00.000-04:00

Hi everyone who reads this, it's Anna, Tony's little sister. He has just sent us a letter from Togo telling me that he wanted me to update his blog, so here it is.

He will not be able to update this himself very often, if at all, so dont be expectant on much. He is doing quite well in Togo, although he does miss a lot of things back home. He loves his host family, he has two brothers and two sisters, and his French is doing much better. If you would like to send Tony letters and are not sure how to get them to him, email me at raspberry1791@hotmail.com and I can give you the address and instructions on how to package and title them so they wont be opened or lost. Oh, and title them "TONY" so I know that it is not junk mail. I will update this probably whenever Tony send a letter, just so I can give everyone a bit of an idea of what's going on. If you have any questions, just email.

-Anna

The Jena 6

2007-09-10T22:28:00.000-04:00

I had no idea what the Jena 6 was when somebody invited me to join the facebook group, but now that I've read about it, let's do something. The petitions we signed for the BP thing worked marvelously. So let's not slack off for this. The case of the Jena 6 is straight up racism. I hate racism. I would love for all kinds of violence to be delivered upon those who would harm others simply for the color of their skin. Yet, as we know, violence only breeds continued ignorance.

If you don't know: currently, in Jena, Louisiana, six black individuals are being held with attempted murder for beating up a white kid. This was a response to the white kid's racists taunts following a DA-busted protest led by the black students. The students' protest was itself a reaction to two nooses that had been hung from the limb of a tree after a single black student had sat under it the day before. So, click on the link below, sign the petition, and let others know about the state-led injustice in Louisiana.

Sign this petition.

Badminton Before You Go

2007-09-10T15:10:00.000-04:00

As I get closer to leaving for Togo, I become more frightened, sort of. I once had a dream where I was afraid to fall asleep, because I knew I would see something so beautiful I would never want to wake up. In some way, this is the feeling I have now.

For the first three months I will be in Pre-Service Training, in-country experience, the last step to becoming a full-fledged volunteer. PST takes place in the "beautiful green and mountainous Plateau Region," according to Togo's country director. This thrills me.

What doesn't thrill me are the details. During the summer I read the first few chapters of Village of Waiting a book about a Peace Corps Volunteer's two years of service in Togo. Descriptions of service, or speaking exclusively in French or a rural language did not scare me. But when the author mentioned buying a stove, I freaked out. How do you buy a stove in Togo? I don't even know how to do that here.

Lists surround me. What to take, what to wear, what to say, how to act, where not to go at night. I've read everything they've given me, and forgotten it all. Cousin Jim, currently serving in Malawi, is my most reliable source of information. Unfortunately, I only hear from him once a month.

Andy and I were talking yesterday, drinking beer, waiting for Nick to finish mowing the lawn so we could play badminton. Our deck chairs were back from the neighbor's house, and the evening was light pink, dipping into the cool degrees. "It's not the friends like you I'm worried about," I told him. "But I'm so afraid of all the people I'll never talk to again." Such is the price, I guess, for this kind of experience.

That's not to say I'm having second thoughts about the whole thing. It is the singular thought in my mind, the only thing I can consider between those moments when I'm forced to listen to my co-workers (forced is a strong word; I like listening to them) or am watching Samurai Jack. Like the day I left for Wyoming two years ago, I know the moment will come when I realize, "I actually have to do this."

There is comfort in fear like this. In the film Tigerland, Colin Farrell's character says that true courage is knowing just how shit-scared you really are. I don't really think that going to Togo is courageous, but I am certainly proud of the fact that I can add "Joining the Peace Corps" to the list of things I said I'd do, and did, despite any reservations.

The fall is beginning. The air is still muggy, but the heat breaks sooner, and a long-sleeved shirt is a hug at night. Andy, Nick, and I play badminton, and the mosquitoes are only an afterthought. When the sun dips low, I pull my A2Z Ranch hat down to my eyebrows, and squint around the visor. I'm leaving this place, I think, sipping beer on the porch with Peppercorn in my lap. I wonder what the sunsets are like in Togo. I wonder if the air in the mountains is crisp and green, if the dew snaps off the grass like a bite into a cucumber. I am so happy that I get to find out.

Un Monde Sans Les Hommes (ou les femmes)

2007-08-23T17:53:00.000-04:00

This here website's real cool.

Dark Humor

2007-08-20T22:28:00.000-04:00

1. Half-naked and sweating, his body the pale almost-yellow of his Spongebob boxers, my father pleaded, through gasps and about-to-vomit gurgles, that I call the doctor who treated him in the ER on Friday. The secretary answered, and I asked for Sherry. "Hold please," she said. And while Dad begged for Dilaudin [sic?], or morphine, or a pistol, I listened to "I Will Survive," waiting for the doctor to pick up.

2. Nick and I were watching "TV's Funniest Moments," and had just finished laughing at number 2, the Family Guy song about the ridiculous censorship of the "Freakin' FCC," which won't allow the word "penis" on television. The last commercial before the show returned started with a black screen, and a close-up traveling shot down what looked like a thermometer. Digital music announced "The world's most advanced pregnancy test" while a virtual stream of urine slow-motioned onto the end of the stick.

My Jew*

2007-08-18T14:56:00.001-04:00

His shoes were the color of his shorts, like they'd been washed in the same dust. They matched the tan of his legs. This made his socks, a rusty magenta, stand out. If I had to give you one reason why he seemed obscenely Jewish, I'd probably say the socks.

There is something about the supremely ethnic that dissuades stereotypical discrimination. Maybe it's that the supremely ethnic satisfy most of the criteria of the stereotype that attacking the person seems about as effective as assaulting a dolphin with a Super-Soaker.

I nodded, he nodded, the poofy mushroom of his hair moving independently of his head. "Nice socks," I said. He looked at his feet as if to say, "These old things?" and nodded at me again. Didn't stop. Half-smiled. I've seen him twice since.

Late afternoons of an Indiana summer are hot. The humidity eases off its midday peak like a beached whale being pushed into the ocean by the African Children's Choir. I usually see the strange-socked Jew around five or six, mostly near the library, on a corner between the two entrances that doesn't inform me if he's coming or going.

I make a right angle with the library, the Reformed Presbyterian Church, and the Post Office. Then over to 2nd Street, past the K & S Country Market, where I grab a 35 cent Faygo from the machine outside. Last summer its only company was a half-filled Coke vendor, with regular, Diet, and Sprite. They added an Adrenaline machine in late May. Adrenaline is an energy drink, each flavor named after a situation where somebody'd be likely to have a heroic 'rush.' My favorite is "Hip-Shot," though "Bungee Snap"'s berry flavor is nostalgic, with a taste like the fence where Grandma's vines twirled.

The sun doesn't really set till after eight, and the sky is light till around nine-thirty. Between six and seven-thirty the air is thick orange, a color I like to think is exclusively midwestern. It is early August now, which means leases are changing hands. It is difficult to determine who is moving in and who is moving out. The scents of marinated meat and ripe corn mix with the warm taste of charcoal in the air. In the last thirty minutes of daylight, I go running.

Despite the immunity of being supremely ethnic, I subject the Jew to private speculation. He's here for med school. Law school. Works for his father. I imagine his mother making matzo balls while asking why he never brings a nice girl home.

What would it take to know the Jew? I've never seen his eyes; he always wears long-lensed reflective sunglasses, the sporty kind that were big in the '90s. Somehow this confirms what the socks only hint at. I wonder if he ever recognizes me, or if the nods are just polite gestures toward a stranger.

A midwestern university town is a good place to live. A transient, impermanent student body allows for the distinct anonymity of a big city, while the small neighborhoods bordering farmland house the midwest's hospitable residents whom grandmas adore. I can be aloof without seeming queer, or I can be friendly without seeming handicapped. This duality often leads to having an Anonymous Friend, a person I see often enough to know**, but have never actually interfaced with. The Jew is my Anonymous Friend.

A commonly tricky relationship move is going from Friend to Lover or vice-versa. An equally common, but less acknowledged move is going from Anonymous Friend to Acquaintance to Friend. Acquaintanceship is never a desirable level. The Purgatory of human interaction, Acquaintanceship means you don't know a person well enough to care about him/her, but you know enough to have to pretend to.

After the run I walk through the park, counting fireflies***. The temperature is down to the 70s, and back at my subleased room the AC goes off, the window up. A fan is turned on, power level one. Crunches are done with shoes still on; dinner is cooked in nothing but shorts. I spend most of my waking hours in silence, as there is no one around to speak with. Aside from summer classmates, the Jew is the closest friend I have.

There is a definite difference between loneliness and solitude. Without reaching for a dictionary, I'd say intent is the dividing line. Loneliness falls upon a person, whereas solitude is his choice. The line is sometimes blurred, and staying in, reading, on a Friday night seems more like a capitulation to circumstance than a conscious choice.

There are many lonely people. The boom of virtual lives, of networking web sites, indicates a noticeable lack in interaction, not the other way around. They are empty plates on which we spill drips of ourselves trying to create desirable personae.

The Jew seems to be a complete person. I feel entirely removed from him, unable to identify in any way. I've never seen his favorite movies, never heard his favorite music, never listened to him explain his favorite books. I can't predict his tastes, whether right or wrong. Maybe this is what draws me to him.

*Most of this is made up, and, admittedly, incomplete.
**As in, during conversations when said person is mentioned, though you've never conversed, and have no biographical information w/r/t said person, you will inevitably say, "Hal? Goofy guy with mushroom hair? Yeah, I know him."
***Actually, I try to follow one firefly for fifty blinks.

Try Not to Take it So Hard

2007-08-13T23:30:00.000-04:00

My teeth are sore in the mornings. Sometimes I remember dreams; starving, thirsty, my mouth unable to open. When nervous, I clack my teeth together, try to feel every protrusion as they slide into every groove. The tops are mostly flat.

Every dentist for the last five years has tried to sell me a mouthguard to wear while sleeping. No thank you, I say, that's all from when I was a kid. Honestly, as far as I can remember, my teeth have always been like this.

Mom says when I was young she could hear me grinding my teeth in my sleep. Molar on molar. The canines have remained untouched.

Is this nerves? I am frightened by the lock-jaw dreams. I wake up stressed, ill-rested, my face like the wrong end of a punch.

I was a paranoid child. Anxiety attacks occurred weekly, if not daily. We once ran out of gas on the way to soccer practice. No more than a half-mile from the Citgo, I wept in the back seat.

In fourth grade I asked to be sent home often. In junior high I would close my eyes and clench my hands, digging my nails into the palms, trying to feel what had just gone numb. Anxiety was a floating feeling; my limbs were skinny balloons. Eventually I learned how to stop the attacks through distraction. Nights now, when I feel one coming, the lights go on, a book is opened, no matter how tired I am. Eventually I pass out, and in the morning the pages are wet with drool.

For most anxious people, the very hint of a panic attack gives them the howling fantods. They have a strange thought, of something that, after several bad incidents, they now associate with panic. Then the fear of having a panic attack takes over. At that point, they're lost, stumbling to a corner to babble and hold onto the walls. Squinting eyes, touching the counters, reminding themselves that everything around them is real.

My panic attacks most likely started when I was eight. I can't say for sure when the first was, but my guess is the night I realized I was going to die. A world lit professor sophomore year of college told me the mid-20s are the years when most people understand the finality of their own mortality. So I was a little early. No real surprise. I'd gone fishing and learned how to ride a bike before my older brother.

I usually freak out while thinking about dying. It's like one of those shots you see in epic movies, where the camera focuses on a single leaf, then an entire forest, then a whole state/country, then a continent, the earth, the galaxy, infinity. It's like my head tries to fit the image of eternity inside. Everything explodes, and the attack lasts as long as it takes to glue the pieces back together. But I end up grinding away the top layer of my teeth.

Dostoevsky says that man is a constructive animal. We build staircases of knowledge, all going up, all without a destination. The closer we get to finishing our staircase, the more often we branch to the side, or double back on ourselves. For some reason, D says, man always avoids finishing his project.

Nietzsche believes that man searches for a meaning to his life. Nietzsche also says there is no meaning. Even a fly believes he is the center of the universe. When we die, we are forgotten, and eventually no one cares. I think this truth is what keeps us building our staircases forever. Who wants to finish at the door to that kind of knowledge? We tell ourselves everyday that we matter, that we exist for a reason. We invent gods and morality and laws; we procreate and do everything we can to survive. The inevitable question is Why? Nobody wants to hear that the answer is No Reason.

I'm not trying to be pretentious or didactic. I don't think I know any better about life than others. I want a purpose just as much as most people. I'd like god to come down and tell me there's a reason for everything that happens. I'm not saying there is one, but I hope like hell a universal truth exists. If you want to know how uneasy I am about the whole thing, just look at my teeth.

Double Whammy

2007-08-09T16:02:00.000-04:00

Seriously, dumping toxic shit into a lake isn't cool. I myself have always been a fan of boycotting. Political activism doesn't have to be radical, reactionary, or hot-headed. So take fifteen seconds to fill out this boycott petition, and let's see what we can do.

Click Here to help Lake Michigan.

Help Lake Michigan

2007-08-08T12:17:00.000-04:00

Click here to sign a petition against the proposed dumping of 6,500 pounds of harmful waste into Lake Michigan.

Singing Tesla Coil at Duckon 2007

2007-08-07T11:09:00.001-04:00

The sounds are being made by the high voltage sparks. The Tesla coil was built by Steve Ward, a student at the University of Illinois.

Why Infinite Jest is the Most Brilliant Book You'll Ever Read

2007-08-06T01:12:00.000-04:00

David Foster Wallace won a MacArthur Fellowship in 1997, the year after Infinite Jest was published. The M.F. is more commonly known as the 'Genius Grant.' DFW like deserves it.

Infinite Jest is 981 pages of narrative. Endnotes take the book to 1,079 pages. It is dense, highbrow, hilarious, and like heartbreaking.

The title comes from Hamlet, in relation to Poor Yorick, known well. In the novel, Infinite Jest is the name of the final film of James O. Incandenza, father of slowly unraveling protagonist Hal, seventeen-year old tennis/lexical wiz. The film is so entertaining it's like lethal. Anyone who sees it loses all interest in life, and wants only to see the film again. They will not eat, sleep, or get up to go to the bathroom. After several days, anyone who watches the movie dies of sleep/food deprivation, in a puddle of piss and a pile of shit, happy as a clown on stilts.

While initially confusing/off-putting due to the cut-and-paste timeline, the strange near-future world, and the myriad of characters, the novel carves for itself an emotional peg in your heart. Don Gately and Hal Incandenza are people whose lives I felt a need to witness.

The novel overflows with detail and verisimilitude, and the language is as tight as a well-strung tennis racket. I thought about the book daily. I dreamt about it. I traded sleep for reading time. I even missed class. The novel proved to be so entertaining that at times I would not stop to make dinner.

And when it was finished I wanted to start all over again. I reread the first three chapters, then collapsed with like exhaustion.

I'm sure most of you can see where I'm going with this. My point falls under the 'form = function' category. A novel about a movie so entertaining people watch it with zeal then re-watch it when done, is itself so entertaining that readers go through the same circle. Luckily, you won't like die.

Infinite Jest is genius. Not just an ego-satisfying think piece, it still has (so) much for the reader to consider. Not a mindless pleasure-filled bestseller, it still will make you laugh, and keep you in that strangely satisfying state of emotional suspense, like that feeling below your breastbone just before the roller-coaster falls. It is involved fiction. It was work for the author, and so it makes sense that the novel should be work for us, like, too.

Maps

2007-08-05T21:50:00.000-04:00

Writing is a wild thing, for me. It's independent of me, a black-and-white jungle. Non-fiction interests me, but fiction intrigues me. Non-fiction can be creative, can be structurally unusual, but it is constrained, for the most part, by something we call the truth. Invention must be acknowledged, imagination is tongue-in-cheek*. But fiction is different. While the goal--imparting truth--is the same, the means of coming to it are as different as a lizard and a kangaroo in a sports coat. Non-fiction is crawling through the dense jungle seeking the light which means escape. Fiction is seeking the light by making the jungle more dense. Fiction is the piling on of untruths to get to the truth. Fiction is like being trapped in an oubliette; to escape we must build a ladder of shit.

I've always been a fan of the Modernists, for whom Truth, if it exists, can never be arrived at using language. There is no direct route with words. The road does not cease so much as fall off, like that illustration on the cover of Shel Silverstein's Where the Sidewalk Ends. So to inform you of their inability to inform you, the Modernists write, after declaring that writing is useless. This notion is oxymoronical. This notion is a cold-rain headache.

When I think about it, I feel lost. But if you wanted to know what I really meant by that, I'd have to tell you something completely different. Fiction writing is not saying, "I feel lost, and this is why," but "I feel unfound, and this is why not."

*Whatever that means.

Family Guy -

2007-08-02T00:31:00.001-04:00

Je pense que c'est drôle.

Prison Thriller

2007-07-30T11:53:00.000-04:00

The guy dressed as a chick weirds me out, and the ending looks like the beginning of a gang rape, but other than that, this video is pretty cool. I think we should start programs like this in all US prisons. Maybe they could do the Macarena.

Infinite Jest

2007-07-25T23:46:00.000-04:00

Am currently reading Infinite Jest, DFW's leviathan novel. One of the funniest, most compelling books I've read in a long time. Keeps me up late, gives me headaches, rarely absent from my thoughts. I can't remember when reading a book has so consumed me. Three hundred forty-two plus pages in, yet I've got nearly seven hundred pages left to go. Thrilled.

I swear by God and sonny Jesus

2007-07-18T00:57:00.000-04:00

In the past, I never cared for bloggers. Lonely, soft-skinned boys and middle-aged men, I thought, resigned to live out their days with online gaming and endless searches of obscure literary music blogs. While I see that this stereotype is not inclusive of all bloggers (though, undoubtedly, many), I still hold a distaste for the business in general.

Call me a hypocrite, I suppose, since I am now one of the legion of online writers from whom I choose to remain aloof.

The blogs I detest are those written by "anguished/suicidal" teens in tight black clothes listening to any number of cynical, ironic musicians (with whom I am so ill-acquainted that I can't even insert a band name). But if there is anything to be learned from all this Bible-reading I've been doing lately, it's that I am in no place to judge the people I make fun of. And, more importantly, I should make all effort to be kind to those whom I would sooner cast-off.

I don't want anyone to get confused with my mentioning the Bible in this post and Jesus in an earlier post. I am not a Christian. I cannot convincingly say that Jesus was the Christ or divine in any way, because I believe that his divinity/non-divinity is totally irrelevant in regards to his impact, both in his time and in ours. The only time his divinity is necessary is when you try to support the concepts of Heaven and Hell and the Eternal Afterlife. Since I don't believe in those things, Jesus can just be Jesus.

What I've come across while reading the gospels is an inconsistency in Jesus, and a frustrating ambiguity in some of his parables/exhortations. Like in Luke 14:26, when he says, "Whoever comes to me and does not hate father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters, yes, and even life itself, cannot be my disciple." I assume he's trying to be a dick on purpose, to drive his point home: because all energy must be devoted to God, none can be devoted to earthly possessions or relations; these fade, and will one day end, whereas God will not.

Even if I did believe in Heaven, I wouldn't agree with Luke 14:26. My general belief is that God doesn't create anything without a purpose. I conclude from this that everything must be valuable. Therefore, my father and mother, etc. are incredibly valuable, and, as products of God, deserve any kind of love I want to give them. Even if their only value is in getting me to the afterlife, why can't I love them? It doesn't add up to me. And I don't want to hear any Christians retaliate with, "God's plans don't have to add up to you, for humans will never understand him." I can't imagine that a god would give us minds and logic and deductive reasoning and free will if he intended for us to be fooled by them persistently, even if he more closely resembled Descartes' Evil Genius than the universally accepted concept of the eternally beneficent God.

But my gospel experience isn't all negative; it isn't even mostly negative. Jesus was a man trying to affect people in an incredibly significant manner. I can understand if he was moved to extremism every now and then. I just wish he had had the foresight to see what kind of extremism that would breed in followers throughout the years, who lacked the capacity to understand his most important teaching, to use it as a check in regards to their own dogma: question the authority surrounding you.

I don't understand how a religion based upon a man who openly defied the leaders of his own faith can be followed by people who, for the most part, refuse to question the words and actions of their religious leaders.

My favorite teaching so far in Matthew, Mark, and Luke (I haven't gotten to John yet) is the concept of loving your enemy. Since I'm on Luke, and since the gospels all repeat each other, I won't bother to quote from more than one source. Here's Luke 6:32 - "If you love those who love you, what credit is that to you? For even sinners love those who love them." In case it isn't obvious, the main theme surrounding Jesus' teachings and death is Sacrifice. Your comforts, your wealth, your family, your body, your Life, amongst other things. If we expect to be good, if we expect to be rewarded, we must sacrifice our pride and our prejudice, and maybe even our safety, so that we might extend our hand to those who would strike it down. I think this teaching gets ignored all the time, and yet it's the most important thing Jesus says. It's so much more than love those who hate you. It's love those who are indifferent towards you, who reject you, who would punish you, and who simply are not like you. This love leads to understanding, of the differences amongst us, and of the similarities we share in spite of those differences. A good Christian is no different from a good Muslim. Both seek righteousness and a reward in the afterlife. In the same vein, a radical evangelist is no different from an Islamic fundamentalist. Both are violent in their beliefs, and ignorant as to the true virtues they claim to possess or extol. Both disgust me equally. Yet I'm doing my best to love them.

Another important teaching is altruism. I can't remember where it is, so I can't quote, but basically Jesus says that when you perform a good deed with no expectation of reward, you will be more blessed than those who seek something in return. What's interesting, though, is that Jesus is giving this advice to people who are going to follow it because they believe it will help get them into Heaven. If the expectation of an eternal afterlife isn't the expectation of a reward, then I don't know what is. How would Jesus explain this catch-22? I have no idea. But the reason I mention it is because I saw a sign on a church the other day that said, "Even if God doesn't exist, do you really want to take that chance?" I thought, "Great. Now religion is nothing more than a contingency plan." I don't know why I said "now," it's been like that since it began.

Who becomes a Christian because being Christian enables them to be good to others? No one. If you become a Christian, or a Muslim, or a Hindu, or whatever, you do so because you don't want to be left behind when you die. You can't stand the thought of your own insignificance and oblivion. So you join a group that promises an eternal Red Carpet Club, and you pay your dues in good deeds. I'd say the most virtuous man on earth is the kind atheist. Every good deed he does is for, at most, the person he helps and his own conscience (provided he's not expecting the favor to be returned).

So put that in your bread and leaven it.

Shiny Rocks

2007-07-13T12:31:00.000-04:00

Diamonds are shiny rocks. They only have value because women, for some reason, are attracted to shiny objects.

Read This

2007-07-11T19:48:00.000-04:00

I'm a link. Click me for something worth two minutes of your time.

Stunning

2007-07-05T19:21:00.001-04:00

This is cool.

men in toilet

2007-07-02T09:07:00.001-04:00

Funny.

Mankind, pt. 1

2007-06-29T12:02:00.000-04:00

After a while, you have to wonder whether all that tension between Israel and Palestine is religious in nature anymore. You ask yourself if anybody is actually following an ideology, or if they’re simply doing everything they can to deny the other side what they want. Why, when seeking autonomy, does one group wish to deny the same thing to others? That’s like when people who have been discriminated against pass that discrimination onto somebody else. Everybody must establish themselves above others, it seems. But that makes no sense to you. Someone who has experienced discrimination knows how awful it is, and should therefore not want to subject others to that kind of treatment. It seems that the concern is always for the individual, though. A man hates to be derided, but does not care a whit if others are derided. Man’s basic instinct is hypocrisy, because man cares not for the well-being of others while he is comfortable.

I’ve thought about Jesus, and the whole Lamb of God thing. He was the shepherd, too, right? How can he be the sacrificial lamb as well as the one guiding the lamb to the sacrifice? I think that it’s possible because every one of us is simultaneously sheep and shepherd. We are the shepherds of our own lives, yet we are part of the flock of mankind. It is our responsibility, as shepherds, to guide our fellow human beings when they err, but it is our privilege, as sheep, to be able to rely on others to help us when we are lost as well.

As a former wrestler, and as a writer, one who thinks in metaphor and symbols, I see that wrestling, as a team sport, is the perfect analogy for humanity. During an individual’s match, it is solely up to the individual to win. Yet his skill level, and even his drive for victory, is a direct result of the interactions in the practice room with his teammates. Also, for those that don’t know wrestling, each individual match contributes a certain number of points to the team, depending on the outcome. A loss, of course, contributes nothing. A decision, a win where the margin of victory is less than 8 points, gives the team 3 points. A major decision, where the margin of victory is between 8 and 14 points, gives the team 4 points. A technical fall, where the match is stopped because one individual has outscored the opponent by 15 (or more) points, gives the team 5. A pin, forfeit, or disqualification (those should be self-explanatory) give the team 6 points.

There have been many situations in my experience where the outcome of a meet rested upon an individual match. I think that we (Carmel) once beat Portage by one point. I don’t remember the matches exactly, but if one of our guys had only gotten a decision instead of a major decision, we would have ended in a tie. So, while each match is up to the individual, the individual’s performance in that match affects his entire team, and the context of the match (i.e., you're the last match, and your team is behind by five points) will influence how you wrestle, and the outcome you seek. I loved to tech. fall people, and rarely went for the pin; but if my team was behind by five, I would adjust my style during the match so that I could pin my opponent and win the meet.

The same can be said for society. This is simply another way of describing that thing from A Beautiful Mind, when Nash declares that Adam Smith was incorrect. You get the best results, Nash says, not by doing what is best for the individual, but by doing what is best for the individual in the context of what is best for the group.

Hamas Captured Gaza

2007-06-29T11:05:00.000-04:00

How many of you have heard about the capture of the Gaza Strip by Hamas, the radical Muslim political party in Palestine? It happened on June 15. Hamas has forced Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas into the West Bank, where he has promised to set up an emergency government. He 'fired' Palestinian Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh, putting in his place Salam Fayyad, an economist who's spent most of his adult life in the US. Nevertheless, Abbas' actions will likely have little impact. Even before Hamas seized the Gaza Strip, Abbas, leader of the rival Fatah group, was seen as a weak leader. Hamas has ignored Haniyeh's 'dismissal.'

On Wednesday, Israeli troops raided Gaza City, killing at least twelve, in what has been the bloodiest fighting since the Hamas takeover. President Abbas condemned Israel's actions, while also condemning the agressions of Hamas, which, since the takeover, has fired five rockets and three mortar rounds into Israel.

For more information on the rise of Hamas, read this article.

European Racism

2007-06-29T00:16:00.001-04:00

Think racism is a concern of the past? Watch this. And don't just dismiss it as a soccer thing, or a European thing.

POUND (a short film by Evan Bernard)

2007-06-28T23:30:00.001-04:00

I remember doing this in elementary school. My friend Sullivan Kahn and I had a really elaborate one worked out.

Videos are Great! Watch this.

2007-06-28T23:18:00.000-04:00

Triumph Insult Comic Dog - Star Wars Nerds Movie Premiere

Add to My Profile | More Videos

found this on another blog

2007-06-28T22:23:00.001-04:00

Children

2007-06-27T23:11:00.000-04:00

I'm amazed at the number of blogs on blogspot devoted to the blogger's child/children.

"Today, little Tate, Jr. Threw Up..."

What the fuck?

On and On

2007-06-27T23:03:00.000-04:00

Please don't cry
We're designed to die

-Wilco

Isn't that weird? As soon as we're born, every minute is one closer to being dead. Is that a pessimistic perspective? Or a realistic one?

Book Review

2007-06-23T19:43:00.000-04:00

Here is a book review I wrote for Blogger News Network.

By the mid 1950s Ray Bradbury had established himself as a premier science-fiction writer. The success of The Martian Chronicles (1950) and Fahrenheit 451 (1953) had seemingly launched his career in that direction. But in 1957 Bradbury released the novel Dandelion Wine, an homage to youth, innocence, and belief, whose only fantastical elements are strictly in the minds of the young protagonist and his friends.

Dandelion Wine is a semi-autobiographical novel set in Green Town, Illinois, a loosely veiled mask for Waukegon, where Bradbury was born. It centers around the summer exploits of Douglas Spaulding, a twelve-year old with the energy of a lightning bolt. In 1974, Bradbury wrote the essay “Just This Side of Byzantium,” which became an introduction for new editions of the book. In the essay he reveals that Doug is based on himself, and Tom, Doug’s ten-year old brother, is based on Bradbury’s brother, and that John Huff, one of Doug’s best friends, was a real person (named John Huff).

The book takes place during the summer of 1928. The summer truly begins for Doug while picking wild grapes with his father and brother. During the course of their outing, Doug feels “a vast tidal wave lift up behind the forest.” When it crashes, Douglas Spaulding realizes for the first time that he is alive.

The plot of the novel isn’t entirely linear from that point on, but this isn’t a detriment. At times the book seems more like a collection of interrelated stories than one cohesive novel, and indeed, many chapters were previously published as short stories. Each chapter (or group of chapters) deals with the various goings-on of the people of Green Town. There’s Leo Auffmann, happily married father of six, who builds a happiness machine with unforeseen consequences. There’s old Mrs. Bentley, who realizes what it means to be old. There’s the heartbreaking love between Helen Loomis, 95, and Bill Forrester, 31. There’s old Colonel Freeleigh, the human time machine. There’s Lavinia Nebbs and the Lonely One. There’s Miss Fern, Miss Roberta, and the Green Machine. All the happenings of summer, to which Doug is a proud and grateful witness.

For those that dislike too much happiness, Bradbury balances all this joy with an appropriate amount of sadness. After all, a novel about life could not be complete if it did not also address death. While Doug gains awareness of his life, he also loses things which have made that life beautiful. Friends move away, loved ones die. Doug even sees the strangled corpse of a woman, latest victim to the town menace, the Lonely One. These events build up, and by the end of the book, Doug has a realization equal to his life-affirming epiphany in the beginning. Douglas Spaulding, 12 years old, will someday have to die, and there’s nothing he can do about it.

Style-wise, Bradbury couldn’t have written a more fitting book, in terms of relating the content to the theme. Doug is alive, for the first time, for a limited amount of time, and because he knows it he never wants to take that for granted again. He has a nickel tablet and a yellow Ticonderoga pencil with which he keeps meticulous record of his summer. Because of this, Bradbury’s always keen eye for detail shines forth like the light from a firefly lamp. He can masterfully set up a scene:

“He looked out at the yellow sunlight on the concrete and on the green awnings and shining on the gold letters of the window signs across the street, and he looked on the calendar on the wall…. The warm air spread under the sighing fans over his head. A number of women laughed by the open door and were gone through his vision, which was focused beyond them at the town itself and the high courthouse clock.”

Or he can describe something like the Green Machine in painfully beautiful simile:

“It glided. It whispered, an ocean breeze. Delicate as maple leaves, fresher than creek water, it purred with the majesty of cats prowling the noontide…. The machine, with a rubber tread, soft, shrewd, whipped up their scalded white sidewalk, whirred to the lowest porch step, twirled, stopped.”

He even made my mouth water:

” ‘Green Dusk for Dreaming Brand Pure Northern Air,‘ he read. ‘Derived from the atmosphere of the white Arctic in the spring of 1900, and mixed with the wind from the upper Hudson Valley in the month of April, 1910, and containing particles of dust seen shining in the sunset of one day in the meadows around Grinnell, Iowa, when a cool air rose to be captured from a lake and a little creek and a natural spring.’”

Throughout the book, the prose never relaxes its grip on detail and imagery. And when combined with the joys of summer and the heartbreaks of life, seen through the eyes of a boy who wants so badly for things to be beautiful and perfect, but who realizes that sometimes life is beyond his control, you have a novel about growing up that never seems contrived, that never panders to cuteness or gimmick. You have a novel that resonates long after you put it down. If you haven’t experienced summer yet, you must pick up this book.

Hemingway

2007-06-23T18:02:00.000-04:00

"Don't do what you sincerely don't want to do. Never confuse movement with action."
-Papa

Science!

2007-06-22T22:11:00.000-04:00

Learning is the new underage drinking. Everybody's doing it.

Click Me!

Academic Freedom

2007-06-20T21:33:00.000-04:00

Below is a link for an article at Inside Higher Ed about Ward Churchill, the University of Colorado professor who made a lot of people angry when he said that the 9/11 victims were "little Eichmanns." He's recently been found to be "academically dishonest," and this article is a good starting point for a discussion on the nature of "Academic Freedom." I suggest that everybody read this article (it's not too long, don't let the small scroll bar fool you).

Academic Freedom Needs Defending -- From Ward Churchill

Blogger News Network

2007-06-20T20:40:00.000-04:00

I'm writing news articles and book/music reviews for Blogger News Network. The more people visit the site, the more money me and other writers make. So check it out.

www.bloggernews.net

My Knife - A True Story, Part 1

2007-06-19T16:42:00.000-04:00

I've got this knife, a springy Kershaw blade of stainless steel. There are small chips in the smooth part of the blade; the serrated half looks like two McDonald's bat puppets from commercials in my youth. I found the blade half-hidden in dirt on the corner of Gilbert and Greenwood. Thanks to the knife, I no longer had to use my Buck tool to cut the baling twine around the hay; the Buck tool required two hands, and often times gloves had to be taken off, which was digital (as in fingers) suicide during the winter. But the knife, the knife was wonderful.

Growing up I had lots of knives. Dad used to give them to my brother and I, and we'd whittle a few sticks till they were pointy enough to slide through marshmallows with little resistance, then the knives would sit in our desk drawers until a neighbor got one and told us how cool it was. We even bought pocket knives in Italy once, with an engraving of a gondola ride on the side. I traded that knife to my friend Peter, but I don't remember what I got in return.

The only time I'd ever seriously used a knife before the stable was my summer on the ranch in Wyoming. After seeing how often Vern and Newt used their blades, I went into Cody on a day off. The Yellowstone gift shop was having a special on knives that day, two for one. The first one had a gray rubber handle that curved like a banana, the second had a thick black rubber handle and a blade as tall (from keen side to dull side) as half my palm. I think they cost me nine dollars.

The first blade fell apart quickly thanks to a loose screw that had lost the thread. The second blade, the thick one, became my partner during those days on the ranch. The knife acted as blade, saw, screwdriver, scraper, shovel, and nail cleaner, and once or twice I used it to scrape a splinter out of my thumb. The days spent entirely on the lawn mower were filled with thoughts of how to kill a bear if I had the bad luck to run into one with no weapon but that knife.

I lost that blade shortly after returning from Wyoming. It was the first of many losses that would take me farther and farther from the ranch, and from the best summer I'd ever had.

Rube Goldberg

2007-06-13T16:08:00.000-04:00

I was supposed to leave for Carmel at two, but the Nintendo emulator I just downloaded has kept me distracted. I have five levels of Kung Fu to play, and they won't beat themselves.

It was three-thirty before I saw a clock again, and If I'd left then I would have hit rush-hour traffic on 465. Indianapolis is a meager traffic town compared to what I've seen in Chicago and New York, but still, if I can avoid it, why not?

Most of my days involve planning like this. Set the alarm for seven, wake up at eight, study till nine, shower and breakfast till ten, walk to class and in the door by ten-twenty. Since I have no job, anything after class ends does not require structure, and I fill the time with emulators, books, and the occasional hard run.

But there are bigger things than just my days. There's the coordination of my future at stake, and in my mind it's all a giant Rube Goldberg machine. Rube Goldberg machines, for those that don't know, are those really complex devices that cartoon characters build to scramble eggs, or pour pancakes, or flip a light-switch. If there is anything out of place, the objective isn't achieved. The candle has to burst just under the balloon, the brick has to land right on the catapult, the parachute must carry the scissors right across the fishing line. And if everything works, your shoes get tied.

My objective is the Peace Corps. Specifically, my objective during these last few months in the United States, is to ensure that I am actually leaving for Africa. To do this I've had to schedule doctor appointments, get blood work, have cavities filled, obtain an eyeglass prescription, send in reimbursement forms. On top of that I have to finally get my diploma, a task which has brought me to IU, taking two French classes, in which I can get no lower than a C (B- right now in F200, we'll see what happens when the final's graded). When the second session finishes on August 10th, I'll have fourteen days to transfer my credits and get my diploma. This, of course, is assuming I'm definitely leaving, and I can't definitely leave until I get this stuff taken care of.

I was just on the verge of writing, "When did my life become like this? Hinting of serious responsibility?" I'm glad I didn't, because I hate questions like that. Another thing I don't like is when people say they need a vacation from their lives. I'm reading Steinbeck's The Log From the Sea of Cortez right now, and one thing he mentions before he and his shipmates cast off is that so many people stand on the dock with this look of envy in their eyes. They are saying, "My life is nothing but boredom, and I wish I were going with you." Steinbeck says that these people are fools, because a bored man is bored everywhere. If you feel victimized by your life, do not blame the circumstances, blame how you've reacted to them.

I understand that that's an easy thing for someone like me to say. I've not gone bankrupt, or had a drug problem, or grown up in a dysfunctional environment; but I've known people who have, and those kinds of people can be divided into two categories: those that blame the state of their lives on their problems, and those that leave their problems behind and take responsibility for themselves.

I won't give away any names, but two women I've dated have had undesirable childhoods. Absent, abusive, or unfaithful fathers, discrimination, poverty. You name it. All the ingredients for a best-selling memoir. I won't go into any details either, but each girl takes a different approach to the Rube Goldberg machines of their lives; one has modified a flawed design, while the other designs around the flaw.

I wrote in an earlier post about Ulysses that, thanks to language, every man is an artist. One could say that every man is also an inventor. Our lives rest upon a Lego-block foundation built in childhood. Sometimes the foundation is unsound, and it is up to the inventor to build his machine to accommodate those weaknesses. Some machines are simpler than others, and some never reach the main objective. Some build machines all their lives, hoping an objective will eventually be discovered. I feel like I'm building many small machines that will someday be connected. Years ago, the machine took me to Wyoming. Another machine made me fall in love. Now, I'm trying to get to Africa, and I feel like I'll be building this damn thing up to the day I leave. But I don't mind. I like to invent. It gives me something to fill the days.

Jesus of Montreal

2007-06-11T14:53:00.000-04:00

This movie came out in 1989, but I've just watched it for the first time this afternoon. It's stunning. You should watch it now. For anybody that has any interest in truth, the purpose of life, Christianity as a religion, or Christianity as a (more) modern mythology, you need to see this.

Morality

2007-06-07T00:24:00.000-04:00

Sometimes I wonder if morality is nothing more than not acting on our impulses. I've just finished The Winter of Our Discontent (1961), Steinbeck's last novel. The main character is Ethan Allen Hawley, a man of integrity, whose honesty has prevented him from receiving the wealth that people have offered him. Yet a bribe he refused in the beginning is accepted at the end, and Hawley's deceits are at times nothing short of betrayal (or even murder, in a way, in the case of his friend Danny Taylor). It was Hawley's intention to rob the bank behind the grocery store he clerks, but his plans are compromised, not by his own integrity, but rather by an honest act performed by his boss Marullo, who is being deported, and whose deportation he owes to none other than Hawley. A government man comes to tell Hawley that Marullo is giving him the store. Because Hawley is a good man. An honest man, the government agent repeats several times. And here he was about to rob a bank. The only thing that kept his morality intact, in that specific instance, was his immorality in another instance.

I was talking to Laura yesterday, or maybe it was Scott, about how I sometimes consider myself a bad person for the thoughts I have. Oh, the people I'd love to swindle, back stab, cheat. But I never do it. So is morality noble thought or simply noble action? And is noble action really action, or simply the passivity of one lacking the guts to follow his impulses?

In Aldous Huxley's Brave New World (1932), the government has solved the problem of dishonesty and emotion and passion by 1) strict conditioning, and 2) allowing the masses to indulge in their every impulse. The conditioning is essential to keeping part 2 from exploding into chaos, because people are conditioned to only have certain impulses, depending on their caste. In this world, orgies are condoned and monogamy criminalized. For them, morality is based on impulse.

I think it is generally considered that an essential part of morality is honesty. Honesty is generally advocated as, not only the telling of truths, but also of "being true to oneself," of not allowing the wishes or actions of others to shape you into a person you don't want to be. But how can we be true to ourselves if we don't follow our impulses? By denying the things we want we are allowing ourselves to be shaped by the majority vote of society, whose morals are drawn from nothing more than tradition, which is a proud way of saying the consensus of the powerful. It seems, then, that we have two choices: be honest, or be moral. But never the twain shall meet.

Wilco

2007-06-01T12:43:00.000-04:00

Read reviews of Sky Blue Sky here.

Mine will be up soon.

John Steinbeck, voice of warm sand and chewed-up glass

2007-05-31T21:36:00.000-04:00

It was my intent, after finishing Ulysses (and then Brave New World, which I'll write about later), to pick up Dave Eggers' What is the What, which I'd started reading in January while Grandma was dying. I couldn't get into it then, but thought that was just a result of reading it in hospice. Well, I opened it on Tuesday, and have advanced from page 86, where I'd left off, to page 122. Not bad, though since Tuesday I've also started and finished Kurt Vonnegut's 1965 novel God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, and John Steinbeck's 1942 novel The Moon is Down, a total of 467 pages.

God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater was good, but not remarkable. A funny book, Vonnegut states the moral as often as he lights up his Pall Malls. While enjoyable, there is no surprise, and the ending feels abrupt. Nonetheless, I wish I could write like Vonnegut.

What I really want to talk about is John Steinbeck. Not only The Moon is Down, but the man in general. I guess it's fitting that I mentioned Vonnegut, because, while Vonnegut is the most famous humanist in contemporary literature, Steinbeck was no slouch when it came to believing in mankind. But where Vonnegut's humanism is slightly sarcastic and blatantly realistic (mankind's repeated failures don't surprise him), Steinbeck maintained an incredibly passionate, idealistic sense of what it meant to be human. Both believed that mankind was deeply flawed, but while I get the feeling that Vonnegut was resigned to these flaws, Steinbeck thought that man had the ability to save himself. He was a strong proponent of independent thought, of the arts, of writing, and of his writing. To say that he believed in his writing is not to say he was an egoist. I think Mr. Steinbeck says it best:

"The writer must believe that what he is doing is the most important thing in the world. And he must hold to this illusion even when he knows it is not true."

My ex-girlfriend believes I'm an incredibly arrogant asshole. One of the reasons is because I really want to write something that significantly impacts people. She probably thinks I want this because impact means fame, which means lots of people will claim to like me and lots of women will sleep with me because I'll be rich. No. I just want to be able to affect people the way I have been affected by literature. I think this is exactly the motive that Steinbeck had as well.

A collection of his journalism and selected non-fiction, America and Americans, is divided into sections based upon subject matter. In the intro to the miscellaneous section, the editors remark that Steinbeck "loved to address his prose to a particular audience...." Much of his Vietnam journalism comes in the form of letters to a woman named Alicia. Who she is, I don't know. An actual person, or simply a name to put on a paper, it doesn't matter. So many writers, usually pricks, say that they write only for themselves, and that writing for anyone else isn't as noble or pure; it is artistic compromise. But those are the kinds of writers who roll their own cigarettes for style, wear sunglasses in the dark, drink red wine and praise Nietzsche without having read him. I don't see how anyone can consider himself a writer, or at least how a writer can desire to be published, if he doesn't believe he has something to share with others.

I read The Moon is Down in two hours, no kidding. Only 188 pages, but I was still proud of myself. The book is about hope, perseverance, never giving up, even in the face of great odds. Sounds cliché, but Steinbeck succeeds with this theme where a weaker writer might fail. Read this book and tell me if you ever see the author in it. Steinbeck's style is there, but in no way would you imagine him sitting down telling this story, whereas, with Vonnegut for example, it is easy to see that Vonnegut is pleading through his characters. The Moon is Down is like a Gus Van Sant movie; detached from the text, the camera simply floats, and does not judge. This detachment allows the characters to be completely independent, actual beings in an actual world, and not the product of someone's thoughts. You might call this believability the 'ficitonal dream.' Never once does Steinbeck break from it.

The point of view is third-person omniscient. Though it stays fairly objective throughout, occasionally the narrative dips into internal monologue, and it does this for multiple characters. It would be safer to call it third-person objective with forays into omniscience. This narration allows for every character to be a human being. The reader can sympathize just as much with the invading army as with the conquered villagers. Mayor Orden and Colonel Lanser, though enemies by circumstance, are emotional equals. Even Captain Loft, the easiest to hate, is a human with needs and desires and vulnerabilities.

This novel is also a wonderful example of an essential setting. Thematically, it could take place anywhere, because mankind shares a certain kind of spirit. Nonetheless, Steinbeck pays careful attention to the layout of the town. The winter backdrop is fitting to the cold emotions between the army and the citizens. And what better setting for the low point of man, war, than the low point of the year, when all is dark, cold, wet, drab? And what better metaphor for the eternal shine of human hope than snow, which falls pure, and glints just as well at the height of day as it does in moonlight?

The more I want to say abou this novel, the less I can think to write. Read it. It is not a demanding book. Never does Steinbeck ask you for your understanding or your interest. He simply presents a story to you. But the story is like a lone bird flying into a storm; you can't help but to care for it, and be moved.

Dispatches From Iraq

2007-05-30T19:00:00.001-04:00

McSweeney's Internet Tendency is an all-around great website, but these are a few of my favorite things. Check out Dispatches from Iraq first, as Roland Thompson just posted another one today.

Dispatches From Iraq
Dispatches From Adjunct Faculty at a Large State University
Philip Graham Spends a Year in Lisbon

What do you think? Right or Wrong way to protest?

2007-05-28T18:05:00.000-04:00

Read this.

Ulysses

2007-05-28T14:08:00.001-04:00

I've finished Ulysses. Conquered the beast in less than a year, which I consider pretty good, since nine months of school interrupted the initial reading with the final sprint to the end.

I'd like to tell you that things are clearer for me now, that I understand the world on a different level, that there are things I know now, things you need to know. But I'm as confused as when I started.

While doing some very minor research, I found a short summary of each of the chapters on Wikipedia. And truly, in eighteen short paragraphs they were able to tell me just what the fuck I'd been reading about for 783 pages. The only thing I really take from reading Ulysses is that James Joyce was a genius.

For example, episode 14 takes place in a maternity hospital where the character Mina Purefoy is giving birth. So here's what Joyce did:

"Joyce organized this chapter as three sections divided into nine total subsections, representing the trimesters and months of gestation.

This extremely complex chapter can be further broken down structurally. It consists of sixty paragraphs. The first ten paragraphs are parodies of Latin and Anglo-Saxon language, the two major predecessors to the English language, and can be seen as intercourse and conception. The next forty paragraphs, representing the 40 weeks of gestation in human embryonic development, begin with Middle English satires, the earliest form of English; they move chronologically forward through the various styles mentioned above. At the end of the fiftieth paragraph, the baby in the maternity hospital is born, and the final ten paragraphs are the child, combining all the different forms of slang and street English that were spoken in Dublin in the early part of the 20th century" (Wikipedia).

Joyce was a master of languages, fluent in (at least) English, French, Italian, and Latin. My guess is he probably knew Irish, German, and Greek as well, amongst others. His final novel, Finnegans Wake, which will be my next major undertaking as a reader, supposedly combines over 100 different languages in various forms. When asked the point of Finnegans Wake, Joyce responded by saying, "It's supposed to make you laugh." The same can easily be said for Ulysses, which, if nothing else, is wretchedly amusing on a strictly language level.

But why is that significant, the language? Novels are supposed to have plot, a beginning, middle, and end that makes sense, that leaves us with a feeling of some kind of change, whether physically or emotionally. Right?

Remember, while Ulysses is considered to be one of the greatest novels of all time, it is also considered "one of the most important works of Modernist literature" (Wikipedia, emphasis added). One of the major tenets of Modernism was that language is an insufficient form of communication. Language would never get us closer to a higher truth; in fact, it might even take us further away from it.

Ulysses can be seen as the prose equivalent of T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land, an incredibly beautiful, and almost as incomprehensible poem. When I studied The Waste Land in American Literature, I learned that Eliot wrote the poem almost as a challenge to people who felt that language could communicate truth. Every section is Eliot saying, "This is how I feel. Can you understand that? Of course not. But I'll try again." It is the use of precise imagery and figurative language to show that, while those things might produce a relatively specific image, they give you no insight into the nature of truth, whether that truth be universal, or personal. We can never understand another's emotions, no matter how similar our life experiences are; neither can we understand the universe, if there is anything to understand.

What Joyce does is slightly different. While arguably as well-educated as Eliot, Joyce wasn't quite the snob that Eliot was. When he looked at the insufficiency of language, he didn't despair, he laughed. And why shouldn't he? Just think of how many languages exist in this world. None are any closer to the truth than others, and for something that is supposed to bring people together, language, on a global scale, actually serves to separate people of different cultures. It's absurd. And since there's nothing we can do about it, we might as well laugh about it.

In his essay "Politics and the English Language," (1946) George Orwell talks about how convoluted language has become:

"Consider for instance some comfortable English professor defending Russian totalitarianism. He cannot say outright, 'I believe in killing off your opponents when you can get good results by doing so.' Probably, therefore, he will say something like this:

While freely conceding that the Soviet regime exhibits certain features which the humanitarian may be inclined to deplore, we must, I think, agree that a certain curtailment of the right to political opposition is an unavoidable concomitant of transitional periods, and that the rigours which the Russian people have been called upon to undergo have been amply justified in the sphere of concrete achievement."

Joyce does this same kind of thing in Ulysses. Here's how he describes Leopold Bloom undressing:

"He removed his collar, with contained black necktie and collapsible stud, from his neck to a position on the left of the table. He unbuttoned successively in reversed direction waistcoat, trousers, shirt and vest along the medial line of irregular incrispated black hair extending in triangular convergence from the pelvic basin over the circumference of the abdomen and umbilicular fossicle along the medial line of nodes to the intersection of the sixth pectoral vertebrae, thence produced both ways at right angles and terminating in circles described about two equidistant points, right and left, on the summits of the mammary prominences. He unbraced successively each of six minus one braced trouser buttons, arranged in pairs, of which one incomplete."

Language is supposed to be specific, and this passage is very specific. Yet specificity is supposed to bring clear meaning to an idea, and this passage is rendered nearly incomprehensible by its specificity. As an English major, and simply as someone who enjoys the complexities of language, I can appreciate the irony. For Joyce, who knew so much about so many languages, it's easy to see why he had so much fun lampooning this kind of specificity and complexity.

After reading the summary on Wikipedia, I said, "Joyce was a genius." Laura was with me, and asked, "But is it really genius if nobody can understand it?" I'd say that's a pretty good question, but the answer is simple: of course.

Vincent Van Gogh is considered by pretty much everyone to be an artistic genius. Yet in his lifetime he never sold a single painting. Nobody understood him either, but Laura had to admit that yes, he was a genius. Stephen Hawking is a brilliant man, yet I don't know enough math or theory to understand anything that he's talking about. The difference with Van Gogh and Stephen Hawking, though, is that most people know what they were/are trying to do with their art (yes, theoretical astrophysics - and all mathematics - is an art). With Joyce, or with language in general, people don't consider the art behind it. Not everybody can paint, nor can everybody understand the kind of math Hawking does, but everybody understands some kind of language. Because of this, language is dismissed as an art form.

That's why the only people who love Ulysses are scholars and critics and writers like me. That's why the bestseller lists are filled with books by James Patterson and Dean Koontz and David Baldacci. Books driven by plot. This happens, then this happens, then this happens, the end. Events. Occurrences. Those are what matter to people, while language takes a backseat.

Yet for me and my fellow writing students, Language is part of the triumvirate of a good story, the other two branches being Plot and Theme. And just like a three-legged stool, a good story cannot stand without all three legs. But, apparently, a story does not have to stand in order to sell.

Ulysses has all three legs. There is a plot, no matter how complicated it seems, and there is a theme, no matter how dubious or ambivalent it may be. But the real thrill of Ulysses, the reason it is still in print, is still the unbending idol of incredible literature, is because it takes language on its own unbelievable odyssey. That's a trip everybody should be willing to take at least once in their lives. Like I said before, everybody speaks a language. Therefore, in some way, we are all artists. While we may not be able to paint a still-life, or solve complex equations, we can all take ideas floating around inside our head and condense them into words. Every single day, with every word we speak, we are creating an image. Every time I say "tree,' I'm drawing you a picture. But common language, i.e. communication, is nothing more than drawing upon the pool of images that have a universal resonance. But the words "tree," or "cup," or "panther," are just monotonous whispers compared to the shouts that good language is able to accomplish. And Ulysses is the longest, loudest scream I've ever heard. It's difficult, almost painful, but god is it refreshing; like jumping in a lake in winter, it turns your insides to glass, stops your heart, and lets you know the pleasing shock of something you've never felt before.

Waiting

2007-05-25T18:50:00.001-04:00

It is hot now in Indiana. Beginning around ten in the morning and not breaking until well after midnight, the heat sits upon everything as the sweat sits upon the foreheads and upper lips of the people I see. The window-unit AC stays off, and I suffer the nights beneath one thin sheet, the window open, a fan humming at its slowest speed. Getting ready for Africa, I tell myself; I lose the last of my clothing and kick off the sheet.

There is too much time to wait. Insurance company mistakes have once again postponed my required dental work, which means that my invitation (and therefore definitive statement of departure) for Africa remains in limbo. A job interview yesterday yielded only the possibility of a drug test, which they'll let me know about in a week. And I've been summoned for jury duty, but that, too, will have to wait.

Right now I'm killing time waiting for a friend to arrive to spend the weekend here. I've spent all day waiting, walking twice to the post office to send out: check for utilities, check for rent, juror questionnaire and reasons why I can't serve during the term specified by the US District Court. I've gone to the library, two computer labs, and walked past the same newspaper racks, restaurants, and bookstores at least three times. My armpits have been damp since I stepped out the door.

Times like these not even music will cheer me up.

In Ulysses, which I am so close to finishing it's almost frustrating, Leopold Bloom, or the narrator, or whoever it is, mentions that, in a life aged 70 years, 20 are spent in sleep. That's 2/7 of an individual's life spent sleeping. The longer you live, the greater the fraction becomes. I've even heard that 1/3 of our lives is spent in a somnolent state. These figures don't bother me so much, because I like sleep, and, while glancing through a random book at the little cornershop on Kirkland today, I learned that sleep is more important than food when it comes to a person's health.

What bothers me is the waiting. How much life do we spend doing that?

Here's what I did yesterday:
1000: woke up, performed waking duties, i.e., urination, cleansification, food-preparation, mastication
1045 - 1300: waited to go to dentist; filled time with: dog-playing, book-reading, tan-getting, mail-retreiving, newspaper-perusing
1300 - 1330: drove to dentist's office
1330 - 1340: waited for dentist to announce name, upon which speaking of said surname, was informed that insurance company, i.e. Aetna, had chosen to drop us at some point in the two-and-a-half (2.5) weeks since I'd been there last
1340 - 1342: punch car in frustration
1342-1346: drive to local location of secondary education
1346-1350: wander through halls in search of paterfamilias
1350 - 1403: explain to padre the gist of what hath gone down
1403 - 1427: immemorable
1427 - 1600: drove to Bloomington
1600 - 1800: waited for job interview
1800 - 1822: drove to job interview
1822 - 1846: filled out another application, pre-employment survey, laughed
1846 - 1900: person-to-person interview
1900: told to wait another week
1901 - 300: waited for sleep

What was accomplished? Some money was spent, some gas was wasted. All debits, no credits. And still, I wait.

And once I do get a job, once I get my teeth fixed, once I graduate, once I go to Africa, won't I still be waiting? For lunch, for dinner, for another drink, for something exciting, for a night with a woman, for what's next? And when I get to what's next, then what?

My grandma lost two husbands in her lifetime. Grandpa Buck in 1984, Jerry in either 2003 or 2004, I can't remember. She wasn't left with nothing, but she'd lost so much. All that came next was more cancer, the usual Christmas celebrations, a surgery or two, chemo, again and again. I would visit her as often as I could, because she was my grandma, and I loved her more than I've ever loved another human being. We would sit, first in the house I'd always known, her house, Grandma's house, and then in the condo her children picked out for her when it was decided that Montpelier was too far from Toledo, that the five acres and the basement stairs were too much for an 81-year old woman. We would play cribbage on the back-porch of her house while corn sizzled in butter and aluminum foil, or in the sunroom of the condo, watching her neighbors move in and out of their garages, or trying to spot hummingbirds, the occasional American goldfinch. It was our way of waiting. For dinner, for dark, when we'd put on the Dean Martin tapes, or for bed, when she'd kiss me goodnight, and I'd watch her walk to her room, floating inside a nightgown, her bones and skin no more than a collection of marrow and dust. She was so tiny, so old and weak, so much in pain, so tired. I would lie awake at night wondering if she was waiting to die.

And then we were told, for the fourth time, that Grandma had cancer. Was it before she went to Florida? It must have been. But while there, visiting Aunt Teeny, Grandma was taken to the hospital. Fluid in her lungs. Totally incoherent. Falling fast. Uncle Pete and Aunt Denise flew down to Florida, spoke with the doctors, and decided to hire an Air Ambulance, a small private jet to fly Grandma back to Toledo.

An Air Ambulance is not cheap. Luckily, the doctor at St. Luke's agreed to accept the transfer, and arrangements were made. The nurses and doctors in Florida were being difficult, saying little to my aunt and uncle, shooting patronizing looks of pity towards them, repeating, over and over, that what they were doing was very expensive. Aunt Denise, nearly in tears, couldn't take it.

"Will you stop looking at my brother and me like we're idiots? We know it's expensive. We know she's dying. We just want her to die at home."

At St. Luke's, she was in pain, and when I visited she slept while I watched television with no sound. She would do her breathing exercises, or try her best to answer the questions the nurses and doctors asked, or bug anyone she could for another pain pill. Aunt Denise and Uncle Pete worked rotating shifts, feeding Grandma as much as they could, asking doctors questions, writing down the answers. The weekend I was there I went in for breakfast, so they could rest a shift, get some sleep.

When it was decided there was nothing they could do, Grandma went to hospice.

In the hospital we were supposed to get her to eat as much as possible. The goal was to make Grandma better. But in hospice, things are different, as we learned when given the standard informational packet, which included the pamphlet The Dying Process. Nobody would force her to do anything. The weekend I was there I watched the nurses give her as many pain pills as she wanted (provided she wouldn't OD), and take away her untouched food trays with no admonishment. Why yell at her? She was there to die.

Aunt Patti had done Grandma's hair, but still, it was thin, and the skin was tight to her skull. She slept most of the time, her mouth open, her hands held tight in the air in front of her chest. The breaths went in slow, held. We waited, wondering who to call first. Exhale. We sat back in our seats. She twitched occasionally. Aunt Teeny said, "I wonder what she's thinking about." I wish I knew. Growing up. Raising her siblings. The way her mother used to sing to her father, that song she'd told me so many times, the song whose name I can't remember, and now will never know. Hopefully she thought of me, of all her grandkids, of washing us in the sink in Montpelier, of rides on the four-wheeler, of Christmases in her living room, when we were young and Jerry was still alive, when nobody thought about anybody dying.

Guests would come in, all tiptoes and whispers, asking, "Is she sleeping?" It's okay, we told them, you can say hello. They would sit on the side of the bed, grab a hand or a shoulder, nudge her awake. Don't push too hard, I'd think, there's not much there. Her eyes would open, adjust, widen. "Oh my God," Grandma'd say, "I can't believe it."

And then, two weeks later, with Uncle Tim back from Australia, with Aunt Teeny flown in just that day from Florida, Grandma died. All six kids were there, holding her hands, telling her how much they loved her. She took a breath and never let it go. I like to think she held onto that breath like she held onto their hands. The last piece of them she could take with her, all their breaths swirling around inside of her; she swallowed it whole, made it a part of her, and when it was complete, she left.

The only time I cried was at the funeral. Standing in the front pew while Aunt Patti sang "Amazing Grace." I was a pallbearer. It felt good to carry her one last time. It was like dancing.

I miss her. No similes can tell how much. I'm waiting for the day when I can finally erase her number from my phone book. I'm waiting to cry again, because I know it's not over. I'm waiting to hear from her, in a breeze, in a song, in the sound of a kitchen sink, or a too-loud television, or a laugh, or the pfth of a BB gun. I'm waiting to see her again, and I know I'm going to be waiting a long time.

Danny Deckchair

2007-05-23T23:16:00.000-04:00

"Imagine you go away
On a business trip one day
And when you come back home,
Your children have grown
And you never made your wife moan"

-Regina Spektor

I like that song, because of that part, and also because of Regina's advice to people who are too caught up with worries, etc.:

"Maybe you should just kiss someone nice,
Or lick a rock,
Or both"

In the past twenty-four hours I've watched four movies:

Rushmore
Solaris
Rezervni Deli (Spare Parts)
Danny Deckchair

Of these, Rushmore and Danny Deckchair are my favorites. Both are quirky, funny, and have a love story. And both have happy endings. Everything works out for everyone, pretty much.

Normally I'm against that kind of shit, because too often a happy ending = cliché. But these pull it off. Kudos.

I think most people give a thumbs up to happiness. Isn't that what everyone spends their whole life looking for? Some method of living that leaves them lying in bed at the end of every day saying, "That was real good"?

And isn't that why we like books and music and movies and art and all these other forms of entertainment, whether mid-day snack or American Idol? They're like gift boxes, or microwave dinners; pieces of life telling us what it might mean to feel, everywhere and all the time, that everything was real good.

But who wants a Healthy Choice alfredo over some homemade spaghetti?

Here comes my happy ending. Let's hope it's not cliché.

If we're not content to settle with a frozen dinner, we shouldn't be content to settle with TV shows and movies and books. Sure, they can be a part of the whole of what makes things great, but if we don't have our own actions supporting those tidbits, we've got nothing. It's Yeats' question all over again: Life of Action or Life of Contemplation? We have to find ourselves somewhere in between.

Why do I like movies like Danny Deckchair, or music like Regina Spektor's? For one, because it feels real good. But also, because it makes me want to go out and do something on my own. Something first-hand, that I can call mine. It doesn't have to be entirely original. Ride a fucking bike if that makes you happy. All I'm saying is don't sit around all day watching the Tour de France.

Kiss someone nice. Lick a rock. Tie helium balloons to a deck chair. Start a club. Fly a kite. Fall in love.

But make sure to do it all the way.

Like Lincoln said: "Whatever you are, be a good one."

A Glass Half Full

2007-05-16T20:26:00.000-04:00

I am drunk. Standing in Ballantine Hall, at one of the Macs that, apparently, is here simply for student convenience. Listening to Badly Drawn Boy. Wishing I had more wine, or some beer, at home. Just finished Haruki Murakami's book "A Wild Sheep Chase" (which is in quotes because I can't figure out how to put shit in italics on this Mac). A good book, extremely entertaining, with enough "deep" dialogue to give a seeker of truth enough scraps to munch on for a few weeks.

It seems my whole life has been a search for God.

I've yet to find him.

What have I found? Love, good music, plenty of sex and desire, alcohol, literature. What will I do with it? Go to Africa, tell people about their farmland, educate some about the danger of HIV. Hopefully teach some creative writing, if all goes well. Am currently tutoring a South Korean student in conversational English and formal writing. I love it. He asks questions, unlike my Philosophy students (except you, Rebecca!), and he seems to genuinely want to learn everything I have to teach him. I wonder how to tell him that all I have are hopes. The study of literature is the search for truth, at least in my experience, and I haven't found it yet.

This weekend, at Adam's graduation party, I entertained three children, all under five, by sitting on a porch swing with them. There was a trash can in front of us, and one of the kids tried to kick it. I grabbed it by the handle, and said, "You should all kick it together, see how high you can get it." When they kicked, with their toes no bigger than baby shrimp, I would launch the trash can from the bottom with my own foot. It would hang in the air like a bubble, a heavy cloud. They were oblivious, thrilled at their strength. They could have kicked that can all day, and I love them for that.

Jesus, Etc.

2007-05-16T09:55:00.000-04:00

Standing at the corner of Woodlawn and Third, I was listening to Billy Breathes, waiting for the traffic to clear. I glanced at the light to see if it was still green, saw something out of the corner of my eye, wheeled around, surprised. Just two people, waiting to cross as well. A guy, a girl. Friends, maybe more. I felt like an idiot, and was glad when they passed me crossing the street.

Outside the last building I pass before walking up the ramp into Ballantine, some construction workers were taking a cigarette break. I was thinking about my ex-girlfriend, something I've been doing since I came to Bloomington, as the town and campus here remind me of my two months living in Boulder. I thought of how the construction workers would look at me and say, "Rich prick. We work while he listens to his iPod." My response, internally, was, "My ex-girlfriend bought this for me." Not much of a comeback, but it reminded me that, yes, she had bought it for me, had even engraved something on the back, the words that, someday, I would like to title a book with: You Were Right About the Stars.

It's a line taken from the song "Jesus, Etc." by Wilco. Anyone who knows me realizes that I consider Wilco to be the greatest rock group history has ever seen. Though The Beatles may have done more to push music in a different direction, Wilco never sold out the beginning of their career with radio-friendly love songs designed to get them on the charts. Not that those Beatles songs aren't any good. I just don't like them on principle.

To understand the engraved line better, here is some context:

Jesus, don't cry
You can rely on me, honey
You can combine anything you want

I'll be around
You were right about the stars
Each one is a setting sun

One of the things I love about music is its malleability. Music can change shape based on the individual experiences of each and every listener, and since those experiences change, so does the impact of the music.

I don't like getting sentimental, but I need to to explain my point. I loved that girl. In a way that has not been recreated, and is still not forgotten. She was, so to speak, a bright, shining star for me, around which everything I did revolved.

Upon this mini-thought supernova, I played the song. Tweedy introduces it on the Kicking Television album as a mid-tempo rocker, which it is, but it's not something you'll hear anywhere on that kind of radio station. The easy drumming, the strings, Tweedy's cigarette and candy voice. And those words.

It's taken a long time to get over the ex. And this sounds so silly, I know, but this makes sense to me now, like the advice that Allen Ginsburg got when he went to India looking for the same kind of enlightenment he got from his vision of William Blake: If you see something terrible, do not hold onto it. If you see something beautiful, do not hold onto it.

In other words, everything in life is a star, and each one is a setting sun.

Ooh La La

2007-05-14T14:52:00.000-04:00

The first time I heard the Faces song "Ooh La La" it was on Rod Stewart's 1998 album When We Were the New Boys. I remember reading the liner notes, an interview with Rod (I think), and the writer was asking Rod how it felt to cover the Faces after so many years. I had no idea who the Faces were at that point, so I figured it was just an influential band Rod knew of.

Several years later, I finally watched Rushmore, the Wes Anderson film (his second, I believe, after Bottle Rocket). The concluding song is "Ooh La La," but in this version the singer was not Rod Stewart. I did some research and found out that the Faces, who performed the original, were a British rock group that lasted from 1969 to 1975. And, lo and behold, around that time that I was watching Rushmore, the Faces were coming out with a brand new box set, described by allmusic.com as such: "There has never been a better box set than the Faces' Five Guys Walk into a Bar.... There has never been a box [set] that captures an artist so perfectly, nor has a box set taken greater advantage of unreleased and rare material, to the point where it seems as essential and vital as the released recordings. Simply put, there's never been a box set as necessary as this, since it tells the band's entire tale and explains exactly what the fuss is all about."

So, in December of 2004, I requested this box set for Christmas, and it was duly given. Beautifully packaged, the case is the shape of a book, with a nice, matte-like finish to the cover. The discs sit inside, two to a page, overlapping, to keep the size of the case small, and not long, like most four-disc box sets, which are unable to fit on some shelves. After many a listen, I had to agree with allmusic.com. The Faces were amazing. But they weren't amazing because they made the best music of their time, or because they were the best in their genre, or anything above average like that. They were amazing because they wrote and played music that they wanted to hear: straight, three-minute guitar rockers (Too Bad), seven-minute plus electric washouts (Around the Plynth/Gasoline Alley), head-bobbing afternoon-drive piano lilts (Glad and Sorry), and stunning, emotional covers (Maybe I'm Amazed). The Faces made music because it was fun and it sounded good. That's it. A single-disc greatest hits collection from 1999, Good Boys... When They're Asleep, hints at their lovable, tousle-haired nature. The liner notes to the box set are extensive and intimate, with photos from recording sessions and performances, and discussions of the bars the band would set up on stage, to keep the beer and liquor flowing during shows. They were a band that, as Lester Bangs might say (at least from his rant in the beginning of Almost Famous), "had the courage to be drunken buffoons, which makes them poetic."

So "Ooh La La." The recorded version, the Faces version, sounds so strange to me, and was significant as a cover for Rod, because it was sung by Ron Wood, the guitarist who, in 1976, would join the Rolling Stones (a post he continues to fill today). The liner notes to the box set declare that Ronnie Lane, the bassist and sometimes singer/songwriter for the Faces, was ill (or not present?) the day of that session, and Rod declared that the song was out of his vocal range. Thus, Ron Wood. Apparently, while recording, the other members of the band sat in the studio, laughing and making fun of Ron's singing. As far as I know, it is the only song Ron Wood sang on a Faces record. Yet, if you were to play an assortment of Faces songs to your average non-music personality, "Ooh La La" is probably the only track they might recognize.

Simple, opening with a soft, warm acoustic rhythm, the song is inviting, a story of a grandfather's advice to his grandson regarding men's biggest problem, women. The sing-along hook, "I wish that I knew what I know now, when I was younger," is neither deep nor extremely philosophical. It is a simple yearn, an honest insight into the nature of human relations and experience. Not a lamentation, only an observation. Like the Faces themselves, it is straightforward, true, and will continue to resonate as long as joy - in life, in music, in anything - is an ideal to which people hold tight.

For more on the Faces, check out these links/websites:
allmusic.com entry
Faces Official Website
wikipedia entry

Scenic World

2007-05-13T13:37:00.000-04:00

Whenever I listen to the album Gulag Orkestar by Beirut, I want to fight in the Spanish Civil War. That's a terrible association, because the album is beautiful, but the Spanish Civil War, or any war for that matter, was/is not. Hemingway did his best to present war the way it was, straight up, without romanticizing it; but, either due to the things he did in life or simply the way he did things in life is presented, I think it's safe to say that Hemingway has been romanticized enough to make fighting in the Spanish Civil War look like a noble thing. Perhaps I should check my wording. Because in a way, depending on your politics, it is a noble thing to defend your ideals by any means necessary. Nonetheless, that doesn't mean that death is any prettier for nobility.

Way onto Way

2007-04-27T09:05:00.000-04:00

when signing in, I noticed the check box that said "Remember Me" and I thought, "Please, remember me," and I listened to Iron & Wine. Somewhere in between the second beer and the first glass of wine, I grabbed my dog and took him for a walk. We came upon two rabbits munching leaves in a back yard. One rabbit ran away. The other stayed, calmly munching on his vittles. And I thought, "What a tease."

lalalal

2007-04-25T22:46:00.001-04:00

Check out Lemon Jelly, and that one song with the sample of the astronaut watching the sunrise over Earth. Just beautiful.

To begin with, everything.

2007-04-14T18:08:00.000-04:00

I'm doing this for practice, to get into the habit of writing reviews for the things I know: music, movies, books, etc. I may stumble, I may forget I even have this thing, but hopefully people will read it, dig the music I want to tell you about, and provide me with new stuff to listen to and dig myself.

And I'll probably write about my dog, too.