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As it turns out, my life speed is perfectly in sync with Morocco… Everyone here seems to live and breathe my own credo, “If we don’t get to it or get there today, there will be tomorrow…” Wake up a little late, miss a bus, stay an extra day… “My friend, for me, it’s no problem.” Most everything will still be here tomorrow… I thought I invented it, and lo and behold, it has been this way here for thousands and thousands of years.

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Sometimes it feels like I am floating weightless in the eye of a violent storm… a constant chaos swirling around me and my quiet cocoon universe of Michael-Land.

Once I arrived in Inezgane (just outside of Agadir), the taxi swindlers tried their best to rape me for 80 dirhams for a ride to Agadir… actual Moroccan price is 3 dirhams… we finally settled on 6dh…

The mad-max style driving is very Grande-Turismo-video-game crazy… and a real thrill ride… no one pays attention to lanes or street lines… they weave around each other, in and out, straddling the center line, sometimes three wide in a one lane road… nobody wears or has seat belts… I just keep silently praying that my driver wins…

I try to keep moving at all times to not look lost. If you walk with purpose, straight on, with conviction, like you know where you’re going, you will have less cling-ons… or panhandlers… or bloodsucking merchants… or a self-appointed “guide”… or restaurant barker… or drug entrepeneur… all clawing at you and wanting a piece of you…

It is this constant movement (physically) and having to be on-guard and paranoid (psychologically) all the time, that makes me exhausted at the end of each day.

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Every night as I unwind and untangle myself to prepare for bed, I take off the day’s layers, the accumulated treasures of cheap beaded bracelets I got in Marrakech; my tossled shirts; my annoying coin change of dirhams dumped out on the table; my pantalons that our Berber guide, Alouk, wanted to buy from me in Merzouga at the flamingo lakes (I told him, “But then I would be naked.”); my sunglasses that Muhammad, the hotel clerk in Marrakech, wanted me to give him as a present and wore around the hotel while I was being rescued and harbored; the necklace my sister gave me a few years ago with a dangling, bent metal ornament that reads “Admired;” and my “lucky necklace” that my nephews made for me just before I left on this trip (as I pointed out Morocco on their rotating, glow-in-the-dark globe). It’s a piece of green string with a lime-green, quarter-sized button tied on. It keeps me safe from all harm.

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Lately, I’ve been falling into deep dream-sleeps more immediately. I lie myself down, close my eyes, and voila, I’m in a vivid dream… It seems strange and amazing. No warm up, no slow dozing into it… it just… starts… like I’m sitting down in the middle of a movie, and clicking the “UN-pause” button to re-start….

In the backseat of the car, in the cafe, in the hotel lobby… anywhere, and around anyone…

Near the end of our late-night dinner in the desert, we were laying around the table on pillows, great adventures and stories were being told (in French), I barely closed my eyes, and, boom, I started right in on a dream… a few minutes later (or longer maybe?) I could faintly hear, “Michael… Michael… have some dessert…” and I was yanked back out into the real world again….

I wish I could harness this and control it… and do it with my eyes completely open… dream in front of people while appearing to be wide awake… that would really be something…

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This morning, I woke up and snuck off from camp to find the highest dune I could climb. I was out of sight and alone on the moon, far away from the rest of the caravan, surrounded by the glorious, mountainous dunescape of bright orange and red… no sound… complete silence… and I watched the sunrise and let the sun peek up and peel off the horizon…. while the wind blew truths and a faint whisper-song in my ears….

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Rode into the Sahara desert on a camel tonight… in a camel caravan convoy… the rhythm of the up-and-down is not much different from a horse… except you sit a lot higher and you have to, sort of, lean back and roll and let gravity sway with each camel stride… like riding a rollercoaster or a rocking boat… and the grunting and snorting is much louder…

Once we arrived and unloaded, we settled into camp and got the full Berber treatment with a traditional Tajine candlelight dinner, everyone digging their hands and bread into the community center… followed by pomegranate for dessert… I got laughed at for eating my pomegranate one seed at a time… in all my life, it never occurred to me to bite into all the seeds at once, getting an entire mouthful with each stab…

Afterwards, we went out into the black and sat around a quaint and humble campfire… the smoke kept drifting into my eyes (I can’t remember if smoke chases beauty or runs away from it)… Eventually, Muhammad, our Berber trekking guide, disappeared into the dinner tent and returned with a candle and threw it into the fire… I thought, “What a waste, Berber dude, that still had a few good hours of burning left in it.” Then, something mystical and magical occurred. The beauty smoke that was stinging my eyes stopped immediately. It was a desert miracle! No more smoke…. just fire…

For the rest of the night, I deciphered as much French as I could, drank my mint tea, and stared the campfire down until it gave up and burnt itself out…

Instantly, another Christmas miracle fell upon us… (yes, even on the Muslims and Berbers)… I was hypnotized and pulled into a trance as I laid on my back and silently watched the blanket of night stars in the sky, spun out and frozen-still like a giant kaleidoscope… so strangely crystal clear… like God was holding up his own personal magnifying glass to let me see…

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Sandra and Miguel invited me to ride along in their car to Merzouga (an 8 hour drive, East to the Sahara). About 6 hours in the middle of the desert (everywhere is the middle of the desert), we got a flat tire. Miguel skillfully NASCAR’d us out of a Moroccan rollover, steered through it and safely got us off to the sandy roadside… We opened the trunk to discover that the rental company left out the most important piece of the jack, we were jackless and had no way to change the tire. The sun was going down fast and it was starting to get dark.

After about 20 minutes of fiddling and trying to invent new solutions, I decided to start waving and flagging any passing vehicles. Our angels were right on it, and on the very first try, someone pulled over. He spoke only Arabic and Spanish – which, of course, was no problem for Sandra and Miguel’s boatload of language surplus.

The kind stranger had a jack and we had the tire changed in no time… well, Miguel had the tire changed in no time!

A couple hours more and we met up with the rest of our A-team at the Sahara base camp… recounting and reliving our brave, desert adventure… peppering our Tajine dinner into the middle of the night… entertained by an impromptu drum jam session by the Berber brothers and family who would be hosting the next day’s trek…

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It still surprises and amuses me how much of traveling is a constant lava lamp flow, continually changing and moving and re-setting in mid-stream… dictated by some unwritten law of synchronicity… knowing things will change 9 different ways, every minute, depending on any random number of happy accidents or chance meetings (or missed trains, delayed flights, whatever). I can’t think of a better way to travel and I have made so many friends and seen crazy miracles by just being open to that hippy freestyle thought and letting the unpredictable, unscheduled, unmapped glitches breathe and appear…

We picked up two more team members today at lunch, Miguel and Sandra, (from Portugal, now living in France).

Naturally, they speak 9 or 10 different languages like everyone else who is not American, and since French is the common denominator, I am sometimes swimming in a lost sea of swirling Frenćais… In the eye of the storm, I can still have complete peace and solitude as I easily check out and think of pretty things in my head (in English) while their conversations and jokes and stories shoot around me like a flurry of ricocheting bullets… (I guess I do the same thing back home during meals with family and friends, too).

Later on, after a family style, rooftop tajine dinner and impromptu folk concert (with Shisha), we piled into deux petite taxis, and raced down to catch the final night of the Ouarazate music festival. We arrived just in time for the climactic ending with reggae legend, Alpha Blondy. It was a little scary at first, as I slowed down my brain long enough to realize I was in the middle of a sea of 3,000 mad, chanting, dancing, spirit-filled, crazed locals… it felt like a riot could break out at any moment… in the middle of the dark… in the middle of nowhere… the music was still raging as we snuck away at one in the morning to beat the crowd and make a clean getaway… coco rasta fantastique, mon…

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Last night’s concert was a large-scale, big bucks production… of Moroccan Hip Hop… straight off the MTV circuit… super high end… except it felt like watching Mexican soap operas. A third or fourth generation derivative…. A cheap counterfeit and carbon copy knockoff, imitating American tv… like watching a cast of seasoned, proficient actors all playing a role… Using all the “correct” hand motions and carefully choreographed “rapper moves” that they have been professionally coached to execute….

Completely unfair, I know, to judge (since I have no idea what they’re saying in Arabic or French). It could have been the most poignant, poetic, heart-piercing human truths… filled with clever wordplay and life altering revelations… or the most profound and inspiring pleas for hope and revolution… I will never know….

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After the 5-hour scenic route through and around the High Atlas mountains and discovering the universal truth that, even here in Morocco, people on the bus go up and down (and I think the wheels on the bus go round and round, too) I arrived in the dark in Ouarzazate (WAH-za-zat)… richer and heavier, with my two new friends in tow, German/French DJ Morgan, and French Beauty/Social Worker Nina.

We grabbed a cab, unloaded and reloaded at a hotel in the center of town, and headed out for dinner and the music festival we heard some people talking about back at the bus station… I already love Morgan’s can-do, must-do, let’s do attitude, spontaneous, and impulsive seat-of-the-pants…

Being out in the world with no entangled, constricting, handcuffed expectations or rigid itinerary, means I’m in surreal time and in constant freefalling flight. Every day is wide open and filled with unpredictable endings. Plans change 9 different ways before I reach the next intended destination. Living and breathing in the moment, being okay with sitting in quiet solitude for hours in a cafe, meeting and drinking-in complete strangers, having a constant curiosity and inquisitiveness about each person or thing I unexpectedly encounter…. it’s swimming in a steady stream of rapids or wind storm, and not caring where you’re blown to… it’s more fun to feel the wind and be surprised with each new ending… it’s jazz… and poker… and blindfolded painting…