You gotta’ have a good headline. Pain! Misery! Anxiety! Get it right here! The good news is that readership’s up. Apparently people can appreciate my misery more than my metaphysical meanderings. At least it’s nice to know that if I lay dying, blogging it for the public, I might achieve in death what has always eluded me in life. Maybe I should do a webcam? Death can be a good career move. There are other disadvantages of course. So as I sit on the cusp of a severely mutated trip, praying for divine intervention, I guess it’s time to pause and reflect. What went wrong? In a word, everything. There’s probably a reason I’ve avoided Africa so long, especially the heartland, even if I couldn’t verbalize it. I still can’t, because I don’t know why. Maybe it’s the African reputation for aggressiveness and violence. But I’ve seen nothing like that, just maybe a little excessive aggression from the sales teams. Maybe it’s because I don’t especially like rap music, and extrapolate that into a general avoidance of modern black culture. That ignores the fact that there are many other genres of African-derived music that I DO like, especially the ones that they themselves tend to like at the source. I hear more rap in Thailand than I did in Africa. Maybe it’s all too close to home, home being Mississippi, Mississippi being the heart of the old South plantation slave system, that being one of the more disgusting periods of human history, in direction contradiction to the general trend of things gradually improving over time throughout history. Now I’ve never disavowed my connection to and affection for Mississippi and never will, nothing personal to it, and that’s the whole point. An entire era got wrapped up in something it couldn’t move past, and the more hopeless it became, the tighter they held to the old ways. We all know people like that, don’t we? Countries are no different. South Africa certainly wasn’t. That is what God invented 2x4’s for, beating some sense into the intransigent.
That is why democracy is good, because small units are better suited for evolution. Does that make sense? The dinosaurs are all gone and will never come back, beneficiaries of a sparsely inhabited world that is not likely to return. The largest mammal during that time was scarcely the size of a rat. They weren’t more powerful. They were more adaptable. Obviously democracy is slow and cumbersome, “the worst of good systems, the best of the bad ones,” a mighty dictator being able to accomplish in one sweep of the pen what a democracy might take years debating. But who knows whether that dictatorial edict will be ultimately good or bad? Aren’t a bunch of little mistakes ultimately better than one colossal one? Sometimes the best offense is a good defense. That’s usually the way I work, gradually insinuating myself into situations while always leaving multiple exit options. The one-trick pony is at a career disadvantage. All this is by way of saying that you have to remain flexible, adaptable, even if it means foregoing life’s biggest prizes. I don’t know what role fame plays in human evolution, natural or cultural. I do know that when somebody posts photos of himself in battle fatigues and then proceeds to systematically slaughter innocent people just because it’s there to be done for the sake of the evening news and Warhol’s dictum, then something is wrong. The problem is that I can’t just write them all off as crazy. The problem is that I DO understand them, as they stand on the brink of being and nothingness and decide to take the big plunge. This is a human condition, but particularly an American one, it seems. This is the price of individualism. This is the price of ‘believing in oneself’ to the exclusion of everything else. Religion is about believing in something bigger, whatever it might be, father figures optional. This is the price of fame. People get hurt.
So I bit the bullet. I split. I just got on the plane and split. I bit the same bullet I had just dodged, pain. I had just gotten over the bout of gout, when the kidney stones struck, screaming for attention. You don’t take this lightly. I’ve passed a kidney stone or two before, and it’s no fun. Even if it’s just a warning call, not the real thing, you don’t take chances. You certainly don’t plan a butt-breaking two-day overland trek back to the most primitive part of the world. The flight back to Mali would be $300 and still commit me to an unchangeable Air France flight back to Europe, or I could just pay $500 and catch a flight to Europe immediately, booked and paid online from the privacy of my own computer, and then take it from there, Europe, next day. So I did. Like the old saying goes, “better Expedia today than AirEvac tomorrow. That’s what my mother always said; didn’t yours? Okay, that’s not true. No, I had a mother, but she never said that. She said lots of other things, though. We used to keep a running greatest hits collection of her prophesies and witticisms. She used to say, “A dollar is a dollar.” I remember that one. She didn’t know Jack, at least not Jack Free. She didn’t need to. She knew everything else. Mothers are like that. They offer love at low interest with multiple repayment options. Now I have a Thai mother-in-law. She makes me spicy food that comes back to haunt me.
So I booked a flight on Iberia and left within a day, just one-wayed it outta’ there. I considered Algerian airlines, change planes in Algiers, just to put another country under my belt, but thought better of that idea. You don’t take chances with health. So I bought a ticket to Paris, and hopped off in Madrid. This is the privilege of traveling without baggage, jumping ship when you like, as long as no flight segments remain. The airlines don’t like it. I don’t like some things they do, or the trains either. The Eurail pass is an outright rip-off. I’ll tell you how to cheat that if you want. The Dakar airport has all the charm of Guatemala City’s and the Air France food was better, aubergines and potatoes braised with chicken in a light Dijon sauce, but Iberia was okay, the milk run to Africa through the Canaries. Sunny Spain sounds better than cold rainy Paris any day, and my Spanish is much better than my French if I need to negotiate my existence with some doctor who looks like Billy Bob Thornton with a Bolivian miner’s light on his forehead in a lesser-known Cohen Brothers’ movie. I know, I feel like a wimp, but when it hurts to fart, and I almost passed out from pain after a sneeze, then we need to hedge bets. Let’s make this clear: it’s not the fear, but the pain, that I succumb to. At fifty-three years old and counting, time is the greatest asset. So now I sit in a hotel in Barcelona, to which I immediately came from Madrid. You’ve got to have priorities, and I’ve already seen Madrid. My main regrets are that I really haven’t seen the entire scope of Mali, and I didn’t eat the mumbo gumbo in Senegal. I was working up to it, eating the local baguette sandwiches regularly, not the tourist ones, but not the goop over rice. The Senegal sandwiches were certainly better than the Spanish bocadillos, rather dry crusty affairs. I ate a lot of cheese sandwiches in Senegal, too, dodging the bacteria, but that’s not what I go to Africa for. I go for the goop.
Then I got hit by the calcium deposits. I even drank all the icy stuff on the train coming across and never got sick. Maybe I’ll return to Mali some day as conquering hero of the music industry. Who knows, maybe next year? The visa’s still good. But for now I’m just trying to salvage a trip, so guess I’ll check out the north of Spain and south of France. If I can’t afford it in February, then when can I? The stones have stopped hurting so much by now, so I’ll deal with them later. A doctor might say something I don’t want to hear. I’ve got a trip to salvage after all! I’m even missing the French language, like I was finally ‘getting it’ after all these years, though it’s nice to be in a country whose language I can speak, when in pain. I never minded the Francophony in Africa, anyway, just the cacophony. At least Africa doesn’t seem so exorbitantly expensive now, compared with Europe, as it did compared with America. We’re still not back up to fifty channels on TV, though certainly better than the one or two we were down to in Africa. You can drink the water! Hopefully cranberry juice will cost less than five bucks a liter. That’s more than gas, I think. Now I know what’s wrong with Africa. It’s just too bloody expensive for what you get. That’s a bullet that’s hard to bite.
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