Diary from Kabul

29-01-2012

Intrepid: So tomorrow I arrive back in Kabul, and I am unsettled. I feel as though all my productivity, all my creativity has been stifled this past few weeks, I have achieved nothing. I dislike that thought but there is little I can do about it, life has its interruptions, they are flung at you from just behind and just before, and they glance a blow that knocks you off your balance. This past few weeks I have teetered nearly to a topple, held upright by the gentle breeze of a supportive collective. I have looked for laughter and funny anecdotes to fill some pages, but somehow my mood has denied me that observation, so I have written barely a word. No that’s not true, I have written many a word, but not words that I can share or commit to the digital ether, they remain stored away in a private folder, and there they shall remain.

I have no pictures of the week, or month, no hilarity or poignancy, just an empty stretch of past to wilfully give up, and an unpaved future waiting for me to lay the first cobble. I had never imagined my life would be this way, it’s not what I had planned, but like a satellite torpedoed by an errant particle, I lost my direction, and I no longer orbit around my world, I am adrift and entranced by the hope of capture by the gravitational field of another. It’s not close yet, I can’t feel its pull, nothing urges me in this direction or that, so I close my eyes and float in the blackness of it all knowing that in good time I will bump into the flicker of a future. The past is lost to me, and I feel the intrepid pleasure of ‘now’ as a lump in my throat, a weary bedfellow of many months.

When we lie in the sun we are simply part of the planet, but at night when we lie under a blanket of stars, we are part of the universe. Well for now I am dormant in the cosmos, a blank canvas pricked by a billion glistening worlds, each distant and appealing, each a new life that becomes brighter the nearer I get to it and fades as I bullet past, a barrelling trajectory between possibilities. Some day a star will fetch me from my slumber and fizz my blood with oxygen and pour light into my eyes, someday, a light will stand beacon. Until then I shall dream in the heavens of possibility until I come to rest on the clouds of a new world. Until!

The Smell of Success: I have been penning this drivel in Emirates Mall in Dubai, before I fly out to Kabul tomorrow. And five cups of something in, I just got up and headed for the washroom to be party to another one of life’s great mysteries, ‘Why if I drink a litre of something do I always pee two?’ Who would know. So I stood in front of the urinal, unzipped and flopped in the necessary manner waiting for nature to prove me right. All around smelled normal. And then I wee’d and everything smelled of lemon. My, what pleasant smelling wee I have I thought, I am giving up on asparagus, from now on it’s ‘Regular Americano’ for me.

And then I stopped and with it so did the smell. So either I have wee the smell of pancakes, or they have invented a very clever toilet. Hhhm, I’m going with wee!

Relax Don’t Do It: The other evening I decided to treat myself. This isn’t much of a treat, don’t get too excited, I barely dribbled myself. In fact my desire to indulge in some metaphorical ‘cheesecake’ merely confirmed a thesis I have been working on for a little time. I had not watched TV since the end of September 2011, not a second. I don’t miss it, I find it a distraction, it keeps me from the things I want to do. Having said all of that, I have lost the ability to relax by myself and I am trying to rectify this. I never watch a movie alone, these are things I like to share with another. I am not much for sitting down, there isn't a cat on a hot tin roof that can match me. So I have been trying to train myself to ‘turn off’, and to only partial success. I have read several books recently to some effect. My mind is a traitor you see, and books have allowed me to defeat it periodically.

So the other evening, I got up from my laptop and walked into the lounge, and for once it was empty, so I fought with myself, picked up the remote and turned the TV on. I was going to watch something for an hour and nothing was going to stop me. I started at 101 and swept through an ample sufficiency of nothing, until I arrived at 999, and beaten I turned the TV off. 1000 channels of nothing, nothing is the same, nothing has changed I thought. I slumped on the sofa, fed up. I had fought my instinct, tried to relax and had failed. The lady I was staying with wondered in, picked up the remote, commenced at 101 and after a brief but disappointing finger press, flung the remote across the room and announced ‘there’s nothing but crap on TV these days’. So I am done with TV, I am going to write a book instead, it may be shit, but at least it will be my shit!

Beholder: And to further place this diary entry in context, as I peer over my black tea across from me, say 7-8 meters to my left are two Emirate women, dressed from head to toe in black, the only skin I can see are their hands and faces. And one of them has one of the most beautiful faces I have ever seen. Who am I to indulge in cliché, but ships would launch and fireworks would tracer and a rainbow would bound the horizon. She is a beauty make no mistake. And I think to myself how sad that I can’t see the form of her body, to know the curve of her neck and the arch of her back, the plump of her breast or the slope of her thighs. No hang on, scrap that, her friend has just glanced at me and she is a right minger. On second thoughts sometimes the mystery of it all is best!

Looking but not Seeing: Some days I see so many things that make me laugh, part irony or part satire, some pathos here and a sprinkling of humanity there. Life is the art of seeing, not looking. For a few weeks it was all I could do to open my eyes. I must have been immersed in a plenitude of engaging possibilities, but I will be buggered if they managed to pique my enthusiasm. I have no entries on my iPhone, nothing in my laptop, no word or thought or line from which cascades 200 words of entertainment.

Nothing at all in fact, except this. I took my kids to see War Horse at the cinema in the UK, and watched a trailer for a soon to be released movie. And this line propelled itself towards me.

‘Everything will be alright in the end, so if it’s not alright, it’s not the end’.

Simple beauty that fixed in my conscience via my ears. I have my eyes closed so I can’t see for now!