Noah’s Ark

 

Eve died first. Women are more durable, they live longer in other settings, but it was Eve who died first. This remarkable woman, whose story was apparently finished once she had painfully given light to a couple of children, was the first creature to experience the darkness of death. She had gone through a few lighter moments with her husband Adama once they had unceremoniously taken leave of the garden. As they had grown older there was a refreshing of the sentiment that they were the people in each other’s lives, for better or worse. They were not always unhappy.

 

Adama’s turn was later. I don’t know how old he was but he had had to bear up under so many mortifications that he must have felt like he was nine hundred and thirty. Ha ha ha.

 

But by then there were other people on the scene. Several generations down the line, after a succession of men had lived long and pointless lives according to the Bible (in the years before they suddenly had the length curtailed to a hundred and twenty years of life by executive order), there emerged an old man named Noah. While Noah was a proverbial good man, at this point it becomes more worthwhile to look at how God himself was feeling around this time. For wasn’t this the moment that he became so disgusted with the outcome of his world – his plaything – that he was that close to tossing it all in? He couldn’t have yet been terribly mature in view of the Abraham fiasco that was to come. So perhaps it wasn’t a deep crisis of disillusionment that he felt – but I’m not sure that it was the distraction of a spoilt child either. Some kids like building miniature worlds with Lego and then smashing them to pieces. But he had already gone through that phase a while ago and while old pleasures can be rediscovered later in life for a few brief moments, generally we all move on. So, I don’t know.

 

Because, it seemed, everything God had ever tried to achieve had blown up in his face. Lucifer and Adama had been friends who had turned their faces away. The dinosaurs had been bestial creatures whose only intent had been to tear each other apart. The garden had been a lovely dream of luminosity and buzzing vibration that had not lasted forever, as nothing ever would thereafter.

 

When we are depressed, the serene musings that ‘everything changes, but only over time’ generally don’t mean a whole lot. We can only focus on our pain, and desperately wish that the pain ends. This was the case with God in these moments. He wanted it all to end: the world (his world), the human race, his anguish. Refreshing the memories from his pioneering days of repetitive immolation, he decided that one day in the next week the seas would unexpectedly rise.

 

Noah had lived a long life. Cursed with the long white beard that all Biblical characters had to have in order to be legitimate, he had nonetheless at various stages of his life found a way around this hindrance to be quite productive. It as probably just as well, for he provided the counterbalance to the rest of the human race, which had degenerated. Much like the dinosaurs before them, they stole and ate each others’ eggs (?!) and generally were a nuisance to be around, casually placing daggers into each other’s backs and so on. If only there was a way to regulate them! With, for example, a pair of magical stone pillars or some other similar, crazy idea. But there wasn’t and the murderous race had long ago outlived its novelty value. They had to go. If something makes us unhappy it’s not immoral to dispense with it.

 

Noah was a level-headed man. Whenever there were clouds on the horizon he could see them – apt, for he would certainly need this foresight when the time would arrive for everyone to pile into the ark. Metaphorical clouds, such as the ones that peppered people’s brows just before they erupted with adverse emotion, did not escape him either.

 

Planet 2000

How’s your world these days? I wonder about the world sometimes, the countries that have spent two hundred years meshing with each other and are fast losing power to the fat-cat corporations, China excepted. Here’s how I see the puzzle:

 

United States: They spent 170 years building themselves up, sixty more being an empire, but what are they going to do now that they are faltering? How long will they still be on top? Probably only another fifty years at best. Strange, because Rome stayed put for hundreds of years.

Cheney and Bush killed them, eventually, even as they thought they were flexing American muscle. Now nobody believes them, their credo of wealthy living collapsed last September and proved just as flawed as the theory of communism, and while every country is still bound to America for the moment, they are starting to understand that they don’t have to listen anymore.

Barack Obama is a new example of sharing, thinky policy that everyone (those in power and observers like us) will love while it lasts but that, rather than heralding a new age, will only last eight years. America has a deep conservative heart that will never be denied. They will never get rid of their guns, their cash mentality, their ways. America’s main problem, apart from the fact that they bully other countries around and think there will be no consequences, is that as a people they are too resistant to change. This futile fight against the inevitability of change will ultimately bring them down, probably in the second half of this century.

 

China: They suddenly know the American adrenaline rush of being answerable to no one. When economic strength kicks in all we’ll be able to do is work with their whims. They have the manpower to be able to call the shots, the complete strength in numbers to achieve anything from a construction point of view. They can build anything they may need. For the moment only economics work against them, but that will fade once their economy gets a bit of money seeping into it. The Confucism and family-centeredness of their culture is an honourable backdrop, but money society is taking over in China.

Their fairly primitive rule-the-world ways seem pretty stupid, even stupider than America’s. They don’t care about the environment, they don’t care about local feelings (the way they are currently ravaging Africa is pretty 19th Century). They order people around, yet are hypersensitive to any sort of criticism. Once China takes over the globe people will end up hating them as much as they hated America, because they are too pushy in the way they act at a higher level.

 

Europe: What they lack in current glory they make up for in social advancement. Gay marriage, competent health care systems, an once-upon-a-time openness to immigrants (that by now is finished, they got saturated and got tired of it), to new ideas, an ability to adapt to change, and liberal ideas, are the things that keep me from spitting on Europe’s hypocrisy. Its people tour the globe lecturing everyone on how their countries could be better, while they dine out and relax on the proceeds that Europe plundered from those very places while destroying their institutions back in the days of colonialism.

Europe now is where America will be, a matron reliving past glories, with a bit of clout but likewise no one really has to listen to what any of them has to say.

Europe, unlike America, is not reactionary, and now that they’ve satisfied monetary urges that the rest of the world is still obsessed with, is probably where the advancement of the human race is going to happen, if your opinion of advancement is based on increased social acceptance rather than mechanical advancement, which is probably still slightly America’s domain.

Europe is probably where it’s still at in a day-to-day sense, at a lower level. It is the place to go to make money and get jobs, to experience ‘culture’ (I hate that word!), to learn relatively simple languages, to backpack and meet locals relatively painlessly. Relatively desperate people from Africa and South America will swarm into Europe this century: will they contribute to Europe’s grandeur or lower its standard of living?

 

Africa and South America: The brains will perennially leave these places, seeing a better economic opportunity to save themselves elsewhere (see above). That will leave a bunch of menial people back home doing a bunch of menial jobs, and hence these continents will not improve compared to the rest of the world. The increased wealth of the planet seeps down bit by bit in the form of mobile phones and the internet and all that, but these people will still have to waste their lives working hour after hour at meaningless jobs for scant wages. At the top level, debt servicing to the first world will keep these countries down. Economics forever kills them; we basically keep them down on purpose, and order them around because of the power of our better economics.

Collectively there’s an undercurrent of bitterness that I don’t see going away anytime soon. Colonialism took their possessions and destroyed their once well-functioning institutions, to be replaced by twisted parodies of Western ways that didn’t work too well at the level of governing and business. I’ll go back in 500 years when colonialism is a distant dream and see how they’re doing, and maybe then everyone will be free of historical bitterness and a sense of having been wronged. (Ditto Iraq: see you in 2511.) For a wrong to be forgotten, first the oppressor must acknowledge that what they did mattered, then the oppressed must acknowledge that the second step is up to them to let that bitterness go and let what happened not matter so much. But we never even do the first step, so there’s no chance of the second. In fact, the wrong in these continents is perennial and has never ended.

It must be added that many of their infortunes are also self-inflicted, due to a deep-seated corruption, which must be shed if these places are to have any hope of advancement. Is corruption a product of poverty? Is poverty a product of corruption? Either way, corruption is killing these countries.

 

Middle East: So much money and yet it never seeps down to their general societies. Will they one day mesh with the rest of the world in anything other than business? Probably not, because I feel the deep religion of their society keeps them at arm’s length from the rest of the world, separating them (anti-religious crusaders would say that religion separates people on purpose).

At the top level the Middle East countries have to be tip-toed around as much as China because of their hypersensitivity, and while oil still calls the shots, so do they. What does the Middle East do when the world runs out of oil? I personally will celebrate the day, since it will facilitate the cleaner energy that we should undoubtedly already be using. But does that mean that the Middle East stops being relevant to the world, and becomes even more insular? Have they set up to use oil revenue to benefit themselves in the future? Can it be used to better the standard of living of Joe Middle East? It hasn’t yet, and why would it ever? We’ve been buying oil for years already and the money just goes to the sheiks.

  

So the 2000s are building to become the Asian century at a higher level, but it can’t yet be called that while their people underneath still have no personal money. End of layman analysis.

Ana Cecilia, or kind things people have said to me

I’ve lost my mojo with this blog, and seemingly my audience too, slim as it was. Maybe I just said everything I needed to say, and need to go through new things to be able to say any more. But there is one night that I still need to talk about: Peru, and Ana Cecilia… eventually, in a roundabout way.

 

“Marty’s too stylish to look at those girls.” It was one of those dirty post-midnight nights where you end up shoving aside someone else’s rubbish and cleaning the table yourself to distractedly eat McDonald’s across from Flinders Street. I had blazer and collar, dolled up, and was with my best mate and two women across from us, one of whom I had mistakenly hooked up with the year before. That night I had not been able to hide just how nuts I am; I particularly cannot hide it in the moments I get dragged out to the bar scene on Saturday nights. I weirded out my mate and also the girl I had once dated, who mentioned that I seemed to have a lot of anger against Australia and my mate consented with, “Against the world. It’s not a good way to be. He probably has to get past that,” but I never did. The girl’s friend gave me a few minutes of kind respite where I actually got into a conversation that I enjoyed. I’d spent the rest of the night kind of staring off into space, and they had both turned to look behind them a few times to work out what the hell I was looking at. I wasn’t.

Anyway… two little ho-ey teenagers in their skin-flashing apparel were sitting next to us, and my sort of ex looked at them and made some remark about me. But my best mate knew me better and responded, “(see above)”. I felt so vindicated in my approach to the world, for a moment. Someone had noticed my feigned or maybe real elegance. He had fed my vanity, but also, he was right: I would never have been interested in them. They just sent out the wrong vibes, the wrong age, the wrong level of politeness, of intellect. A body without a brain or at least a level of understanding, is kind of repugnant, just a germy other person. No girl who would assess me on external matters is ever worth wasting time on.

 

“You seem like a bit of an intellectual.” I was in Queensland one weekend in 2007, the lost year (as opposed to 2004, the lost year). We had all hit the piss on Sunday, and on the Sunday night a girl walked out on a guy. He was a bricklayer with dreds, who mentioned the following morning that “I could go out and get drunk today, or I could get on with my life.” We laughed our asses off and naturally chose the former option.

I didn’t know him, but I sensed that if you lose your girl then it can hurt, and perhaps a lot. She was a prize: a good-looking lawyer, and they’d been together two years. So as I found out repeatedly that day that Bundy and Cola is on tap in Qld, I said what needed to be said without saying anything. He was a man’s man, but I listened as he told me that to be a brickie you have to put your emotions aside even if you’re feeling off the ball, because you are paid per brick so you need to keep your focus. Somehow he had noticed me amidst all the blokes standing around and felt like talking to me, and said, “(see above)”. Like the comment about style, the brain bit was how I had tried to paint myself and was happy to have been noticed as a thinker. It’s harder to show that than what you might suspect.

I went through a series of half-conversations with him about his spot. I didn’t say too much, but I showed him that I understood, that I got him, that he was perhaps going through shit but that as blokes we couldn’t say too much about it, and he knew that I knew. At the end of the day he told me that I had been a bit of a legend to him. Thank you.

I’m sad that no further chances have since popped up for me to be kind to anyone, to help someone. Later on I paid for three of a woman’s uni semesters and saved her each time, but that was only because I loved her.

 

“No. Te conozco.” This one was very beautiful. I picked up Ana Cecilia, a pretty, mature, young 19-year old Peruvian, when I was 24 and passing through, you guessed it, Peru. We danced together as the centre focus of the club and I ended up kissing her.

It was my greatest night, and I would write an entire blog about her if I hadn’t already done it, if I wasn’t so lazy and if the story wasn’t so old. Ana Cecilia was my what if, my one-night romance, my night where everything came together and I proved myself, without touching a drop of alcohol and despite some dumpy clothes (I had just done a four-day trek; my track pants and purple shoes (!) were the only things that didn’t smell). She was dancing in the centre of the surrounding ring of people and I decided that she would be fun to dance with, so I slid in, popped some moves and held my hand out to her with my chin raised in smirked challenge: who are you to refuse?

Does she still think of me? She said I was the first foreigner she ever kissed. She was the first Peruvian I ever, and the only. She had a tongue stud but hadn’t told her parents about it, and I enjoyed it. She had had her heart broken, same as me. She was studying architecture in Cuzco. We whispered these things to each other as we danced in each others hands and arms, and occasionally kissed.

She walked me back to my hostel with her friends, because I was alone at night and a foreigner, a tourist ripe for the picking. Thank you Cecilia. She mentioned that she had to keep an eye on her friends, because they were with guys she couldn’t trust. I asked: “How do you know you can trust me?” And she replied, “(see above): No. I know you.” I know you. We had met each other only a few hours earlier, and I could hardly have dreamed of getting her on any other night, but my dancefloor confidence was soaring that year and I managed it. She had seen something in me beyond the funk, and had decided for herself that I was real, that I had already given enough for her to trust in.

It was tender when we said goodbye. She kissed me on my mouth, then on my nose, and asked how we could see each other again. So we arranged a time for the next morning, but she never showed up. She said the word goodbye, in English, then kissed me, then said goodbye, then kissed me, then said goodbye, then kissed me. I don’t remember her face in detail but a vague shadow still floats in my mind. Her skin was light brown, her hair was cut at her neck. I wrote: I would have liked for her to be more than just a memory.

And there she is still, the briefly attained but eternally unattainable, the girl who saw something in me as I saw something in her, our attraction but also something beyond that, and that something I could not have kept but have wanted to every day since I lost her, even if I didn’t have her beyond a few wonderful hours. And so I have to ask…

Ana Cecilia, born in 1984 or 1985, studying architecture at university in Cuzco, in a small nightclub in Machupicchu (”Aguas Calientes”) with her university group on the night of Saturday, May 6, 2006 and who went to see the lost Inca city Machu Picchu a day later, who danced with a tall foreigner who had his most inspired night despite his ugly, heavy shoes, who danced fluidly and spoke Spanish to you: Ana Cecilia, do you remember me?

2004

I’ve been thinking about America lately. Not the America that’s on TV, or the political America, but my own personal one, the one that I’m kind of intrigued by but certainly don’t want to get too close to. My impression of America is not the pristine one that I saw so many times as a kid in the late 80s and mid 90s, but the one I saw in 2003 and 2004 the last time I was there until now, and forever.

2004 was for me the lost year, where I lived in the past (I was trying to re-do the magic of 2003 but it had dissipated), was alone, had people to see but who didn’t care so much if they saw me. I took walks alone, was tense and sad but happy that I was free, free to not have to associate with people, free to not have to work, free to not have to do anything except soak up my solitude. For if 2003 was the year that travelling worked, then 2004 was the year that it didn’t. I wanted a girl to give a shit about my presence, and I looked for it from past memories and moments that were gone baby, gone, girls who had moved on and hadn’t forgotten but I was a memory to them like they were to me, even as I briefly saw each of them again in the flesh.

I got sidetracked. I arrived in America in late May 2004, right as the impossible had happened on the soccer field (Porto European Champion 2004), and once there I ran into a bunch of people who lived in the rich country but dealt with the tension of its less-publicised lack: they were struggling, getting into and out of relationships and avoiding the African-Americans and having abortions and having to drop out of college for lack of money and get real jobs. It wasn’t ghetto, and I got a slight taste of ghetto that existed in its own world nearby, but it was something, and I felt that I would not want to do this, be American, have to fight for everything, be this fucked up. Because to some extent they were: their parents hadn’t really known how to raise them without them all turning into little emos ten years along the path, teens and twenty-somethings who never learnt how to control their emotions, who took pills, who grew up very fast but never matured, they never took that final emotional step into adulthood at any stages of their lives, wearing their hats backward as they visited bars and strip clubs well into their thirties.

My mission was a black girl named Ashlee.  Wait, that’s wrongly worded. I loved Ashlee. I loved her without even knowing her, not really. Her face was not attractive and if I hadn’t seen her face-to-face in 2004 I might have thought it was hormones, but I took a walk around a forest preserve with her and found that I loved her dearly, even though she repeatedly screwed me around by not showing up to whatever place we agreed to meet at.  I don’t know if I can say I love her anymore; she’s just an idea now, and to some extent even Lizeth the goddess of Paradise Lost fame (see blog title) is just an idea now too. Ashlee lived in dire straits, she scraped money where she could, by fair means or foul, and I was just some naïve white boy from Australia who had only had his first kiss the year before. She was my first kiss, and I’m happy it was her. That doesn’t mean a whole lot now, but still, Ashlee had a certain dignity, faith, kindness and soul amid the rubble, that other women just don’t have. She was fucked up too, but show me a person who isn’t, deep down.

I don’t know what I could have done with her. I couldn’t save her from the sordidness of her circumstances. I couldn’t form anything with her. Her mood was weird, and mostly she was exasperated with me, but we had that one talk in person and one talk by telephone in 2004, a year after we had spent a week together in 2003, pre-dissipation of magic. I am sure that I loved her, in a te amo sense in Spanish, the major one, not just the te quiero that you throw around willy nilly. But why? I don’t know, I just did. I wanted to save her. But she’s still kicking on somewhere out there in Chicago and it turned out that she didn’t need saving. I caused a tear to fall from her cheek, and when I said goodbye to her I placed my hand on one side of her face while kissing the other cheek, like a woman would do. To some extent I probably would have been a better chick than I am a dude.

In the last month I walked around aimlessly as the country got colder and time wound down. I was immobile, hanging out with a guy that had recently turned gay, whose sister went for the blacks and whose father drank, but who gave me a free place to stay and who I became fond of despite my original reservations. I stayed there in the middle of their parents getting a divorce, in the middle of everything. I was a prisoner of my physical placing, of my circumstance, of my unrequited love, of my despair, of my lack of friends. Yet I delayed going home, hoping against hope. I spent one evening at the house of a fantasy, Liesl. I was five years older than her and she was illegal. I charmed her parents though. She was beautiful, huge eyes, long blond hair, and I was stunned. But I left America in disappointment with Liesl and Ashlee on my mind a few days later, and I don’t believe I ever want to go back again. I got out just in time, on November 16, right before the snow fell and dusk was already happening at 4:45pm (!). I had spent months walking around alone on roads that went nowhere, thinking that I was on the frontier (but the place was really a meaningless nothing in hindsight), eating ice-cream Blizzards alone, taking long-distance bus trips alone, racking up the hours staring out the window, comfortable in my solitude but I had always known that something was missing, and that I had found it in 2003 but it was gone in 2004.

I discovered: I have a passport to this country, but this is not my country. I was lost there, chasing ghosts. I had no idea. I had to get out, start again, even if I went to Bolivia rather than Australia to find it, postponing real life once more. At least Bolivia was new, it wasn’t America yet again, that land of vagueness, not of sadness but of something-ness nonetheless. That is my America. And America will stay that way for me, because I will not do it again. I am not afraid of America, nor even have negative feelings against it, but I will never go back there.

Mali of my heart

Given the tumbleweeds that drift through this blog these days, I’m abandoning all pretence of being relevant and will just write about what is in my head, what I think about, and I might even hit the snooze button soon. This piece is a rambling, rolling fantasy and if it sounds like demented dream, that’s because it partially is.

Mali, Mali. It’s a country dead in the centre of Africa, one of the Sahara Desert nations, without a coastline. For me Mali is the end of the Earth, now that we know that the world is circular and we can’t fall off its extremities; as far as we could go towards the nothingness and away from the mundanity of our streamlined Western societies. Mali is the beginning of black Africa as one heads south away from Europe and the Arab north, although the Malians, diversely black as their ethnic groups are, are almost all Muslims and as I once saw written on an internet forum, the Bambaras of Mali would probably have a tad more in common with the Arabs to the north than with black ethnic groups in, say, Kenya or South Africa.

I became interested when a bunch of their kids (Under 23s) won a series of manic soccer matches against Portugal, Uruguay, Cameroon and Nigeria to get the bronze medal in the World Youth Cup of 1999, kids with names like Seydou Keita, Mahamadou Diarra, and other Malian surnames like Cissoko, Diakite, Touré, Coulibaly and all the rest.

Mali on the surface is the worst of everything: one of the hottest places in the world, where the Sahara Desert from the north invades ever-increasingly, where the plants die and there is never enough food for all, nor enough money to pay for the food that is left nor jobs to get money, where to survive people sell junk to each other “in a circle of increasingly dwindling returns”. The country is at the bottom of Human Development Indices, and I suspect the stats don’t lie in this case. Immigrants from Ghana and Nigeria find themselves there on their way to the miracle life in Spain and get stuck there with their money run out, alone and forced to cut hair for pennies or some similarly meaningless shit. (But I’m reading a book about science by Bill Bryson – atoms, the universe and all that – and it seems that life simply exists to exist, without ambition, simply for the purpose of survival.)

Malians are black, a shade that for unknown reasons finds itself at the bottom of the pecking order and a nationality that is either ignored or looked down on, for its lack of personal resources, for its AIDS, for its inability to succeed. Externally it is weak, but like Bolivia, Paraguay or whatever else, is a world within its world, rich in culture, in difference, not exactly rich in solidarity but as solid as such a poor country can be. The President is given the nickname ‘A.T.T.’ by a people that saw him liberate the country from dictatorship and in 1991 hand it over to what observers say are always free elections. Malian music, dancing and flowery traditional clothing are becoming somewhat better known now, taking over from what Cuba and Latin America once were before their New World exoticism was discovered, overdone and made cliché.

It is a country that is sprinkled with numerous black ethnic groups who traditionally had their callings: the Bambara were the farmers (and are Mali’s current-day majority population), the Fulani were the cattle herders, the Somono were the fishermen. Their languages are mostly related and when they don’t match the country is very loosely linked by the colonialist French language, a language that in War and Peace times was a symbol of refinement for the Russian aristocracy but whose future now relies on being transposed and Africanised into rolling ‘R’s, used to express frustrations of poverty, abjection, closed doors and migration.

What do Malians feel? I don’t know, and I don’t want to know. From birth they get trapped in a country that offers its citizens no purpose besides child-rearing propagation (say what you will about the chase for money but at least it’s a mission). Money is power, it is ability to alter things, and they have none, they drift from jobs to unemployment and if they can, find themselves in Paris or New York City, looked down on for being African and on the world’s bottom rung, working every day of their lives there without a day off. Back in Mali, Malians contract AIDS, they get malaria but it’s just par for the course there and they shrug it off, or else they die from it but that happens too with regularity and to some extent even death is to be moved on from, they get diseases that no longer exist here. They study by writing in workbooks but don’t have anywhere to apply their knowledge and they ask themselves: we have to study our culture as well as Shakespeare and European culture, so we know both, while Europeans know nothing about Mali, wouldn’t that mean that we are better? They dance, they play Beyoncé in their clubs, they get laid, same as us. A Tanzanian girl I knew in Australia told me, “Just go there. You’ll see that it’s not so different to anywhere else.” It’ll be the same as Australia, as Bolivia, as France, as Tanzania, just a bunch of people going about their day-to-day business. They support their extended families and are supported by others: socialism beats capitalism for the moment, whereas a month unemployed in New York and you’re done for, you won’t get a helping hand from anyone.

This is more about my idea of Mali, my imaginary emotions that it inspires, than about the country itself. It is so close to France and Spain and all the rest, so close to humdrum civilisation and yet so isolated, such a new world only a thousand kilometres away. I could tell you about the mosques made of earth standing strong in the middle of the desert, or the ‘bush’ feel that even the sprawling capital city of more than a million people still exudes, or the freakish River Niger that finds a way through the desert, curving inward against all logic, or Timbuktu, or their music that has not been commercialised just yet despite the wishes of the hippie set, or the fact that in Africa people die with regularity and the world couldn’t care less about Africa’s existence but that they are still standing and still find something to laugh about, and despite the fact they have the most reason to be bitter they just get on with it.

And then in my mind I evaluate which is more important, exotic curiosity and subsequent euphoria (but all the same, loneliness) or everlasting companionship, regular sex and a special person to talk to and look at all my life, and it is probably the latter. I couldn’t lose that for a few months bumming around Mali in heat and various states of composure, head up in the uncertainly of the early days, amused joy as I talk French to young women and dance with them (I suspect I would absolutely love African clubs), or the lack of composure as problems mount in the blistering heat amid the danger of living rich surrounded by poverty and I realise that however fun the whole endeavour would be in patches, there isn’t anybody there that I can depend on. Mali is so in tune with life but also so in tune with death, and if I go there I might die, either from a tropical disease or through violence. I don’t want Mali to be my graveyard.

There is so much to say about Mali and a thousand words have flown by without me having said anything, but I long for Mali against all hope and reason. I probably will not get there, and would not know what to do with myself once there. But even if I didn’t have a mission once I got there, a temporary purpose, I would have a moment when I stand there, breathe and say to myself in utter disbelief that right now, I am in Mali, I am at the end of the Earth. And I would know that a dream can be dreamt forever but the moment it hits us that it has come true is utterly indescribable, a feeling of complete disbelief. But if I get married it won’t happen, because what is real is what is real, and real happiness is better than imaginary happiness, but on the off chance that one in a thousand delivers itself then in those moments life becomes extraordinary, the impossible has unbelievably been made true, and that is where magic occurs.

The Tribulation of Black Americans

Black people seem to be a people apart in America. Black America is an almost completely separate society with its own code of conduct and behaviour, its own dress sense and almost its own dialect of the English language. It also seems to be a much derided and despised group that at a glance would appear to be in perpetual decline.

A lot of my so-called knowledge of the situation in America and of a theory behind the suffering that black people in America go through has to do with a talk I had with a black American guy named Brandon while walking around what was approaching the Harlem area, New York City on September 11th, 2003, when I was twenty-one. That (American) summer I had worked at a summer camp in northern Wisconsin which hosted various black, white and Hispanic groups of kids from the Chicago area for a week at a time. It was named St. Mary’s, run by the Maryville Academy in Chicago, and the camp counsellors there were a mixture of Americans from the Chicago area and a few from Wisconsin and (two-thirds) internationals. I found that the black groups contributed a lot of fun in different ways to their camp week that was missing from the white groups. (There was only two weeks of Hispanic kids.) Overall, the black groups were more willing to sing and dance and contributed mightily to the talent shows and dances that we had on the Friday nights to send the week off and say goodbye. Black (and Hispanic) kids were also, incidentally, a lot more willing to support and encourage the counsellors if they tried singing or dancing as part of the evening festivities.

What the various groups could and couldn’t do well was, I feel, a direct result of their domestic situations. The black kids in general were terrifically skilled at basketball and liked playing flag football and occasionally softball (even though a few of them called it a ‘dying sport’) but were novices at almost every other sport, and virtually none of them could swim. The white kids’ tastes were more varied. They would almost all pass their swim tests and could show their aptitude in other sports like volleyball, water activities, soccer and one of the more select of sports, lacrosse. They liked basketball a lot too and some of them were very adept.

At the beginning of the season I preferred the black groups for the reasons listed above, but by the end I think I found the white ones easier to deal with. Generally the white kids were more sociable with the counsellors right away instead of being warier in the beginning and slowly thawing as the week progressed. But the ones who did thaw provided terrific moments. Each sort of group could bring things that others couldn’t.

Getting to Chicago in September after three months in remote Wisconsin was a difference. Black and white people did not even so much as sit next to each other on trains. I noticed a bad-tempered abruptness and lack of decorum among a lot of people in Chicago who had customer service jobs. At first I attributed it to the struggle and competitiveness of living in a big American city. But after about a week and a half when a few of us had moved on from visiting Chicago to New York, I realised that there was something else that all of these people had in common besides their deficient customer relations skills. Dealing with black people for something as simple a buying a slice of pizza for lunch could frequently take on a confrontational tone and end up being debilitating.

In New York I was for the most part with two fantastic friends who were both from Johannesburg, South Africa. I was very grateful to have been able to spend the week with Jono and Langu, a white guy and a black girl. At the end of the week they were set to go home towards London while I would hang around for another month before it would eventually become necessary to head home in the opposite direction. It was on the last afternoon, after the three of us that morning had been to see the two-year anniversary commemoration at the old World Trade Centre site, that Brandon showed up as we were walking back to our hostel on 101st Street in a Hispanic section of Manhattan. Brandon was a peripheral coach of a high school-age football team who had come from Chicago to use the camp for pre-season training during the camp’s last operating week in late August. I had not worked with them but Jono and Langu had. The players were black teenagers who were incredibly built and looked older than their ages, and were one of the more unruly groups we had for the summer.

Brandon and Langu hooked up that week. That year it wasn’t an uncommon occurrence at that place for the live-in camp counsellors to occasionally see eye-to-eye with some of the visiting staff from the groups themselves. Two months beforehand, in the camp’s early days, I had hooked up with one of the younger supervisors of one of the groups, a girl named Ashlee. And Jono – don’t get me started. When a sizeable (eight or nine) group of us left at camp’s end on August 28th to go to Chicago Jono was with us and so was Langu, originally. But Langu’s concerns about the unsafe nature of the hostel we were all staying at (possession-wise, not personal safety-wise) and perhaps Langu’s precarious money situation meant that she bailed after a day and went to spend the rest of the week at Brandon’s apartment somewhere on Chicago’s south side. The two of them showed up at a get-together we had one night at a local guy’s house, so she hadn’t disappeared completely. I was afraid otherwise when she didn’t show up to meet us and grab our bus to New York, but it was only a temporary hiccup, caused by Langu joking that she’d been going on ‘black people’s time.’

As one of our friends commented to Brandon, Langu must have been something special for Brandon to drive all the way from Chicago to New York for one last chance to see her the last day before she left for home. (But I already knew that.) The four of us went to Central Park, which is pan-Manhattan and no matter where you happen to be staying – even if in a run-down and severely Uptown section nicknamed Spanish Harlem – the Park is within a few minutes’ walking distance for almost anyone. After that, minus Jonathan, three of us decided to walk further Uptown to have a look at proper Harlem.

I was intensely curious but had reservations about the fact that my wallet was still strapped to my chest with $90 inside, and more importantly being white and especially having paid $25 the day before for a Beninoise lady near the hostel (along with Jono) to braid my hair African-style. I was worried I’d be making some sort of unwelcome statement by walking around black neighbourhoods with ‘black hair’.

Langu had once remarked to me that she had once or twice had vague thoughts about moving to Australia but that it would be difficult being one of the only black girls in a white society. I didn’t relate to this statement until the three of us were walking and gradually there were no longer any Hispanics and white people around. I said to Langu, “I’m starting to understand how you would feel if you moved to Australia.” Later I moved to Bolivia and it became my own reality for a year.

I generally kept my head down and looked no one in the face. I did notice one guy looking at me with a puzzled, “What the hell is this guy doing here?” expression on his face. Yes, the area looked in bad repair but not that much more than the area our hostel was situated. I was grateful for Brandon’s presence in these moments, even though he wasn’t all that built, and no doubt Langu was too, although perhaps not in the same way I was. It had been his suggestion to take a look here in the first place. We wouldn’t be there by ourselves. I was tense.

I can’t remember which Avenue we were walking up. Checking the map a few years later, it was probably either Madison or Park Avenue, maybe Fifth. At roughly 120^th Street there was some sort of block or dead-end so we turned right. There was an empty street in front of us and we’d been waiting for the little green man for about ten seconds, like they do in Chicago, when Brandon suddenly said, “This is what makes us look like tourists: waiting at the light.” No one in New York needs anybody’s permission to cross the street whenever they feel like it. Even cops do it.

I remember a few of the comments he’d made while we’d been walking. One was about a ‘ghetto whistle’ – you whistle out the front of a building so that a friend pokes his head out the window or something, ’cause you never just go into a building you don’t know in the ghetto. Another was about an Ethiopian restaurant we walked past, with Brandon laughing and suggesting that some very shady things probably happened in there.

It was while we were walking East along one of the Streets that Brandon said, “Do you know why they call it the projects in the first place?” Langu replied that she would guess that it was a project set up by the authorities many years ago to assemble the black people in one section away from the rest of society. He told her that she was right.

“They conducted experiments on rats. If a community of rats were given everything they needed, food and those things, then things would stay the same with those rats. Then they started depriving the rats of enough food to feed everyone. So the rats would have to fight over what they had. And what they found was that with each new generation the rats would get meaner and meaner. Then they did it with humans.

“All these black people, they put them here, in this one section of town so that they don’t mix with white people and everyone else. And they are deprived of the jobs they need to survive. So they fight with each other, like the rats.

“They’ll grow up with other people just like them, but their attitude towards the people they live around and grow up with, people who are supposedly their friends, will be, ‘I’ll hang out with you but I won’t trust you any further than I can throw you.’

“It’s set up so that everything a black person might want is right here, so that they need never leave this little section of town.” He pointed around as we walked. “There’s your grocery store. There’s where you buy clothes. There’s your cinema, your entertainment.” He indicated a Chinese takeout. “There’s your foreign food if you wanted a bit of variety.”

Then his topic extended beyond what I could believe in but I was listening nonetheless. By this point we were heading down Lexington Avenue away from black Harlem, back in the direction of the hostel. This discussion was about things I’d never imagined before. It was also distracting me from the fear I’d been feeling. “Every major American city was set up with streets in a grid formation. That’s so that the army can easily roll right on through if necessary. No one can take over one section of the city. And one thing that every major city has is a stadium. It’s there so a lot of people can be assembled in one place if they need to.” He quoted a few NFL franchises that I was unsure about, being a semi-foreigner. “The Cleveland team moved to Baltimore because there was an increase in the number of black people there, so they needed a stadium. But then they realised that Cleveland was getting a lot more black people too, so they moved another new team back there. Things were all set up this way by the government, so that a black person can’t rise up out of their place.”

“But why would they do that?” I asked, head swimming. The words had just passed my lips when the incomprehension immediately cleared and I answered my own question. “So that they’re fighting each other instead of them,” meaning black people battle with each other instead of teaming up to focus their energies on the people in power.

I suddenly realised that I was so absorbed that since we’d started talking I had stopped looking around and taking in the sights of what was undoubtedly a once-only opportunity in my life. I felt a pang of regret over this. I looked around trying to make up for lost time, and with new eyes, too. I also realised that I’d been paying so much attention to Brandon that I had forgotten about being intimidated by Harlem. Thanks, Brandon.

Brandon wasn’t even an angry guy either, although he spoke about these subjects with understandable annoyance amid his conviction. Generally he was pretty upbeat, joking a lot with opinions coming to the fore. The minute I had met him he’d clicked off a list of what was wrong with the city of New York. How would a less jovial black person endure these disadvantages given from birth? Yes, I believed the majority of what he’d told me. Thinking about all the violence that happens in the ghetto, perpetrated by neighbour on neighbour, these theories made sense.

What did Langu make of all this? She did not volunteer anything. She simply listened to Brandon’s outpourings and my occasional questions. But being black and coming from the country that had once given rise to Apartheid, the subject may well have been up her alley.

She had told me a few weeks beforehand about a movie called Lumumba, which she said was a terrific one to watch if someone wanted a picture of Africa and its politics, colonialism, the whole package. She was now telling me that it had been on in the last week, while we were all in Chicago. The two of them had watched it at his apartment. “We grow up in ignorance,” Brandon said. “When would I have ever heard about Lumumba if not for her?”

We had made it back to our familiar Spanish Harlem surroundings. He was telling me about a job with a car garage that he had obtained and lost. “The second-in-charge hired me and told me that I’d be on this starting pay rate. Then I showed him that I could do this,” (he spoke in specifics as far as money and mechanic techniques go but I’ve forgotten what he said) “and they said, well, you’ve got yourself another x dollars per hour. Then I showed them this, and they said, that’s another so-and-so dollars per hour. Then a week later the boss came back. I was out the door. If I’d held on another month, the boss was fired for an indiscretion. But I’ve got a mark on my CV now. ‘Why was I fired so soon after starting?’ they’d be asking. And what can I do about it?” I hadn’t known that this sort of stuff was still happening. “Some people have a certain look when it comes to blacks, you can tell right away they don’t like them and don’t trust them. The boss was like that.” Langu nodded. “Our boss at camp was like that too,” she said. I was surprised. She’d never said anything negative about our boss before.

We walked towards the eastern extreme of Manhattan Island and reached the river. I’m reconciling all of these directions years later with a map that I obtained of the New York train system a year later, when I was back for a few days in late August 2004 (but on the Upper West Side, not really near East Harlem). On one score I can be very grateful to Brandon, and Langu as well. In most similar situations I’ve ever been with a guy and his girl the guy will generally pay me scant attention. Here Brandon had his last afternoon with Langu and yet he was talking mostly to me and showing me a lot of respect.

He asked Langu what she would want to achieve with herself once home. She said eventually to own her own business. Brandon said that that was the difference between black people in America and elsewhere. “Ambition?” I asked. “Yeah. Here a black guy will say, ‘I gotta get me a job.’ That’s all. She wants to own her own business.” And then there was a regret on his part, half spoken aloud and half not, that he would want to be a part of that. The goodbyes that year were a sore point for me too, more so than in 2004 when I repeated the experience.

We were heading back when Brandon mentioned something else to consider. “They never found the killers of Malcolm X or Martin Luther King. To this day no one has the slightest idea who did those killings. But everyone knows that Lee Harvey Oswald killed Kennedy. Why do they know about that but not the others?” His belief was that they were taken out from above, and for a reason. And/or that no one doing the ‘investigating’ wanted to find the murderers. I asked him how old Martin Luther King had been when he died. “I don’t know,” he said. He turned to the black woman who was the cop ushering us across the street (there must have been construction going on or something). “Excuse me! How old was Martin Luther King when he died?” “Huh?” She understandably wasn’t expecting the question and didn’t know either.

On the walk back to the hostel we stopped off at the front of an elementary school building so that Langu could use the bathroom. The two of us started to move with her as she headed towards the bathroom as a sort of instinctive protective measure, or maybe because we’d all been walking around for a few hours together and were in the habit. “Gentlemen?” the security guard who had given us directions, asked. He was right, it looked suspicious. We waited and talked to him about the controversy over what would be done with the 9-11 site. It was a painful issue for New York. He also asked how the three of us had all met. We were an unusual combination, even if the hair did make me look like a wannabe black dude. I think on our way back to the hostel we talked about 9-11 conspiracies. But conspiracy theories or not, it’s a common belief that the aeroplane that crashed in Pennsylvania was shot down by U.S. forces. Brandon also remarked about Harlem, “You hear so much about it, I just wanted to see what it was like. It wasn’t as bad as they say. Except for the drug deal those two guys were working out on the corner there, that wasn’t good.” He and Langu were laughing. I hadn’t noticed it. I’d probably been too busy keeping my head down.

We got dinner in the area and realised how ignorant we had been all week to get most of our food at neighbouring McDonald’s and KFCs when the local Chinese places were so cheap. Inside while eating it grew dark. We collected Jono back at the hostel (Who knows what he’d found to do for all that time? I’d never thought about it before now) and went once more to see the wall of lights at Times Square. The pure neon was enough for even Brandon to be impressed by New York despite his reservations that afternoon. He and I each bought a pamphlet for $1 off a young Asian guy that showed drawings of 452 different sexual positions. It seemed an “I’m in New York, why not?” thing to do. Brandon was even able to find a cousin who worked there at a McDonald’s or something. While he and Langu were inside finding the cousin Jono and I sat outside and ‘rated’ any and every female that walked past, “No matter how old or ugly they were.” When he suggested it I had to laugh. We were all splitting up the next day and I would be sorry to leave these moments. Then we rated all of our girls back at camp (the counsellors).

Brandon slept in his car parked around the corner that night. It wasn’t all that big either. We all split up at noon, after hanging around the pavement outside the hostel for the last half hour. This included Brandon, Langu, Jono, me and two others with us named Nigel and Becca from England who had done a lot of things on their own in Chicago and New York (Becca was his girlfriend who had come visit Nigel at camp in late August). They were all going home that day, but I would be staying in the U.S. for another month. I was on my way to Maryland that day, by bus. Langu went off with Brandon who would drive her to the airport for an afternoon flight. It was the last time I ever saw her. Nigel, Jono and Becca went in the opposite direction towards the subway for one more afternoon downtown. I believe they were all catching the same flight that evening, for London. With all of them gone the hostel was very empty for me. I packed my remaining stuff and got out of there quickly.

Brandon and I had intentions of seeing each other in Chicago when I would arrive back there later on, but it didn’t happen. Plans change when you’re abroad. The next year I painfully learned in an even more comprehensive manner that when you are overseas and say goodbye to a person (even if only for the evening and you’re assuming another meeting in the next few days), you can’t ever take it for granted that you’ll see that person again.

Zinedine Zidane and France (and me)

Zidane’s dead, he retired the second he planted that headbutt into Marco Materazzi in the 2006 World Cup Final. He was France’s excuse as a nation: they were always able to point to him and pretend that their country wasn’t falling apart on racial faultlines; to the way he had won France its World Cup in 1998 and were able to blindly say, “But look, even Algerians can make it to the top in France if they apply themselves.” Meanwhile the real Algerians remained marginalised and unemployed in shithole suburbs at the end of the Parisian and Marseille trainlines while CVs with Algerian (or Senegalese or any sort of Arab or African) names were proven in a French study to be immediately thrown into the bin by French employers.

I was fascinated by the French soccer team. Even though each game was a struggle, somehow they were winners. They were a motley collection of Algerians, Caribbeans, Africans, Frenchmen all who were mostly first or second generation. There was Patrick Vieira, the man who as an ex-Senegalese lined up for France in World Cup 2002 against, yes, Senegal, who themselves were a team full of first-generation Frenchmen. That’s postcolonialism for you. And Senegal won!

I couldn’t really get a read on Zidane as a soccer player. He thought better than other players, faster: he played soccer with a one-touch style (that is, thinking ahead so that he already knew where he would pass the ball even before he received it, thus moving the ball on with a single touch without maintaining possession). It’s a trait I admire and a way I always felt was the best way to play in my own shitty little soccer games. Zidane had an innate sense of the field, but he would sometimes fade in and out of games. My hero on the French team was not in fact Zidane but his ‘rival’ for the French team’s number one, Thierry Henry. Henry had an all-action style, always involved with the play, whereas Zidane didn’t know how to get his own ball, so that if he wasn’t supplied by other teammates he got lost.

People are seldom able to think as fast as Zidane, on field (and nor are there many who can think fast off it). Most players are ball-hogs, both at local level and internationally. Zidane and Henry did not gel that well, and in fact until Henry’s famous goal that killed Brazil at World Cup 2006 (see below) they had never combined for a French goal. They both existed as the French focus, separate but equal, tying France over for four tournaments without having much to do with each other.

I loved the French team back in the day. They were almost Latin in their elegance, almost Germanic in their pragmatic efficiency to win all of the close matches, almost African in their physical strength and, well, blackness, almost Italian in their defensive strength. I was not a Zidane fan as such but he was indisputably the man. Now that he’s gone I just can’t bring myself to care about France’s results anymore, their terrible Euro 2008.

When they won Euro 2000 against the hated Italian team (although I now admire Italy since they won WC 2006) after Italy were seconds away from winning I was utterly overjoyed by the way it had happened; the good guys had won. And then in 2006 after I was sure that France were now irrelevant and finished as a force they, and Zidane, turned the clock back out of nowhere and beat all the same teams that they had in 2000. It was as if God made deal just with me: you liked France’s 2000 so much, here it is all over again. They beat Spain again by scoring goals, by having it, a force which Spain, for all their pretty ball possession, did not have. They beat Portugal again with a Zidane penalty. They beat Brazil again (those arrogant pricks totally needed to be put in their place; France is their daddy). All that was left was to beat Italy in the Final again.

Zidane chipped a beautiful penalty in at the start of the 2006 World Cup Final. But after that Henry’s buzzing was the only x-factor of the standoffish match. Ten minutes from the end Zidane’s header was saved by the Italian goalkeeper. If it had gone in Zidane would have been the two-goal hero just like 1998, France would be World Champions again completely against the formguide and my life would have been just wonderful. But it got saved and three minutes later he headbutted Materazzi and was sent off. In spirit that moment was the end of the 2006 World Cup; the penalty shootout afterwards felt oddly empty even as it was happening. There wasn’t a chance in hell that France would win the penalty shootout after all that.

He was the French team. When he trudged past the World Cup trophy on display as he was sent off, there trudged off the French team with him, leaving a bunch of ghosts to take the penalties. And then Italy won – think about how many trillions of times anyone has ever kicked a ball anywhere; Fabio Grosso’s winning penalty was the single most important kick of all of them, ever – and I quietly turned off the TV. I couldn’t bear to see the rest, the Italian happiness.

Zidane was from Marseille. Did he come from a place where you just don’t let insults against one’s sister slide, damn the consequences (even when the World Cup is on the line in the next ten minutes)? He must have had some sort of anger within him, a need to achieve, driving his career. I think most top athletes – apart from the insanely gifted ones like Roger Federer – have something fierce inside them, something that needs to set them apart from others, at the expense of others particularly. It actually wasn’t the first time that Zidane headbutted someone in his career.

Oh well. At least they all have 1998 and 2000. It’s funny talking about Zidane and Henry both underachieving in their insanely successful careers but those twin French victories came so early in their careers that I have to wonder if there will still be regrets for each of them.

On how it is

We only have so many credits in the eyes of other people, and each time we complain about something we lose a few. It’s best to save our arguments for things that really matter to us, because then people say: “Oh, he/she never complains, so if he’s complaining now something must really be fucked up.” Otherwise it’s: “Oh, he/she always complains” and argument instantly dismissed, no matter how insightful it may be. Some things just make us angry – sometimes it’s legitimate anger over an issue, or sometimes it is latent anger that comes from an indirect association. Some things have to be fought for. And some things we think we have to fight for but then we realise afterwards: no it didn’t, I should have saved that credit and preserved that relationship a bit better.

There are so many problems and so many people out there who have opinions, yet are neither in a position to solve them or lack the innate ability to perform correctly when they have the moment. All the rest of us have are words, cheap words that will change tomorrow. Some say it’s all about keeping up the fight. But the fight against what? The cluelessness of the human race? The hatred of those who keep the old in place? And then you wonder so many things, about collective inability to let go of hurt, about collective hatred, about collective inability. Should we keep caring if nothing seems to change? Should we fight, and argue, clog up the atmosphere with yet more negative vibes, or should we simply try to create something new, put new beauty out there where there was none, and hope that it helps someone? Do we help someone if there are no signs of it? And even, do opinions really matter? Is it worth thinking someone is a fool simply because he wanted Barcelona to win the Champions League Final and I wanted Arsenal? Or that he’s a fool for some other irrelevant matter of belief, like the opinion of a particular politician, or of a particular practice? No, of course it’s not worth it, and yet it happens, it’s instinctive. They want to help, those others want to help in a different way, and yet both sets end up hating each other.

What’s going on, man?

 

MEDIA What’s going on? We went to war in Iraq against the wishes of the entire nation and the media doesn’t say a word about it? And why do I have to hear about Lara goddamn Bingle every day of my life? The media ditched the truth a long time ago in favour of cheap shit, yet does that mean that everyone likes cheap shit, titillation, vacuousness, celebrity? It must, it must. The Herald Sun goes from strength to strength while all the other newspapers go under, what’s going on? The stars of some TV show get twenty minutes’ coverage while a ship that goes down off the coast of Senegal taking 900 lives with it gets one line? What the fuck are our priorities, as a society? What even is the point of the media anymore?

POLITICS We voted Rudd in to change to better energy and he didn’t do it. And what’s the alternative? The old crew made executive decisions based on the fact that the opinions of one hundred are more important than the opinions of twenty million. And why can 51% tell 49% exactly what to do? Don’t hold your breath for someone to shake it up, we thought Rudd would be that guy, remember? Barack Obamas come along once every two hundred years.

AUSTRALIA Thanks for the money, Australia, I appreciate your funding of my studies and unemployed moments, but what are we doing? Have we lost an identity, did we ever have an identity, or is it just about who’s got what, who’s got that job, who’s got that street cred? Has the excessive money and distance from everyone else blinded us? Do we give a shit about anyone except our families? We make announcements talking about what great blokes we are for giving a shit about our kids. Guess what? So does every other father on Earth, it’s instinct. Is there a country of people who do more than simply big-note themselves and their mates?

SPORT We celebrate the fact that one team has all the ability and therefore always wins, and we call them ‘great’. Oh me oh my. Speculation and reputation becomes more important than actual results, in the sporting sphere and in business, and in daily life. When the little guy wins it gets forgotten, when the big guy loses it gets forgotten pretty quickly too in favour of the next uneven ritual slaughter. Remember Jean Paul Duminy? Which one was he again? Real Madrid is in crisis unless it wins every game. Of course they have to win every game, they own three-quarters of Spain. Where’s the perspective?

Unless we make tomorrow matter as much as today we’re gone. What else, Pittsburgh Steelers won the Super Bowl so for once I’m on the winning side, if you don’t count me being born as a white male and all that jazz. And I saw Wodonga for the first time and went swimming for $3. Coooooooool!

Paraguay, Hijo de hombre

Paraguay River

I long for Paraguay as much as I long to breathe. The existence of that country is one more thing that is there in my mind, perhaps an ambition, perhaps a place, perhaps the representation of a dream or a representation of the concept itself of simply wanting, perhaps simply the sound of a word.

It exists for me in a few different ways, some of which are more pleasant than others, and some of which ironically don’t exist for the locals themselves. It is the tropical flatlands with colourful flowers and paths of red earth that spread out into windswept plains that go far off into nowhere. Paraguay is heat, stifling summer heat. It is the rivers, the forest, the thousand of species of animals with Guaraní names, the lack of coastline. Paraguay is the nation that was once complete jungle. Paraguay is the people drinking local tea outside the front of their houses on a Sunday afternoon, born in a forgotten corner of the world who exist purely for themselves, forgetting the wider world that forgot them.

It is the name. No one is even completely sure where the word Paraguay came from. It is probably from the indigenous Guaraní language and probably means “The water that flows to the sea,” the country named after the massive Paraguay River that does what I’ve just suggested. Or it could be named after local birds, or a tribe of local pirates.

Paraguay is many things, my mind separating the promise of magic from the land of incessant difficulties. Paraguay is a people born in an economic prison without exit signs. It is without money from the legal sector yet a country that is one long black market whose profits are siphoned off by crooks. It is a tranquil country that snoozes yet has terrible problems with petty crime. The night I got there I was told not to go into town until the next morning. “That’s Paraguay,” the reservedly personable landlord shrugged.

The Chaco Desert, scene of the War of Thirst

Paraguay is quintessentially South American. It does not have Argentina’s tourists, or Colombia’s salsa dancing, or Bolivia’s Andes Mountains, or Peru’s connection to the Incas. It is sneered at by Brazilians in their hauteur who go there for cheap shopping. But it is authentic. Visitors describe the reserve of the locals, the quiet confederacy of purpose, the vague sadness and quietness that drifts, the straightforwardness of the locals who apparently have not yet discovered sarcasm and despite the arrival of 21st Century amenities, the internet, abundant mobile phones, have not quite discovered the modern world in its entirety.

The country was almost crushed by Brazil and Argentina in the 1870s. It was not wiped off the map but ceased to exist as a viable, self-sufficient nation, and the mood never really recovered. Then they shot themselves in the foot a few more times.

I was there for one day, on July 15, 2006, one week after the soccer World Cup had finished, when Zinedine Zidane had planted his head and the Italian team had put in all of its penalty kicks. My friend and I knew no one there and found the place impenetrable, too much of a mystery to crack in a few hours without someone holding my hand, which I didn’t have. I bought a famous Paraguayan book there called Hijo de hombre for 25,000 Guaraníes, which I simply paid for with a $us5 note. It’s next to me right now, one of my rarest possessions. Inside the story the country unfolds…

In the small town of Sapucai in the flowery countryside where people speak Guaraní to each other instead of Spanish, people without land or power struggle to rise up and are always defeated by the Paraguayan army. Memories of the town go back to a few years after Halley’s Comet flew past Paraguay, to 1912, when hope was denied and their best men were killed. Those without anything try again, and again lose. Army conscripts ask themselves: we’re one of them, it kills me to be ordered to fire on these peasants, I’ve become just like the guy who killed my Dad. Then a four-year war against one of Paraguay’s neighbouring countries unites the nation: The political prisoners are all freed and the focus shifts outward, to the Chaco Desert (this happened in the 1930s), the theatre of war where more soldiers die gruesomely of thirst than by the bullet. The war ‘won’, the soldiers, some who have had arms and legs amputated and some who will not get over the trauma of war return home to their farms. The old shouts and the graffiti of the disenfranchised begging for land, bread and freedom will once again start up. The narrator says: something has to change. A people can’t continue to be oppressed indefinitely. Man is like a river, who is born and dies in other rivers. A bad river is one that dies in an estuary, because stagnant water is contaminated, poisonous. It engenders miasmas of a malign fever, of a furious madness. Then, to cure the sick man or to pacify him, he has to be killed. And the ground of this country is already busy enough under the earth. The book is filled with an edgy, uncertain mood that ends like this:

“There must be some way out in this monstrous countersense of man crucified by man. Because if it’s the opposite it would be the case to think that the human race is cursed forever, that this is hell and that we cannot hope for salvation.

There must be a way out, because if it’s the opposite…”

I love Bolivia tenderly. But I’m in love with Paraguay.

Stream of consciousness

The months fly by, and every time I check it is a different one, but I’ve lost my dread that they pass, that time goes by. It simply happens. I chose emotional over political a while ago and held fast to it, but every so often I reacted badly to people who choose the opposite. I think about hurt, but don’t wonder if anyone else feels it too because it’s outside my ability to see things through other people’s eyes. I wonder if it’s more important to be kind to people or to get shit done, because in reality there are very few people who do either thing, so they are probably as important as each other and no more. I would like to be the former and sometimes to often I am.

I believe that I am being consumed by negativity. I no longer think about what things mean but simply react to them with anger. I drop angry comments without stopping to ask myself the consequences and occasionally I am too fragile to verify the result of them. I have a weird relationship with the human race, in which I often feel oddly tender moments of love for the individual that I’m speaking to but when I think of people in an abstract sense I feel afraid of them and disgusted by them. I question whether I’ll have a close relationship with anyone now that I’m no longer early-twenties stock, because we stop meeting people and getting to know them for the sake of it after a certain age: once we are above twenty-whatever we need to know them for a reason. Once I get married it will no longer be legit to have female companions, but it doesn’t matter a whole lot to me. I might get married in the next two years; I know a girl with whom I would like to shut out the world and just be with her, lately I’ve become more convinced, and for the moment I trust that she would like me around. She says so.

The phone just rang right now and I reacted with irritation, like I do with every minor and unexpected interruption. When did I become this way? When did it reach the stage where anger and irritation is my automatic reaction? And was I afraid? I don’t know, did everything relate to that, that thing from the past? I drive my car, and her. I eat my lunch, and there she is, always there in my mind. But new things should be entering my head, I should let them if they don’t, because once a person stops being open to newness he is finished, absolutely. And yet three point something years later, there she still was. I never really got over the sadness of that sudden about-face rejection from her, the anger that it later developed into. And after her there were not many pieces left to pick up so that I could try again, because I had given away my most passionate love and I couldn’t find much more to give to anyone else. But there were different kinds of love, and some: while not as self-consuming, weren’t lesser but simply different.

The tennis is here, the tennis will go. Today’s ephemeral time-killers will become tomorrow’s why-did-I-care-about-that-little-piece-of-unimportant-trivia. I started work at a restaurant two and a half months ago, and it keeps me level but I achieve nothing with my days, for the moment and perhaps forever. I want money but I don’t want to own anything, but even more confusingly I don’t want to suffer from the same afflictions that the others who own nothing suffer. Sometimes it is wilful simplicity and sometimes it is genuine simplicity, and sometimes it is wilful ignorance and sometimes it is just lazy ignorance. I might be broken but I suspect that everyone is broken in some way; if you do not fulfil certain dreams it hurts, and too much. I have time but not so much; perhaps that’s the best way to be. People say that we need a sense of urgency to achieve something today. I don’t care if what they have to say is new as long as how they say it is new. I feel pity and contempt at the same time, and at the same time love and fear and is that hatred, all at once? Or is hatred too strong a word for something so capricious?