Hot Mess By Louis Martin |
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Elect a fool and a clown as president and you harvest a generation of "suckers", as at the World War II cemetery at Ben M'Sik, Casablanca, Morocco:
The background is a mess, a hot one, the foreground only a little clearer. I do my best to detect meaning, any. It’s not an easy task. I begin in Madrid, as good a place as any to begin. I begin on the Iberian Peninsula, as good a peninsula as any to start out. The sky is high, almost cloudless, and blue. A good first impression. Madrid now but headed to Tunisia. Recovering from abuse of airlines — two smashed, double-bagged bottles of ink — and assault of security goons. Wounded suitcase is bleeding red ink, dying, my hands dyed red trying to save it. Then I discover that the hotel has supplied page upon page of marketing information but not its address. I am not in a good mood, don’t even know what a good mood is anymore. But I get through it, over it, or around it somehow. I shake it off like a horse shakes off flies. Cheered the next day by a little walk around Alcala Norte and the parks there, soon the next bad discovery: Can’t get access to gmail or login to UK mobile carrier “3”. Crippled in a foreign country, but what’s new? Later can connect but don’t know why, what’s new? “Ain’t technology grand?” a friend in San Francisco used to say. I won’t tell her name but she worked for one of the big tech journals back then. No, technology is not grand, but I move onto the next mind-boggling SNAFU of the day. Reminds me of the time I couldn’t get into a bomb shelter in Ukraine because good-ol’ carrier “3” couldn’t or wouldn’t send me the OTC code I needed; but I got over it and didn’t get bombed and life moved on. Despite some lingering depression over Google and “3”, I picked myself up the next day and went to the Prado to see Goya and Rubens. “Goya, with all his talent, seemed to be employed like a photographer to depict the royal family”, I wrote in my notes. How wrong can you be! I’d only viewed a small part of Goya. Later I would learn about the man, his pain, his depression, and the richness and depth of his art. But that was my first impression standing before his visual impression of the royal family. I kind of liked it because he didn’t make them look all that good. And realist Rubens? He shows a peasant barfing on a tree at a wedding. Salud, Rubens! But I would go back. It was good I went, even though I too was suffering depression from all the technology SNAFUs. They seem to be nonstop these days, as though by design. From trying to check in online to going through security, to getting your baggage. None of it works “seamlessly”, as the tech promoters say. Or when it does, it’s a shock. “What’s going on here, it worked!” We live in a digital prison and don’t even realize it most of the time. Did I mention that I was forced to buy an exit ticket from Madrid out of the EU? This was back in LA at the baggage check-in counter. “It’s the rule!”, the witch behind the counter shrieked at me. I went over, sat on a floor of ground-in dirt, and bought a ticket from Madrid to Tunis, Tunisia. The witch at the check-in counter — I think her nails were black and her teeth that of a shark — now accepted my bag. “Happy?” I asked somewhat tartly. “What do you mean by that?” she snapped. I didn’t take the bait from the shark behind the counter where the sign read ABUSE WILL NOT BE TOLERATED! This was bureaucracy designed to break the spirit, ruin your mood, and leave you feeling downer than you felt before, which was pretty down. Then it was killing time at the airport before departure. Limbo mode. It all seemed like an eternity, punishment for every sin you have ever committed. Then more security. This time they take away my nail clippers because it has a small blade with a file on it. It is simply inconceivable that I would attack the pilot or cabin crew with it but it had to go. I would now like to attack the pilot and the cabin crew but have no idea how I would do it. “It’s not a weapon”, I plead, but it makes no difference. I look menacing, as though to say, “There are other ways”. But there aren’t. The airlines make travel miserable and they love doing it. They are sadistic and cruel. They are like the guards at Auschwitz. What more can I say? Your misery is their pleasure. Then the real torture begins. We are off to Adolfo Suarez Airport in Madrid, code named MAD and appropriately so. It is simply a maze, a labyrinth that Daedalus would have been proud of. If you think you know where you’re going in MAD, you don’t. And one mistake and you’re trapped. Elevators and doors are one-way only. Moreover you are only looking for a train to take you to a bus so you can then walk to a plane somewhere out on the runway. There is no help, no human reassurances — nothing to build confidence that you’re headed the right way. All indications are that you’re not. And time is running out to catch your flight. The telltale indicator that trouble lies ahead is that twenty minutes before arrival at MAD, movies go off screens and Iberia Airlines starts running videos on how to navigate this airport. They help little; the complexity is just too great. MAD Daedalus wins the prize and you, Martin the Minotaur, are trapped. But you have a plan. You’re going to Tunisia. That is the goal. You need to remember that at all times. You have a goal, a purpose, a raison d'être. But a lot of bad stuff happens along the way. That is inevitable. The airports need comfort stations and psychiatric social workers. They also need drugs to calm passengers down and get them through it. You’re also trying to vote in absentia in the next US presidential election. The instructions for absentee voters make it sound like it’s a piece of cake. It’s not. It’s a can of worms, sour grapes at the best. And Tunis, Tunisia, is probably not the best place from which to cast an absentee ballot. But it’s an important election. The stakes are as high as they can get. Cast a vote for a madman, a felon, a rapist, and a con artist; or for two outstanding people of good will and no criminal history. Could the choices be clearer? You fear, unfortunately, that for many Americans the choice is not clear at all. It’s as muddled as the American mind, which is a cocktail made up of anger, racial hatred, stupidity, greed … And it’s a mind on the rocks. It’s a shipwreck of conflicting ideas and prejudices that are the chemical formula for disaster. And you’re also keeping your eye on the war in the Mideast. In Tunisia you will not be that far away. It’s a war that Biden has been trying to tamp down and that Trump, once in office, will try to rekindle. Trump sees it as a property deal, and the killing that appears to bother him in Ukraine does not trouble him at all in the Mideast. There he sees death as the cost of doing business. And more SNAFUs are lined up and waiting to happen in carelessly written software with new instances of this or that invoked either too early, too late, or not at all to handle that which wasn’t considered by some young rutting coder at a software start up in San Francisco. We live in a digital prison devised by techno-bureaucrat tyrants. Your failure is their success! In fact while I head toward Tunisia I’m living in one created by the Atlas travel-history database of the United Kingdom’s immigration software. If it weren’t for Atlas I would probably be in Swansea, Wales, or London reading at a literary event. But that is another story that we will get back to. And then I’m there. Tunis. High skies, almost clear. Pale blue. Clouds stretched out as though by invisible hands in the sky. The Mediterranean near by. You can’t see it but you can feel its presence. I’m staying at the Golden Tulip El Mechtel, a very nice hotel with a bar and two restaurants. I settle in, turning my room into my office on the road. The manager is a real gentleman, and when I ask about markets, he sets me up with a cab driver to take me wherever I want to go for the next hour for a very good price. The driver’s name is Rzouga and he speaks both Arabic and French, like most people in Tunisia. We become friends over the next couple of weeks and I switch to riding up front. We go on shopping adventures and he shows me his beloved city. Despite some grime I begin to love it too. My first concern, I’m ashamed to say, is getting booze. We are in a Muslim country and getting booze there is not always easy. But Rzouga knows where to get it. We go to Magasin General and I get Amstel beer, Johnnie Walker scotch whiskey, and a bottle of Tunisia’s wonderful Magnifique wine. We buy some food too. Who wants to drink on an empty stomach? In Tunis I use Rzouga for shopping — he knows where everything is — but otherwise I walk. It’s the best way to truly get to know a place. Walking I see the many stray dogs and cats. The cats are skinny and don’t look healthy. They prowl the garbage on street corners for food. These are not “pets”. Later I would go to Casablanca in Morocco and see the difference between cats here and cats there. In Casablanca the cats are plump and lazy and often lie next to a half-eaten bowl of food on the street. I suspect they all have indoor homes too. They don’t look desperate like the cats in Tunis. The dogs in Tunis are similar to the cats. But they look enterprising. They are lean hounds on the move and a little menacing. Other than getting to know Tunis, I have two unrelated things I’m working on: Voting in the upcoming US election and responding to the bogus report by the British Border Force that charged me with overstaying with the result that I’m “denied leave” to enter the UK. More on that later. But I am more concerned right now with getting to know Tunis. My first action on that account is to take to the streets and walk. I start by taking a walk on a car-parts street that runs south of the hotel. But I’m not in the market for car parts; it also has coffee houses. I may be an odd bird there but I don’t think I stand out much because I‘m not seen taking photos and I don’t gawk at the scenery; I don’t look like someone on vacation. I just drink coffee, sit, and stare at my phone like everyone else. Frankly my main thought is this: Where the hell am I? I’m trying to get the streets down and the Google maps are not very helpful. I am also thinking of Asma in Paris who influenced my coming here. She works at Hotel Paris Gambetta and was teaching me some Arabic. I was intrigued with the language and the way it is written with its scrolling characters written from left to right. But she hadn’t made me fluent, simply interested and somewhat intrigued. Those beautiful looping connected characters I am now seeing on street signs and everywhere else, often with the French as well. Spend enough time in a country and you want to learn its language. And I was beginning to want to learn Arabic. It was a novelty to me, and looking at it was almost like being in love; it felt fresh and new. Yet about all I knew was mrhban sadiqi (hello my friend) and shkran (thank you). I finish my coffee and walk on up the street. Or is it down the street? Google does not seem to be of much help. Up? Down? North? South? Who knows? But this was important; direction and location matter. If you don’t know where you are or which way you’re headed you may be living in the here and now; but you are also stuck in space and time. The buildings in this area are old, broken, but classic looking, and there is a pile of trash at the corner of each street. I do not see a single trash can. If I needed car parts, this would be the place to go. But I have no car and no need for car parts. Maybe Rzouga needs parts for his aging taxi but he didn’t mention it. My interest is the skinny little cats prowling through the trash and the old buildings. I watch but I don’t stare. I imagine that I look like a guy with some kind of purpose. Business? Possibly. A Frenchman with a connection to some small business? Maybe. An importer? Possibly. A publisher? Could be. I wear my Spanish Basque Elosegui beret. None of the tourists here wear berets, and they are always clutching their phones and looking like they are trying to figure out where they are. I too am trying to figure out where I am but don’t look like it. While I wander, I check that I always know the way back. It is like when I lived in the giant redwood forests in Mendocino, California. If you don’t want to get lost among the tall trees, you maintain a list of markers so you can always backtrack. And you pay close attention, which always enhances any experience.
At the end of the auto parts lane there is a kind of turnabout with train tracks running right and left along another street. I go left, noting the mosque across the street at the turnaround. I go a few blocks, then take another left at a more attractive-looking street of small businesses and cafes. I am in fact keeping an eye out for a stationery store where I can buy encre (ink) to replace that destroyed by the airlines. Encre en bouteille. Everyone knows what it is but no one has it; all have throwaway pens, and a few have cartridges. A day later I go right on the same street and find a shop that has cartridges and a copy machine and a lot more. It becomes my stationery store, papeterie, in Tunis. It also has the envelopes I need to mail my absentee ballot back to San Francisco. I’m making progress. But now I’m on the left side and drop into a small coffee shop with pastries and order an espresso. There is no one else in the shop other than the barista and a very old man sitting in the back. I ask the barista, a friendly young woman now making my coffee, if she knows which way is nord. She looks embarrassed but admits she doesn’t. After finishing making the coffee she goes across the street to get a friend. They are both charming young woman who laugh and smile at me. As old as I am, I guess I’m a novelty, unlike the old guy in the back of the shop. Nord? Hm … Their spirits lift me up. The young woman from across the street thinks north is in the direction of her shop across the street. My magnetic compass roughly confirms this. But I realize I don’t really know where I am but can always backtrack, as I’ve been careful about maintaining a list of markers. Not of rocks, boulders, trees, and stream, as in the country, but of turnabouts, railroad tracks, curious shops, mosques … The system of references works as well in the city as in the country. Here the railroad tracks up the street and the mosque are my references. They don’t get up and move easily just like boulders and streams and trees, unless you’re thinking about the Birnam Wood in Macbeth. But then you better watch out! I retraced my path through the auto-parts streets to the Golden Tulip Hotel, then come back the next day. But this time I turned right on the same street. High, pale-blue skies with pure-white stretched-out clouds. You are in another world when you look up. Heaven above, earth being tested below. Hungry looking kittens going through the trash at the corners. Stress. Yet the kids are playful and look happy and the women, most of them plump, are dressed in flowing gowns of beautiful colors. They walk together having intimate conversations. Something must be working here. Hamas and Israel in the East are always in the background of my mind. Tunis is not that far away. And the other war to the North and Putin’s threats of mass destruction. It’s possible but he has threatened so many times now that no one believes him. I was up there two years ago. Ukraine was doing okay as long as it had US support. But what if Trump wins the election? Then all bets are off. And how do wars end? How do these wars in the here and now end? Unless one side wins decisively, wars can go on for a long time. After a long period of bloodshed, countries are hesitant to cut their losses. “What, then, was it all for?” they logically ask. No one likes to say, honestly, that it was all for nothing. So the parties should think a little before starting a war. And talk it through, reason it out. Not just blindly lash out. Face reality with open eyes. But that is not an easy thing to do. Delusion is tempting. Does humanity just like to suffer? Maybe. But the children? Do they like to suffer? I don’t think so. In this the children are more sensible, more adult, than the adults! But the skies here today are clear and bright. They are hopeful skies. They smile upon the fools below. Everywhere I go I engage in a little bit of "doggerel", as Edgar Poe likes to call it. I write poetry, and not all of it is perfect poetry. And sometimes I read at literary events. There you hear from various readers at different levels. I used to read in dreamy San Francisco, California, where you often heard things like this: Being a poet makes you exceptional! You do not need to tell the truth or even know the difference between truth and lie. If you say it, it must mean something because you are exceptional! Myopic? Oh me, oh my! Self centered? No other way! Others have ideas but you know the truth, the absolute truth! And the truth is whatever comes out of your mouth. Out of the way dingbat, dipstick, booby! I’m feeling creative today! Some of the poetry there was less than profound; and the poet being giddy by one means or another, it often teetered on a fine line between dream and delusion. But it was a fun place of fog and sometimes even sun. More walking and a few days later I make it to the edge of Lake of Medrine on the eastern side of Tunis. I had seen it on the map. My sense of direction was improving and I had more landmarks to go by now. More coffee shops, mosques, and hookah bars. I’m thinking of trying the hookah but don’t. I think it would make me like a San Francisco poet, too dizzy to navigate the new terrain. And I learn about the excellence of mosques as markers — easy to spot because they are tall and you can also hear them. If only they had them out in the woods of Mendocino! I think about the wars nearby in Gaza and Lebanon. I am a US citizen and “we” are supplying the weapons. We don’t pull the triggers or drop the bombs but we supplied the guns, the ammunition, the bombs. Doesn’t that imply some level of guilt? With this going on I don’t feel good about being an American. The president should exercise some control over anyone to whom he supplies weapons. He doesn’t seem to be doing that. And Netanyahu is not any easy person to control. And now pagers are exploding in Lebanon and maiming people. Not just Hezbollah but grampa in the little shop. Clever but pure evil. Something the devil would do. What if I even hated Hezbollah? Was there not a line too far to cross? How would I feel if my iPhone XX exploded in my face? Double-espresso thoughts, these! Hookah reflections! I’m glad I have a French name and look and speak French. I don’t know how I would answer the questions! About all I can do right now is vote in the next election, because if Trump wins things will get even worse. America has a choice: a guy with principles who is, yes, getting old but who can still make sound decisions. Or a malevolent narcissist and wannabe dictator. About half of America wants a malevolent narcissist dictator. They think it will mean cheap eggs and free gas. Oh, how wrong this will prove to be! The con man will pull the wool over their eyes and oringar en la leche de sus madres. Oh, how well the Spanish have the language down for this. Are Americas just plain stupid? Well, they are not even the plain brand of smart they once were. Covered in tattoos and high on pot, they are badass in the worst sense; they are dumbass and proud of it. “Tunisia, wow!” said the young woman on the phone in San Francisco assigned to help people having absentee-voting problems. “The online system”, I told her, “it won’t let me save my ballot so I can sign it and mail it back to you. Also there’s a war going on nearby. Israel is trying to obliterate Hezbollah, which is trying to do the same to Israel. It’s a little hard to focus on voting.” “Well, I’m sure you’ll figure it out. Wow, Tunisia!” she said again. “That’s so exciting.” She thought so, anyway. I confess I was mostly feeling distracted. I wasn’t quite sure why I was here with all the messes and distractions around me. Lunatics and lovers and poets are all of imagination compact. I was trying to remember that line but could not quite say why. Summer had just ended and it was a little late for Midsummer Night’s Dream. Maybe it had to do with mental distraction. I knew all about that. It was hard to avoid in a world composed mostly of mental distractions. Was I the lunatic, the lover, or the poet? Hm. Clearly not the lover these days, though I was certainly still charmed by young woman like the ones at the coffee shop on the previous day. The lunatic? Certainly a bit crazy but not clinically insane. I guess that left me as the poet of sorts. Perhaps a depressed one like Jaques in As You Like It. Melancholic but still discerning of truth. And I was trying to remember why I had been barred from entering the UK, my ancestoral home. Oh, it was partly because of the new 77-million-pound travel-history database system called Titan, named for the mythological giant who holds up the world. It had “conflated” me with one or more other immigration “subjects” and scrambled my travel history. I was shown making trips I had not made and I was not credited with making many trips I had. And it only listed trips made via air carriers and omitted rail, bus, and marine transportation. Even stranger, It showed me flying into and out of train stations. Titan is one very confused giant. Possibly even schizophrenic. Moreover it showed me leaving the UK multiple times without ever having entered the UK! Not logical but apparently of no concern to border-force agents, who might well ask themselves: If you don’t know when a person arrived, how do you know how long that person stayed, let alone if that person overstayed? Simple answer: You don’t. But with the current anti-immigrant and anti-visitor passion, logic does not seem to matter. See Overstay. More later on this. I’m in Tunisia now, and as the young woman on the help desk in San Francisco said: “Wow”! I wish I could share her enthusiasm but I’m still a little lost here. A few days later I went to visit the ancient city of Carthage, or what is left of it. The Romans burned it to the ground and killed everyone there in 146 BC. Unlike the Greeks, they did not spare girls seven-years old and under, with the idea that they were pliable and would not remember the murder of their parents. The Romans also burned all books and evidence of the language that had developed there. They were taking no chances on a resurgence of anything. A wise policy militarily but a very cruel one. The Romans then built amphitheatres there for gladiator fights, animal slayings, and public executions. At one amphitheatre they killed as many as 900 elephants in a year for public “entertainment”. I end up contemplating human cruelty and the dark side of human nature. Only by staring upward at the clear blue Mediterranean sky do I pull myself out of a dark funk. Back in Tunis the next day I take a walk down one of the more upscale streets, Taieb Mhiri, and past Parc du Belvedere on the left with its lake and waterfowl. Then I cut over on the right to an upscale street with cafes, lovely trees, and potted plants. I order a coffee and gateau at one for only 8.5 dinar or about 2.82 USD. Not bad. A few tables over a little girl with, I think, mother, grandpa, and grandma, seems to be watching me. Everything seems so normal, so pretty, and nice here now. No thoughts about the bloody wars to the East in Gaza and Lebanon or the sacking of Carthage some 2,000-years ago. Here all is “as above, so below”. But the war goes on with Israel and its neighbors. “Nowhere near a truce”, says Nic Robertson of CNN. And now the tactic seems to be starving the Palestinians. I noted the previous day that the air fare to Israel is much higher now. I’m surprised that there are still flights. I am thinking of going but not sure now. It is probably the only place I could go in the Mideast conflict zone and not get killed immediately, or find myself a prisoner. For the moment I can watch from here. And I’m monitoring the US elections. I will give more to the Harris campaign shortly. I fear the return of Trump to the White House. It could only mean one things: corruption, authoritarian rule …
The next day I see that Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah has been assassinated by Israel. He became the leader of Hezbollah after Israel assassinated the former leader in 1992. Assignations are usually depressing to me. But I wondered how I would feel if it had been Trump. Trump is a very evil person. Among other things he is responsible for some 200,000 deaths during the covid epidemic. Yet he owns up to nothing. It is always someone else’s fault, typically Obama’s or Biden’s. He has no sense of shame. On 30 September 2024 I headed back to Madrid. The Palestinians were getting slaughtered but I didn’t see anything I could do about it. And of course there was another airlines debacle getting there. On the runway some problem developed with the plane and we sat and sat and sat without word from el capitan. We return to the terminal still without a word of explanation. Not even about what was going to happen next. Then we sit and sit and sit. No explanation. I force the question and am told another plane is being located. Why not say that so passengers know what is going on? Finally a plane is located and we board again. But before that I visit a duty-free shop and buy a bottle of Jagermeister. We are so late now that most people will miss their connections or arrive at their hotel too late to check in. Too difficult for the airlines to let people know so they can adjust their plan, make a call, not go nuts? What’s the big deal about making a brief announcement of fact, when earlier it was one unnecessary announcement after another? But I do get to Madrid and the Smartr Madrid Hotel on Gran Via. And by some kind of miracle there is still someone on the desk! The next day I’m off to Oviedo where I plan to mail my absentee ballot to the US and go to Llanera to visit my daughter on her farm. And what beautiful country this is. Green, luscious, moist! It’s beauty rivals that of Mendocino, California.
On 4 October, one month and a day before the election, I mailed my absentee ballot from La Oficina de Correos in Oviedo. It was a relief, at least for a while. Then came the election a month and a day later. That was on 5 November 2024, a day to remember — 11/5, like 9/11. Did America have any idea what it was doing to itself? Did it grasp the idiocy of returning this unfit man to office? Apparently not. In about three months the idiocy would begin and it would be one malevolent thing after another, the latest being street arrests of students for expressing opinions, unlawful deportations to prisons in El Salvador, and defunding universities for not kowtowing to Trump ideology. It took Germany about 60 years to recover from World War II. Did the US want to go through that for the perceived lower prices of eggs and gas and deportations that would force American to pick their own tomatoes, stooping low and doing hard work for the food on their tables? Were elderly Americans ready and willing to change their own bed pans? They had a good deal and didn’t know it. So far three months into the new administration and Trump has done nothing other than raise prices and stir up animosity at home and abroad. He hasn’t started a war yet but he hasn’t ended the one he promised to stop on day one. The worst is undoubtedly yet to come. But it was lovely in Oviedo eating tapas and drinking red wine with daughter Trista and granddaughter Isabella and visiting the horses and chickens on their farm. The farm is on the North Atlantic coast of Asturias and is as paradisiacal as it gets in this world. Walking in the meadows there, the blues take a long hike in some other land and peace of mind prevails. I then went briefly to Paris to read poetry at two clubs, Au Chat Noir and Club Culture Rapide, then flew to Chicago where I had business to take care of. It was in Skokie near Chicago that I saw the election results. It was terrifying. The evil spirit, the monster, the ifrit of all ifrits had won the election. America had failed to flush the Orange Turd down the drain. I wrote a largely unprintable poem at the time called Debacle Now. Here are a few printable lines from it: End of era story US; devil proudly parades as clown … Nothing good can come of this, bad day for anything good … America knows not his-her story, thumbs nose at shining works past … Tattoo-covered goon-fools, fools’ fools drunk on MAGA moonshine … America will reap consequence of foray into dark-Trump matter … Moral character thing passe, thing passe thing passe ... 11/5 fallout begins now, sins, no silver lining here … Then back to Madrid on 30 December 2024 and onto Casablanca, Morocco, the next day. From Chicago to Madrid I felt like a dog in a cage, un perro enjualado, but survived it. But the flight to Casablanca, brief, was without problems till I got to the airport. The next problem was a very stupid landlord in London who thought his apart-hotel was so well known that he didn’t need to list its street address in the reservation. Marketing hyperbole, he thought, would get you there along with the name of the concierge. Apparently there have been enough taxi problems at Mohammad V Airport in Casablanca that getting a taxi starts this way: You go to a special office near the taxi queue where attendants figure out where your hotel is, then you pay the fare and they assign a driver. The lack of a street address baffled the young woman in black scarf behind the counter. She asked some questions, made calls, then wrote out instructions for the driver without looking overly confident. The driver got his assignment but did not look overly confident either. No problem getting to Casablanca itself from the airport, but once there the confusion began. “Est-ce que tu as les coordonnees?” (“Do you have the co-ordinates,” he asked.) “Vous avez l’adresse du bureau!” (“You have the address from the office.”) I said. I didn’t want to get involved in coordinates … “Just get me there,” I was trying to say. I was tired. Once in Casablanca he drove around for about an hour looking perturbed, then disturbed, and finally angry. The situation was looking hopeless when he finally got a clue and found it. I think he wanted to kill me at that point, and I certainly wanted to kill the landlord. Later I called him in London, where he lives, and let him know, somewhat profanely, what I thought about the situation. He seemed unapologetic. But the place was okay, or actually better than okay, as I would later learn when I had a basis for comparison. The main problem I had in Casablanca was noise. Not one place I stayed at was quiet other than this one. And everything worked, which was not always the case elsewhere. As a writer I seek quiet places, as it makes work so much easier. But the three other places I stayed had either construction noise, mosquitos, or noisy housekeepers. And about the latter, I don’t mean a little noisy. I mean dragging and dropping furniture at all hours. They seemed to lack a code of good housekeeper conduct. Louder housekeeping seemed to mean better housekeeping to them. My first place without an address was called “B-Living”. What significance that name had I never learned nor wanted to learn. I gladly let it remain a mystery. It had a nice view of the port in Casablanca, as advertised, but also a view of an enormous trash pile right outside the window, not advertised. The effect was sort of cancelling. You couldn’t see one view without seeing the other! After a week I decided it was time for a change. Now I should mention one other problem of living at a place with no address. You can locate places you want to go, like a market, and get a taxi; but you can’t tell your return taxi driver how to get back since you don’t know the address. Thus you limit where you can go. The concierge, who also didn’t know the address, acknowledged the problem. But I began to prowl on foot. The overall area is known as Casaport. It was an interesting part of town. Ancienne Madina Casablanca was just down the street. It was indeed ancient and also intriguing. It was a maze that would put Alfonso Suarez Airport in Madrid to shame. Daedalus himself must have had a hand in the street plan. The first time I went in I feared I would never get out. But then I found the little coffee shops like Cafe Central and Cafe du Port with very good, very strong coffee and a friendly atmosphere. I then went further into the labyrinth of streets with its huge number of shops and did not get lost. These are mostly tourist shops and clothing stores frequented by Casablancans and African tourists. The whole area is touristy but nice, with many shops set up right on the streets on tables. There are also some good restaurants nearby like Casa Tapas Casablanca with seafood specialties and a good bar. I had a calamari appetizer and a red vermouth. Oh La La. I was in Heaven. And further down the way is Rick’s Cafe, modeled on the movie version with the owners listed as “The Usual Suspects”. Sort of clever if you remember the movie. I didn’t go in; I was a lonely party of one unless you counted the depression that seemed to follow me everywhere. The main drag through this part of town is a spectacle with shops, mosques, and people from anywhere and everywhere: light-skinned Africans from North Africa, including many Arabs & Berbers; beautiful brown- & black-skinned Africans from the south; and a smattering of northern whiteys like myself.
A week later I move up the street to the Diwan Hotel on Boulevard Hassan Seghir. It is a nice hotel except for the noise of the housekeepers, some of whom seem to live there and are making a lot of noise all day and night, and the mosquitos. But what I recommend is the street itself. There are nice coffee houses and even a good bar, the Titan, and the Carrefour market at the end of the street before the train lines. Moreover the Carrefour has a “Cave” with a good selection of liquor. Casablanca Beer is excellent and so is Sahara Gold. There is plenty of French wine at Carrefour in the market on Hassan Seqhir but there is also some good wine with grapes grown around the Atlas Mountains to the south. I think it is safe to say they show the French influence in Casablanca. While I moved out of the Diwan Hotel because of the noise and mosquitos, I returned regularly to this neighborhood for shopping. Sitting in one of the coffee houses and contemplating the state of the world seemed to bring peace of mind and perspective. Nothing was going to be resolved immediately, you told yourself, but the right attitude could open up possibilities. Well, It was nice to think so, anyway. The fact is with Trump in office, things were likely to be a mess. I also discovered Mustapha discount liquor store a few blocks away. Morocco is a Muslim country and there is a “sin tax” for liquor. Mustapha took some of the sting out of the sin tax. With alcohol and the right attitude much can be endured, maybe even Trump. But it was going to be difficult. America has made a very bad choice and it is unclear what can be done about it, if anything. Facebook is now giving up fact checking, agreeing with Trump that it had gone too far. Too true, too far? I thought Mark Zuckerberg was better than this but Zuck headed straight to Mar-a-Lago to hand in his badge of courage to draft-dodger President ‘rump. The other tech “giants” have also caved. I also thought they were better than this. The heroes of America have all decided that money and currying favor with the “boss” are more important than sound ideas and good character. And they have done this for a con man, a rapist, and a felon. Our heroes are not heroes; they are toadies and sycophants. And now their master is talking about acquiring territory, lebensraum: Greenland, Canada, the Panama canal, Gaza … And you don’t see the pattern; you ignore history and all the United states has fought for in the past to be free? You are willing to trade your freedom for a cheap carton of eggs and lower gas prices. But then your master, seeing how low you will go, jacks prices with tariffs. Your draft-dodger President sees you as suckers! Did you not expect this of a con man and a pathological liar? You, like your tech giant heroes, have caved. See what it gets you? A lamb knows its mother from a fox. You have called up the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse and the barbarians are now at the gate. Your king is not a king, not even a knight. Nor can he sing do re me fa so la? Oh, no, no, no, no, no. He's only good at bellowing hate and lies. He’s the horse’s ass covered with flies, bovine dung flung for fun. But you, America, knew all this. Don’t say you didn’t know! But Casablanca is a touch of Paris. I have a Vermouth at the Titan bar on Boulevard Hassan Seghir and forget about this for an hour or so. I walk to the end of the street where the railroad tracks cross, take a left and head to Mustapha. I buy a six pack of Casablanca beer and a bottle of Grant’s scotch. One of the guys there asks me where I’m from. I lie, or purposely misinterpret his question. I tell I’m coming from Madrid. Madrid is not supplying weapons to Netanyahu to kill Palestinians and there is a strong historical connection between Casablanca and Madrid vis-a-vis the Iberian Peninsula. As I travel around North Africa that comes into focus. There has been travel back and forth between the Iberian Peninsula and North Africa for centuries. It makes me almost local if I say I’m coming from Madrid. And no problem appearing a little Frenchie. The French have meddled for ages in Morocco and Moroccans even speak their language. As I wander up the tracks to Mustapha I observe the many empty buildings, some of which must have been quite elegant in their days. Over a two-month period I observe one building being carefully dismantled with its stones being lowered one by one in nets. The wrecking ball is not used. Buildings are too close together. My next move is to Les Saisons Hotel on Rue Al Oraibi Jilali. It is a very nice hotel on an off street in the Casaport area up from Ancienne Medina. The young woman at the desk is charming with her braces, her smile, and long black hair fully on display. While at the desk she wears no scarf. But when she leaves she puts it on. She is all smiles and playfulness. One jolly day I even pat her on the top of the head, which she seems to like. She says she would like me to write a good review of the hotel, which I would like to do. But it suffers the noise problem as do the others. There is construction going on almost every day there. It has a very nice restaurant with a bar and interesting art work on the walls. But with the noise I don’t think anyone will ever write a novel there. But the kid with the braces there deserves special attention. She is a charmer. If only she were the hotel! Then I could write a good review. While at Les Saisons Hotel I went to the American Art Center for an open mic that was preceded by four local poets discussing rap & hip-hop. It was in Arabic and I could not follow it, but it left me exhausted trying. I left early and did not read. Why rap & hip-hop? I will never know. I think Morocco has better to offer than that. But I grow old, I grow old. I only see the grit and the mold; maybe I’m stuck in another time. I’m thinking of Stravinsky, Igor and Joplin, Janis; Le Sacre du Printemps and Me and Bobby McGee. My next abode was a good choice. It was an apart-hotel called Casa City Break Hotel on Rue Al Wahda. It was up the hill from the port area and not a tourist spot. There were real people living there and lots of little markets and vegetable carts going up and down the streets. You didn’t have to go in search of good avocados; they came to you. And there were many local bakeries with the wonderful taste and smell of fresh bread. There were also kids on the street with boys roughhousing and kicking soccer balls and little girls being charming and nice. One day one of them decided I looked like I needed to buy one of her grandmother’s little packages of tissues. I had noticed her grandmother sitting on the steps of a building selling these little packages but she had never tried to sell me one. Then having passed by grandma one day, a little girls came running up from the rear smiling and asking if I didn’t need tissues. I said, “Je n’en ai pa besoin”, then quickly changed my mind. Her smile was too convincing. Right across the street from my apartment was, however, a mosque. They were everywhere; no escaping them and the call to prayer. It added character to the neighborhood but the call to prayer was often and persistent. Then it was Ramadan and the call to prayer became more like a threat. I was running low on wine, my own form of worship. I had been informed at Mustapha a day before Ramadan began that they were closing down for a month. The owner rightly guessed that I didn’t know. I thanked him for tipping me off, went outside for a few minutes to think about the situation and going dry for a month, then went back in and bought two more bottles of Poliakov vodka. It was a heavy load walking back to Casa City Break Hotel through the fabric market with its spoke-wheel of streets and shops but worth it. I could now smile when I heard the call to prayer and pour my own holy libation in response. Life was good there at the hotel. Jilal the manger asked me everyday if things were ok, and even sometimes asked if were happy. What innkeeper ever does that? He kept things as quiet as possible in a lively neighborhood.
There are many bright young people in Casablanca but I sensed, the longer I was there, that there were few “good” jobs. I’m afraid that I was having conversations in the market and at the hotel with young people who had been to college, were bright, spoke two or more languages, but had little opportunity to employ their education. One at the Diwan Hotel, Abu, suggested that I might be able to help him visit France; as it was right now he couldn’t even get in. The traffic along the Iberian Peninsula was no longer the freeway it once was. Many nations can’t close their borders fast enough these days, even to lucrative tourism. I myself had become a victim of that regarding the United Kingdom. A completely trumped-up report was keeping me out; the UK Home Office knew that but would do absolutely nothing to help. They made filing an appeal impossible. Consequently I had pretty much lost all respect for the UK government. But coming from the US, what can you say? The US is even worse under Trump. Fortunately I can still travel most places, but many people cannot. Later, coming back into the US I, and the woman in front of me in line, wondered if we were going to be hassled by the US border-patrol officer in the glass-metal cage. She was another returning US citizen. I was very careful about what I said to the officer. We both made it through without incident. Should we have said, “God bless Donald Trump!” for good measure? Maybe so but we didn’t. The situation is getting dire. I returned to Madrid on 10 March 2025. I was still thinking about Trump but turned my attention to the Spanish Civil War which led to nearly 30 years of dictatorship in Spain. I was also interested in going to the museums again. I stayed at Smartr Madrid, an apart-hotel on Calle Gran Via. The staff there was good, and there was a Carrefour across the street with wonderful Rioja Crianza and Plaza Callao was nearby. I had been dreaming about a Campo Viejo Crianza in Casablanca. I saw a painting at Reina Sophia Museo by Alfonso Ponce de Leon that surprised me. Called Autorretrato (self portrait), it is an eerie painting that appears prophetic of the painter’s fate. It shows the painter in an automobile accident bleeding. About a month later in 1936 he was murdered by Republican paramilitaries for his involvement in the Nationalist cause. But he was also a friend of poet Garcia Lorca, also murdered but by the other side in the conflict, and worked with him in the theatre. Alliances were not always clear cut back then in 1936. I came to realize that the causes of the Spanish Civil were complex and that there were ripple effects to the current day.
This caused me to take a walk to the English Bookstore in Madrid, not too far from Smartr Madrid Hotel. I asked owner David Price if there were still conflicting opinions about the civil war. He said that almost every day something comes up about it. “The renaming of a street …” Part of the conflict has to do with the identification of the war dead buried in mass graves, especially the Republican war dead. This was curious to me but not surprising. I got the impression in talking with my granddaughter that all was neatly resolved. She is Spanish and goes to school in Asturias. But I knew from the American Civil war that all was not resolved in that conflict. Even now with Trump back in office issues are being raised, and he has been involved in the renaming of military bases to restore respect to the Confederacy. He is anti almost anything you came name: diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI); LGBT, transgender sports, … I bought Paul Preston’s book The Spanish Civil War. It was overwhelming. It included so many details, it presented so many sides, issues, and historical precedents that I had trouble seeing the broader picture of the war. The abbreviations and acronyms alone caused vertigo. What I was looking for was a story but found myself drowning in the details of the events that led up to, that influenced, that war. Focus as I might try, the result was always for me a blur, a swirling mass of details, a … a “hot mess”. It was a bit like trying to learn all the streets in a city in a single day. The result was indigestion, a headache, not comprehension. I got the idea of a “hot mess” from a taxi driver back in Skokie, Illinois. He picked me up from Jewel-Osco Market on Old Skokie Road after shopping and we fell into conversation about daughters. He said he had three: a new one, one of about seven, and an older daughter. The new one was just starting to recognize him and squirming and making gurgling sounds when she saw him. The middle daughter was currently very attached to him, and the older daughter, while formerly attached to him, had now switched her attachment to her mother. This he said was normal from his observations of daughters and it did not worry him, except that he feared the day when the middle daughter would reattach to her mother and he would “loose her”. The older daughter, he said, was always very calm, untroubled, while the middle daughter he described as a “hot mess.” I had not heard the expression before and later looked it up. He gave me an example. “The other day,” he said, “I got a call from the principal of the school she attends. He asked me to come by to discuss an incident that had occurred.” It seems a boy of her age at the school she attends told her she looked like a lizard. Her reaction was immediate and swift. She kicked him in the nuts, leveling him on the playground in great pain. Or as the principal told him, “She kicked him down there where the sun don’t shine.” Frankly I was amused and curious. “Good for her,” was my first thought. “That’ll teach that creep to insult girls”. I had a daughter and two granddaughters and was a big supporter of girls. They go to a great deal of trouble every morning to get up, make their toilet, look presentable, and get to school. They don't need insult when they get there! He went in to meet with the principal, who suggested that his daughter receive some kind of punishment for her behavior. But her father suggested the boy should also received some kind of punishment as well. “After all”, he said, “he started it”. The principal agreed. He said he would talk to the boy’s father about arranging some kind of punishment for him too. “I hope the punishment for her,” I said, “would not be too harsh”. I was thinking no punishment at all. Her father smiled. “This is the way she is. She reacts strongly to things. And does not give much thought to the consequences.” At least she does not hide her emotions. That can have even worse consequences. “Well, be kind,” I said. “Teach her the idea of delayed expression.” He dropped me off at my destination, but I wish we could have talked further. He was an interesting person. Many of my drivers were. I could tell you about the woman from Somalia who said it was safe there now and very beautiful (I am thinking about Black Hawk Down and civil wars); the three different drivers I had from Mongolia who described the Mongolia diet heavy on meat and light on vegetables due to the cold climate; Nestor from the Congo who was named by his parents for the King of Pylos; the woman who described the terrifying NATO bombings she endured as a young girl growing up in Serbia in the 1990s during the Balkan wars … They all were colorful people with interesting stories that could be told in about five minutes, the typical length of the drive. I began to wonder if my travels were a waste of time. I could just stay in Skokie and take Uber or Lyft to the Jewel-Osco market and back to the hotel. I would have all the material I would ever need. But the “hot mess” is kind of the way the Spanish are. They are an emotional people who let things build up, then explode. They don’t hold back. And that seems to be the background to the Spanish Civil War. There had been other incidents, other explosions, skirmishes. But they had ended after various violent incidents. The issues were much the same each time. It had to do with poverty, insults to the Catholic church, disrespect to rich landowners from a “radical left”, a call for change that was just too much to expect from the privileged class, … But this time it turned into all-out war. And a very capable military leader stationed in Morocco responded, Francisco Franco. After almost three years of war with some help from international fighters and the Russians on the Republican side and a lot of help from Hitler and Mussolini on the Nationalist side, the Republic was overthrown and retribution began. Franco was cruel and showed no respect for the defeated. He insulted them in every way possible with summary executions, parades of naked women, … And perhaps most insulting of all, he did not allow for the burial of the dead on the defeated side. They were bulldozed into ditches and left there to decompose. This was the grand insult to the universal tradition of returning and burying the dead. It has been stated that he was sentimental over trivial matters yet icy cold over serious matters such as death. Trump could also be described as a “hot mess”, as he often has no plan and does things just to stir up trouble and exact retribution. If chaos is a plan, that is his. Keep the show going, defund this, defund that, and care not for the harm you are doing to real people. And hire freaks to give you advice and disobey the rulings of the court, supreme and other. Where this will lead, no one knows. So far he has not started a war but that may be just around the corner. It’s hard to imagine that a person with such a scrambled mind could conduct a war other than in a completely chaotic and nonsensical manner. Almost any enemy could outthink and outmaneuver him. As a commander-in-chief he is as unfit as a teenager who has eaten too much candy! There will surely be a day of reckoning but I do not know what form it will take. I settled into Madrid to rest, read about the civil war in Paul Preston's book, and contemplate the future. I had been a lot of places in a short period of time and needed to digest it all. Plaza Callao, close to my hotel on Gran Via, was my gateway to most of Madrid. The Florida Hotel used to be the press club during the civil war but that was gone now I learned. One day I walked to a little cafe off of Callao Plaza, ordered a glass of red wine, and sat at a table out front with just a few other people. It was a kind of between-hour after lunch and before the night business. There was a couple with a teenage daughter who looked much like my granddaughter in Asturias; there was another couple a few tables over; and there was an older guy with a viola at a table to my left drinking coffee. I drank the wonderful wine and read a story online about Paddy Hemingway, a 107-year-old RAF pilot from WWII who just died; he was shot down six times during WWII but survived. Once he went down at 600 feet and his parachute failed to open. He landed in a tree with only slight injuries; once he went down in the English Channel but was picked up unscathed. It was said that Paddy’s eyes always twinkled and so they did in the photograph of him. Prince William paid tribute to Paddy calling him the last of “The Few”. And I read about a postal worker, Joseph Roulin, who lived in the country in Arles and was a friend of Van Gogh. He watched out for Van Gogh and even paid his rent one time when Van Gogh didn’t or couldn’t. When Van Gogh cut off his ear he made sure he got proper medical care. He was a caring and understanding man. Almost everyone knows Van Gogh’s vibrant artwork, childlike, innocent, and inspiring wonder. You can’t look at a Van Gogh painting without being moved. While reading about Van Gogh I hear the sound of the viola being played at the far table where there is a couple drinking coffee. It is quite lovely. And the player is a fine musician. It transforms the atmosphere of the restaurant patio with its tables, chairs, and umbrellas. I shoot a picture and send over a tip. The musician smiles and looks very pleased. Appreciation counts in this world. And I began to appreciate this world a little more myself. There were still these lovely quiet moments between all the messes. There was still art, real heroes, a glass of wine, and afternoon shadows and smiles.
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