The Road to Marrakech

"Travelling, one accepts everything; indignation stays at home. One looks, one listens, one is roused to enthusiasm by the most dreadful things because they are new. Good travelers are heartless."
― Elias Canetti, The Voices of Marrakesh: A Record of a Visit

Why Morocco? I was planning a trip to Southern Spain, thought about a dip into Tangiers, kept tracing my finger South on the map, and got more and more excited. The dates also coincide with Eid al Adha, the biggest of all Muslim holidays. The Festival of Sacrifice. Why not spend it in a Muslim country?

On my last trip (Poland, Ukraine, and the Baltics) I grew a beard and decided to quit my job to devote a year to writing. When I got back, I got as far as the quitting part, but they asked me back, and I accepted. I felt like I'd betrayed myself a little bit. But I also felt like I dodged a bullet, that I was lucky they didn't want to lose me. 

I'm still conflicted, and what I hope to learn from this trip, beyond how easy it is to kill a sheep, is how effectively I can enact a parallel process -- keep the corporate job (and check) and be an active, serious creator. 

I want to leave Morocco with a new play. I don't know if I'll be able to do it. I want to read twenty books. I don't know if I'll be able to do it. I've packed them. 

It's fifteen days in a country where English is the fourth language (if spoken at all), yet I didn't pack until the day of the flight. Is that experience, overconfidence, or procrastination? What does it mean? On the night before, instead of resting or preparing, I went out and stayed out very late.

A club on Capitol Hill with French music and pernod, a place where the poor and the tech-rich smoke together on tiny porches. Fantastic Planet was projected on the wall, women wore fake plastic Halloween scars, boys dragged their shot glasses slowly along the length of their friend's beer cans,

I was clean-shaven and looked to myself like a mollusk out of its shell. Girls asked me to dance with them and dragged their bodies slowly over one another's like a shot glass on a beer can. A man in a t-shirt for a non-existent basketball team made "binoculars" out of his hands and watched them.

The girls hooted like owls to the music making the songs their own.

I went home reeling, stinking of licorice, and wrestled with the cat. He was very pleased.

In the morning, I filled a bag with books, a bag with t-shirts and camera and hired a car. The driver didn't want to talk and turned the radio up. Separate Ways. When I was a boy, my mother took us to the fair. We wanted to ride something called the Bavarian Tumbler. It was one of those "cars go around in a circle" things. 

There were three more of the exact same ride but with different art. One had a really bad Princess Leia and a worse Luke fighting green aliens from the artist's imagination. What made the Tumbler "Bavarian" was the airbrushed art of a... mature woman in lederhosen next to a man squeezing a sausage and drinking a beer. Mustard from his sausage dripped on the woman.

My brother and I were at least this tall and allowed to ride. This was proven by a three-foot-tall wooden bratwurst gradated with numbers. When the gate opened, we boarded, and as luck would have it, our car was next to the operator's booth. He was also the DJ.

"What do you want to hear, little dudes?"

Tank top, cigarette, shaggy hair, mustache, aviator shades. 

I looked at my brother, but he didn't know. We were nine or ten. "Cars by Gary Numan," I said. 

"Journey? Ok, you got it!"

"No! We said..."

"I love Journey too, little dudes!" He pulled a lever or pushed a button and the ride started moving and Separate Ways pounded out. Whenever we came back around to him, I shouted "Cars!" but he would either point to his ear and shake his head or flip us off.

The cab to the airport was faster than the Bavarian Tumbler and had the same music. 

The flight has three links. Seattle to Philly. Philly to Lisbon. Lisbon to Marrakech. 

On the first link, I was completely absorbed in All the Light We Cannot See. Gobbled up 400 pages from takeoff to touchdown. Tears streaming down my face, blowing my nose in cocktail napkins. Such a beautifully constructed novel. Wonderful. So rare to have that much time free from distraction with time devoted only to reading. And rarer still to capture something wholly worthy of that opportunity.

The trip is already an unqualified success.

I left it balanced on a recycling bin next to a gift shop selling replica Liberty Bells and Rocky t-shirts.

From Philly to Lisbon, I read The Horla by Guy de Maupassant, The Devil by Leo Tolstoy, Voices of Marrakech by Elias Canetti, and as much of The Rare and the Beautiful as I could stand. I left them all in pouches on the plane.

The reading part is starting off very well. Will the writing part? It will soon be told.

In Lisbon now. Will be in Marrakech for lunch and then a wild night on the Jamaa el Fna. Will it match the French-music club?  It will soon be told.