After a long hard day of surviving myself, I cozied up to my drug habit of choice. While everyone in the hotel lobby was dragging off their hash cigarettes and polluting the airspace, I clung to my coke and snickers and bottle of water. The midnight movie, the film of whatever happens to be playing on the English channel (with Arabic subtitles scrolling and muddying up the screen) became my saving grace medicine… The Love Guru, with Mike Meyers. I had never seen it. I needed to laugh like that, though… at stupid, juvenile, jr. high humor… at American “inside-baseball” gags… no matter how silly and profane and base, it just felt so good to laugh hard outloud, with all the others in the room (from various distant parts of the globe) joining in. I wasn’t sure if all the laughter was true, I mean, authentic, if everyone in the room GOT the jokes… but like being in a movie theater, it gets contagious…. or maybe I looked like a goofball kid, laughing far more than anyone else… the Western humor, mixed with my long-lost English language, was so potent and sharp and pointy and delicious.

I discovered Oum Kalthoum‘s music in Egypt (where she was from), but I hear her pouring out of everywhere here in Morocco… restaurants and cafes… souks… orange juice stands… taxis… mud hut windows… She was a giant star in the 30’s and 40’s and her music is still a big deal today throughout the world. I love her so.

It’s easy to get lost wandering through the souks… such a beautiful hypnotizing maze of shiny, pretty things… like a jungle of bear traps laced with honey and cream-filled donuts… Each shopkeeper sits outside his own shop, the hungry spider waiting for any unsuspecting fly… he prods or lures or begs you in… “Just look. Come.” It’s a fierce and tiresome tug of war, over and over again. “Where you from? Ah, welcome.” “My friend, come in, just look.”

It’s hard not to become jaded and callous and you have to guard your eyes from making any visual contact or use verbal jujitsu to get past. Eventually, I did get caught off guard, or I was too tired to fight, and I got pulled in to the web.

A young jewelry store owner somehow harangued me into sitting and chatting, and we talked about politics, economics, love (“romantics”?), and Moroccan life, in general. Throughout the conversation, he just couldn’t help himself and inevitably (several times) would come back to asking if I wanted to buy something in his shop.

I told him how poor and broke I was… a pauper in America… and explained my ill-fated career choice… the starving artist… and how difficult it is to survive at times. He replied, “No, you are not. You are rich. You can move around and go anywhere. Do anything. The fact that you are here in Morocco means you are rich.”

I felt ashamed… like I was caught out or exposed… he was right. I knew this. No matter how broke or down-and-out I might ever get, I am truly rich. So privileged, so blessed, so spoiled. To live where you can be what you want. Free to move or go anywhere you want. This is not the Moroccan way.

He said Moroccans will always be poor their whole lives. I tried to argue with him, or counter jab… partly from my natural defense mechanism anytime I feel cornered… partly because deep down, I believed what I was about to tell him as I tried to break it down in as simplified terms as possible.

I told him I have seen so many poor people here… yet, they seem happier than many people who live in the West. I said “rich” or “poor” is what is inside your heart. Someone can have all the world’s treasures, and still be poor in his heart… or a man can have nothing, no material possessions, and still be rich in his heart.

It sounded like an American Indian speech in a cheesy western cowboy film… I was winging it, but as it came out of my mouth and off my lips, it sounded too simple… too obvious… but exactly true…. as if I told him how it gets hot in the summer and cold in winter.

There was a long pause, as if he were tasting a glass of wine for the first time, trying to articulate the new flavor of something he’d never thought about before… swirled it around in his brain… processed it… and finally uttered, “Yes, my friend, this is true.”

We went on to discuss and contrast and compare each other’s family life, some cultural heritage, more love and “romantics”… and I could tell we were both pleased with the friendship… a new bond… that would instantly break apart and end as soon as I left…. but it was still worth it… worth the seeds that might have been sewn…

I think I’m getting “museum fatigue.” Like being at the end of a long day at the museum, when I sometimes get so burnt out I start blowing through the last few wings without much stopping to give any art its due. I just want to finish and get to the end, complete it…
I’ve hit that same threshold, but with towns. Flavors are getting dullened. I need a rest from exciting sights and exotic mystique. I can feel autopilot kicking in.

Meanwhile, I am on the night train to Marrakech. Sealed in a boxcar and chatting it up with an Australian, traveling for the first time, out for 3 weeks, a gift from his wife whom he married straight out of high school 13 years ago. I must sound like an Amway salesman with a pitch. I’ve spent the last hour trying to convince him to not let go of the dream he gave up on. It is obvious he tricked himself out of it long ago. Working a manual labor, tiling job, day in and day out, to support his family, like he should, but he self-extinguished his own secret dream… I gave him too many reasons why he HAD to still go for it, and how this dream of his could easily be fulfilled in unexpected ways that he never considered… and how it was his duty, and obligation as a father to hand down to his kids that legacy of his TRYING… even if it doesn’t get fulfilled exactly as he envisioned it, the spirit of him not giving up will plant seeds in his kids to do the same later on…

He seemed changed and excited to try. New light was coming out of him. New fire. Go forth. Right on, brother, right on.

Something hit me tonight… throughout all of Morocco I have not heard a single swear word… a cussword(?)… expletive… Maybe nobody swears or maybe they’re using Arabic swear words that I can’t understand, either way, it’s like I have been living under a cone of silence. Sadly, it did not occur to me until I was eating a late dinner tonight. They happened to have an American movie playing on their tiny 13″ tv, mounted in the corner. It was a Sean Connery film and I was naturally glued and fixated… but after all this lovely filtered air, boy, it poked me in the eye pretty hard, repeatedly, f-bomb after jagged f-bomb…

I wish I could set my brain to mute specific words, like the edited, made-for-tv movies where certain words get bleeped out to please the FCC… someday that should be possible when we start inserting chips in our head… you could apply that to all sorts of likes and dislikes, keywords, tastes… maybe expand it to behaviors and even people… make it into a phone app… that would be sweet…