MahdiM - Travelers guide to nowhere

A smoking from my prom. When you buy it you imagine yourself looking like James Bond in it, but when you wear it, the style is lost somewhere in between the pimples and the unimpressive body.

A photograph from my first night drinking. Holding a cigarette and a bottle of vodka, my eyes are bloodshot, my smile is slightly south of desperate, and my shirt is the kind of shirt that mothers buy for teenagers when they think that they are still nine.

A cigarette butt with lipstick on it. Wine red, bordering on black, and the wrinkles of the lips left a clearly defined texture. It was from my first sexual encounter with an older woman, in a upscale hotel in Dakar.

A picture from shame-watch, a tradition when i would sit upon my roof, watching the girls of the neighborhood return to their houses on saturdays and sundays, hung over and contrite. I would photograph them and put the pictures on a website, for everyone to see. Why, you ask? For the fuck of it.

I’ll write you a haiku,
Just to make you start counting syllables.
And I’ll write you a book
Just so you’ll have something
To call you names when I’ve gone

And I’ll sing you a song without vowels,
Whenever you try to sing along,
You’ll just feel dumb
(You’ll stop then, won’t you?)
But I’ll sing your praises until
I deem that you had enough
(But less is more, right?)

I’ll get rid of all your bad habits,
I’ll make you feel depressed
Long after my cold heart stops beating

But, you see my darling,
Thats just what a parents love is ALL about!

The meat counter in the supermarket smelled like a thousand cows having their body parts evaluated, valued and made into expensive food, cheap food, dog food, cat food and thrash. In that order. The fish counter smelled like the giant floating plastic island in the pacific. With dead fish caught in six pack holders. Like the millions of tiny people caught in the network of cubicles of a large corporation whose input is excel sheets, and its out put is summarized excel sheets. I like it. Makes me feel like home in this modern western world. Makes me feel like i can always expect what somebody will react like when i say something, makes me know how to not push somebody’s buttons. And i never do, god forbid i have to actually talk to somebody. (should i capitalize the g in god? or shouldn’t i? I’m an atheist, but should i anyway? Out of swedish “respect” (cowardliness)?) Note: never mention religion expect if you want to watch somebody try to find the least offensive words ever. They think thrice if any word could be interpreted in any offensive way, and then they utter a sentence one word at a time, usually with no coherence and no meaning. Except the religious right. I want to meet the religious left, see what they are all about. Ask them how they achieve the level of invisibility that nobody ever even wonder why nobody sees them.

A while ago I wanted to write. I wanted to get published, I wanted to get recognized.
Not for fame or fortune, simply for survival of my ego and the continued existence of my life. So I went to Hungary, inspired by a friend, and a TED-talk. I toured Budapest, and lived with a Hungarian family. I walked the streets, I went to the festivals, and I saw the bands. I even drank the absinth. But nothing inspired me to write about anything more than my failures. So I went to Barcelona, inspired by the price of the flight. And once again I would move around, I drank the wine, I wandered the alleys, and I observed the beaches. And I decided to go to tangier, Africa. Another country, another continent, and another life would probably make me produce again. But alas, no. I Listened to their music, I followed their traditions, I watched them live, but no. I did not produce, and even if that trip led to getting in contact with somebody in power, somebody whom could get me into the world which I dreamed of. So after a short trip back to Sweden, a meting with a “big-wig” in media, I returned to Africa, to Dakar, Senegal, and tried to write. I got an apartment, got integrated into the city, and lived its life. But still I could not produce. Now I feel like a load has been lifted off my chest, like I have actually made progress. Because I know. I know that I am not in the place where I can write what I need to fulfill the want stated in the beginning of this eulogy to a dream. I simply do not have the capacity or experience. At least not now. And that is my reason for giving up.

The more time I spend here I realize that ignorance actually is bliss, that being able sit in the shade of the light of knowledge of the injustice of this world is a trait that though should not be praised, certainly has its perks. More so than I have thought of it earlier. I would not like to live in that shade, under that roof which shields one from the knowledge, but it certainly stings to live in a place where your feeling of guilt never sleeps, where I can never shun away from the suffering, not even for a second.

What I will bring away from this place when I leave I do not know. But it has changed me, and fundamentally how I think about my future. I have given up on some dreams, and where they cease to exist, it feels like no new doors are being unlocked. I have to find a way to utilize what I can do. But for that I need to learn, and most of all, I need to find out what it is I can do.

When I first arrived here, in Dakar, I was full of myself. I hope that has changed a bit.

I could not imagine a more capitalistic place than Dakar. This is economic Darwinism at its extreme, with everybody selling something, all the time. If I want anything from a banjo to a bottle of wine, I need not to go longer than out my door and give somebody the money. Of course I don’t do it, since that would demean the experience.

But when you walk down the street its like your wearing a plaque saying: “Free money.” They will sell you anything, and every street is a market. And they don’t give up. They never give up. It starts out by trying to convince you that they are your friend, and when they realized that you saw through it, they start bargaining with themselves, bringing prices down to half. after that, they get annoyed, and ask what price you are willing to pay, and when you explain that you aren’t interested at any price, thats when they get mad at you and start the screaming. Every streetcorner is a fashionstore. The streets are not just a store, but bedroom and kitchen. Outside of probably one of the more fancy banks, every night I see somebody cooking dinner or sleeping (I’m guessing the flat, relatively clean surface is more comfortable.)

When i depart, i will have spent all my money simply watching. watching people. Uptown gurus, downtown teachers, broke ass artists and dealers and Filipino preachers, leaf-blowers, boob-job doctors, hooligans, garbagemen and your local congressman. Everybody gets this one pointless gift. Everybody gets these two eyes watching them socialize, capitalize, philanthropize and live.

When i depart i will not know more truth than at arrival, that presumably normal night in a hospital in sweden. I will not know less. I will not have contracted nor extracted from or to this world.

If i try to write about it, vindicate it, glorify it or vilify it, i would still just be a player, i will still just be another person living… Trying to live of other people living.

If we were created to spread our genes, then my arrival and transfer is a study in failure. A study in what gives the human pleasure after purpose is ruled out.

Hedonism is after all just the search for release of endorphins. Religion is in the end just the hope for something more than we can see. Science just tries to understand what we already see.

And heritage is still just the small differences in nature and nurture between you and the guy next to you on the bus. Money is only a number with a imaginary value attached to it.

Suicide is still just death, and death is still just the evaporation of interaction with the world. 

Or so we believe.

A flirtatious encounter with the lady behind the espresso-machine. I laughed while she was trying to spell my name, she laughed when I said that she could call me whatever she wanted. She Looked at me shyly while she made the coffee, gave me another 15 minutes later, with her name and number on the papercup, and I though, “Is it the jacket that does it?”.
That kind of shit never happens to my, neither at home, nor on foreign soil.

But, hey, she deserves a call, don’tyouthink?

Through feverish dreams of women and wine, I sing a song of change.

Lady Luck mocked me with rear-end water,

And promises of a continent afar seemed to fade into painful loneliness

So i sing a song of change, and my feet move east

A continent connected with mine, What convenience!

A trip planned for books turns sour when people around you do not share

The experiences of Hari Kunzru or revel at the words of Zadie Smith

What to do? Change of pace and direction!

Moroccans with spite,

Africans as fierce beggars,

Maghreb feels hostile,

I need to catch my breath, even though travels of mine have not been long…

Recent revelations,

Ratified by rapture.

Fortitude found

When future twined its face.

A challenge changed

When the wryness

Of solitude was self-apparent

What was

Embedded with ember

Fixed by philosophy

Has now fiercely faded.

—-

I have now fallen astray

And the road is far too tempting

What motives were driving me

T’wards the Africa’s west?

The east now calls me,

Not the east of the cradle of humanity

But rather the glow afar.

I wanted to destroy everything beautiful I’d never have. Burn the Amazon rain forests. Pump chlorofluorocarbons straight up to gobble the ozone. Open the dump valves on supertankers and uncap offshore oil wells. I wanted to kill all the fish I couldn’t afford to eat, and smother the French beaches I’d never see.

I wanted the whole world to hit bottom.

I really wanted to put a bullet between the eyes of every endangered panda that wouldn’t screw to save its species and every whale or dolphin that gave up and ran itself aground.

Don’t think of this as extinction. Think of this as downsizing.

For thousands of years, human beings had screwed up and trashed and crapped on this planet, and now history expected me to clean up after everyone. I have to wash out and flatten my soup cans. And account for every drop of used motor oil.

And I have to foot the bill for nuclear waste and buried gasoline tanks and land-filled toxic sludge dumped a generation before I was born.

I wanted to breathe smoke.

Birds and deer are a silly luxury, and all the fish should be floating.

I wanted to burn the Louvre. I’d do the Elgin Marbles with a sledgehammer and wipe my ass with the Mona Lisa. This is my world now.

This is my world, my world, and those ancient people are dead.

Credit: Chuck Palahniuk

“I guess its just like life, eh? You never know what you get until you try.”

Only alot of us don’t really try. We stumble along, walking in our circles in the sand, until they grow so deep that we entrench ourselves in them. We build up a image of us going somewhere with everything, we struggle, we hurt, we strife to get there. This place, this imaginary utopia where everything is… What? What is this utopia? Do we actually believe we will get there? Do we actually imagine ourselves someday being completely content with our lives, our surroundings, and perhaps most unbelievably ourselves?

Don’t we deserve better? Don’t we deserve to try to be happy with today, instead of trying to make tomorrow a chance to make the day after tomorrow a little better? I believe that we should slow down a bit. Say piss off to a friend, and doze off a while. Wake up, and go mix everything in your fridge into one soup. Just because all of those times when we go to the fridge for a snack, don’t we all ask our selves “I wonder what the five months old mango chutney would taste like if I cooked it with the lambracks i bought yesterday…?”

Today I have switched from the expensive hotel that first lived in, to probably the cheapest one that can be found. Its called pension atou, and is beautifully located on a buzzy, maybe even stressful street, but through a network of stairs, you get up on a beautiful terrace, where I shot some very interesting photos with a birds eye view.  But when I actually checked out my room I came to a frightening conclusion. There was no electrical sockets. There was what looked like a homemade holder for a lightbulb, and the bulb worked, but no sockets. And I had planned to stay here for at least a couple of days, maybe a week… So I thought, what would I do if I ran into this at home. Of course I would make some kind of homemade solution to fix electricity, and so I did. I removed the security which was supposed to keep the whole thing from going haywire, and then I turned off the electricity, took two wires and taped them to my mobile phone charger. And sure enough, it worked.

Now my plan is to go to Café Hafa, and read a couple of hundred pages. Just like my usual daily ritual.

Au Revoir, Dear presumed readers.

There once was a cat. An ordinary cat, for all intents and purposes. The place he called his home was called Tangier, even though he did not know it. He wandered around, sneaking in between tables, sunbathing on the stairs up to the Kabash and looking for discarded pieces of kebab in the medina. His life was pleasant and he was content with it. His daily journeys were interesting, food was never scarce, the female felines were beautiful and so was he.

This certain cat, you see, could have been almost any cat, in almost any city, in almost any country. Even though this cat did not know of such things such as cities of countries. He knew of the felines he loved, the food he enjoyed, the sun that kept him warm, the old men that pet him, and the other old men that tried to hit him with rocks that he tauntingly avoided.

There really is no point to this. Expect maybe that I want to be that cat. And I am really going to try to put that mindset more into my mind. No master. No follower. No plan. Just a simple pursuit of pleasure for that single day, for that single hour. Plans, commitments, contacts, these things will I fail at whenever I commit to them or not, so why even try?

In a Moroccan café a scrawny small Swedish white boy saw three old men sitting, each one drinking coffee. One was black, with an old suit that suggested either that it was bought second hand, or that he had shrunk from someone huge to someone that it seemed would wither away in the wind. He had a hat, way to big for his small head, and each time that he grasped for his coffee glass it slipped down to his nose, and he had to tip it back, but not until he had sipped his coffee.

One was French, and he wore his colonial heritage as a monarch wears a crown. He was dressed in the traditional khaki brown trousers, and an officers shirt that obviously was never intended for him and that he could not wear in any convincing way. His head was bare, and he was trying to cover his head with hair through a comb-over, but his scalp was clearly showing, and he did not have more than a few locks of hair left. While the black man always slouched and leaned backwards (and therefore always had to grasp for his coffee, with the consequences) the French was always sitting with his back straight, even though this obviously was both painful and hard for him.

One was Arab, wearing a traditional Moroccan robe that was so big that you could have made four well fitting robes for a normal person. It looked like life had been hardest on him, he had only one tooth left, and you could only see one lock of hair on his scalp. His face always seemed to grin, and his laugh was the rolling giggle of a man that has seen too much but can’t understand any of it. His back was so arched that he could not stand upright, when he sat down he always had his right hand on his cane and his chin on his hand. He drank his coffee through a dirty pink straw that he brought with him each time he came there.

They seemed deeply entrenched in conversation, but when you actually listened to them you realized that each one was speaking their own language, and nothing seemed to be a reply to anything else. It was simply three old men, who had found each other not because they liked each other, in fact they seemed to dislike each other, but because they needed something to do during the days. An observer would not think any one of them ever understood what the others said. As soon as one of them had finished what seemed to be an argument the others made loudly disagreeing sounds, and explained something in their own language, with the others sipping their coffee in disbelief.

The scrawny Swedish boy witnessed all of this on his first day in the Moroccan town, and he went home, bewildered by the sights of the old men. When he laid down upon his bed he promised himself that he would go back the next day, and sit down by their table, and start to argument loudly with them in Swedish. And he did.

At first when he sat down with them they looked at him with disbelief. They stared at him for a couple of minutes while he sipped his coffee and he looked right back at them, trying to look like this was the most natural thing in the world for him. After a few minutes they started arguing again, and he joined in, in Swedish. Again they looked a little bewildered but this time with cautious amusement, while he laid out a full argument about the importance of nouns in native American poetry. In Swedish. When he was done, they screamed out their disbelief, throwing up their hands in the air, and the Arab took over in Arabic. And then the French. And then the black man. And the scrawny Swedish boy stayed. He came back the next day, and the next.