I’m sick of this town… partly because of how heartbreaking it is to see they’ve turned their beautiful beach into a landfill of garbage… I was planning on getting out this afternoon and went to collect my laundry (dropped it with the hotel owner a couple days ago). I finally found it… left hanging on the rooftop clothesline… where it was soaking up all the rain that was pouring down since this morning (as forecasted)…

I am paranoidally(?) certain the hotel owner did it on purpose so I would have to stay an extra night (they cleared all their valuable possessions and furniture off the terrace, but left my stuff out).

I pulled everything down, wrung it all out, and rehung it anywhere I could find in my room on makeshift hangers and window sills…. looks like I am trapped here another night…

Last night, I wandered the neighborhood, made new friends, shook hands, struck up conversations with passing strangers, and followed the wind wherever it led me…

Victor, from Argentina, told me all about his residency at a hospital on a tiny island off the coast of Spain… Abdul and Muhammad invited me to sit and sip tea at their table… we people-watched together, as they broke open and reloaded their cigarettes and told me everything they knew about California…

I asked them to tell me a Moroccan joke, something that made them laugh super hard… something considered really funny in Morocco… Abdul explained how observing normal life situations and finding humor in them is what they mostly laugh about. “Like how the comedians do this. They see real life.” I prodded him for a specific example.

Abdul: “In our fishing town, sardines are very cheap. You can buy a whole pallet of hundreds of sardines for only 6 dirhams! Why are these sardines so very cheap? I say it is because… they HAVE NO PERSONALITY!! ha ha ha ha ha!!!”

He retold the same joke (in Arabic) to the rest of his friends sitting around the table. They, too, all exploded in laughter!! then Abdul repeated the punchline to me in English, making sure I got the joke. “Because… they… have… NO… PERSONALITY!!!” and they all laughed again together while keeping one eye on my response to make sure I was laughing, too.

I did laugh. But for all the wrong reasons. At how awesome and hilarious it was to hear their unguarded happy laughter. At how there must have been something lost in the English translation. At myself, for pretending to understand the punchline to not hurt their feelings. At the infectious laughter feeding itself into swelling laughter…

It feels good. My first train ride in Morocco… freedom and some personal space and a break from the go-go-go…
At one stop along the way, I slipped out to get some fresh air at the back of the car. For some reason, the car door did not close when we began moving again. I sat there in the open doorway drinking in the wide scenery of green hills, shepherds and sheep, orchards of oranges, tiny children running in the dirt, wild hobo cats, gangs of gentlemen playing checkers, shanty towns, and palm tree gardens…. taking it all in like a dog hanging out of a pickup truck window, ocean wind in my face… After several cities and stops, a conductor eventually made his rounds back to our last car. I pretended not to see him coming and acted like I belonged there… until he reached over me, shut the car door, and scolded me in Arabic about how dangerous it was… I pretended to suddenly understand that he was right and how it never occurred to me that I could have fallen out…

Sometimes you have to break the rules… and keep pushing forward… until someone tells you to stop…

I finished my stroll through Rabat’s ginormous cemetery overlooking the behemoth, crashing waves and the ocean (I think this is where I’d like to be buried… AFTER I’m dead, I mean) and wandered around the kasbah and French colonial gardens inside…

Ah, and it wouldn’t be a day in Morocco without someone asking me to buy hash… “No, sir. Thank you.” Not sure why I have to be so polite in my declining their stalwart, entrepreneurial efforts, but it’s become my trusty, failsafe mantra here, like a six-gun shooter at my side… and I keep my itchy, FRENCH trigger finger ready at all times… “No, Monsieur. Merci.” Boom – done! “No, Monsieur. Merci.” Bam – back away!

I sat to rest my weary self outside the impressive and massive front kasbah gate… when two girls came up to me, asked if they could sit, and proceeded to try out their scant English against my non-existent Spanish/French/Arabic. Sisters, I deduced, on a shopping excursion to the big city to escape their family and small town for a quick daytrip jaunt. I thought for sure they were prostitutes, not by how they were dressed, but by how intensely friendly and immediately, gregariously comfortable and curious they were with me as they sat down and started chatting.

Once again, my cynical guard and cautious defenses were shamed by true kindness and innocent sweetness. We spent the rest of the afternoon hanging out at a restaurant where Najat took exceptional pride in ordering the entire meal, sending my plate back when the wrong dish was served, insisted on paying… Afterwards, we taxi’d to the train station so I could treat them to ice cream while they waited for their return home, back to their tiny, Moroccan village, back to their huge family…. and off they went…

I kept exploring for the next four or five hours… getting super lost again in the sardine-packed, ant hill, cattle herd crawl of the medina…. outside the medina walls, I finally stumbled on a beachfront seafood restaurant for dinner and found myself surrounded by all the Rabat lovers, gazing out across the ocean and over their lovers’ dinners… I think it was quite noisy (as when any crowd chatter swells), but I couldn’t tell… I was too enchanted by my seafood spaghetti, and a day’s worth of thoughts to sort through… perfect peace and quiet in my secret head…

Waiting in the bus station to go to Rabat, I heard a loud yelling match break out in front of one of the bus stalls… groups of men pulling the two yellers away from each other (picture an overdramatic episode of Jerry Springer… in Arabic).

While all this commotion was stirring around me, a sweet janitor insisted on helping me watch out for my correct bus… and chatting with me. I think English visitors are more rare, at least that’s how most react when I’m found out. It was important to him that I know who his favorite bands were… no other English was spoken. Only bands mixed in with Arabic. “Jimi Hendrix hhkalla jiabshalla prayamechka Bobe Deelahn khallak shwell hhhalla… Croezbee Steelz Nosh khhhhahlla awahkkalla Laid Zeppelin bshhal wakhkha nshoofha…”

He saw my eyes widen and light up when he mentioned Led Zeppelin… and I stoked his fire with “Je t’aime!! Je t’aime!! Je t’aaaaaaaaime! C’est TRES Bon! Aw yeah, Monsieur! Tres Bon!!”

My long travel day ended in a lengthy taxi ride, and longwinded argument in broken French about the driver’s fluctuating meter charge (I won), then having to search out the hotel into the windy maze of the medina (that the taxi driver didn’t come CLOSE to)… I finally caved in and ate at McDonald’s… while I sang the theme song to “Team America,” dedicating it to Mr. Rabat Taxi Man…

I’ve only been out for four weeks so far… and it feels like I’ve been gone for four months… funny how time gets stretched and distorted and becomes a lost buried manuscript in some forgotten tomb… like I’m an astronaut and have gone into space, and when I return, everyone else will have aged and grown in documentable, noticeable distances… time and history will have moved ahead in measurable blocks… while I, the cosmonaut in a tiny capsule on a different plane of time, remain lost in space…

I feel like I’m constantly carrying this crushing weight everywhere I go… I witness, or am confronted by, true kindness and true honest selflessness…. there are so many people here with a simple pure heart of giving and caring about other people…

During the 2 and a half hour bus ride to El-Jadida, everyone practically climbed over each other to drop change in a blind beggar’s hand as he walked the aisle with his blind man’s cane. The boy sitting next to me then jumped off the bus at one of the roadside stops, and came back with his lunch… a banana, an apple, a sandwich… he started cutting into it with his trusty pocket knife… using the only 3 words he knew in English, he insisted I take half of everything and I ate with him for the rest of the ride… what probably cost him half his day’s wage, he joyfully fed me and kept checking on me to make sure everything was alright…

I tried to think of something to share back, I gave him a “whisp” toothbrush… so strange and alien to him, made him smile hard with great curiosity and intrigue as he spent the next 20 minutes with that thing in his mouth…

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.

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.

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.