I’ve come to the conclusion that most pieces of writing are far longer than they need to be.

This is partially about style, but no one likes long-windedness.

he feels pretty important
we mock him for his grand feuds
over sheep

well
i feel pretty important too
but no one is mocking me
nor can I
see past those mountains

Rope, clip, harness, 70 feet above the ground. In the moment after the jump my body relaxes, opens, and one arm flings back in flight. Finally. The Earth is to my back, the sky is a huge blue audience. Then the moon gravity of the cliff pulls me in. When my feet contact the rock, everything spins and the sky is up once more.

When I catch my breath I watch myself plummet to the ground.  Line, griri, carabiner, harness. A chain of single-point failures. The fall loops over and over in my head, each time slightly different.

A run this time. Sideways canting up the rock until the line gently drags me back through the middle and out the other side. Higher at the second end, then higher still, a gathering pendulum. At the tail of the arc there is a split second of perfect weightlessness, and I launch myself into it. In flight the cliff is liquid and I glide fifty feet to the far shore.

I will not pray.

The rope is statically rated to 6000 pounds. The hardware is over-designed by factors of ten. No one falls from gear failure. No plane has ever crashed because aerodynamics took a holiday. To say that physics is faith is an insult to reason, and yet you’ll look for the meaning if I die.

You’ll say, it was just his time. You’ll say, it was meant to be. You will have a ritual by the cliff base to mark my end, a ceremony with candles because fire and light are the only things we can all believe in. You’ll make yourself feel better. Some will speak of the great cliff wall in the sky. Eventually you will talk of the things that bloomed from the pain of loss.

But when the breath is back in my throat I turn, reach and fall to find that I’m cartwheeling through free space. Everything spins again but my body knows what to do. My leading leg touches rock and I land lightly. The video will show my first ever perfect jetée. I thought nothing of it.

Will I come down just before or just after we discover that the belay device has a one-in-a-million manufacturing defect?

Or, the rock could shear off around the anchor. Fate could always kill me, if I allow our ignorance a name.

We have done our engineering, we have double triple checked. I know that no one has ever died from this, and I know that some day there will be a first. Everything I can do I have done, and now there is only the risk of living. But I will not hope for karma. I will not smile at the Gods. If I die from a random failure, please do not see meaning in it. The meaning is already here.

As I step into the air again.

The truth is, we all do whatever we have to do to get up here. It doesn’t matter what we call it.

Elegant, beautiful, and strangely sad.

The only substantial thing I can find on this Ulik character is this video. In it, Ulik performs with some of his contraptions such as a home-made jet-engine backpack (used with skis or rollerblades), a life-sized puppet who holds a camera and interviews him, and the front half of a car. It’s all wonderfully creative stuff, and it makes me wonder why we haven’t seen more hi-tech in circus.

For the potential is ample. We could use modern control-system technology to perform previously impossible man-machine feats of daring. I wonder about automatically balancing Segways 30 feet high than one could dance on top of,  harnesses connected to a crane that cancels out its own friction and inertia and modulates the effective gravity under performer control, a ridiculously precise robotic juggling partner, or powered jumping stilts with built in balance and timing systems. This is not mere robotic circus; at their best, such machines become something between costume and vehicle, an extension of the performer’s body that makes them, taller, stronger, faster, or able to move excitingly inhuman ways.

Given that such wide artistic and technological possibilities exist, I find it hard to believe that they won’t be developed. We may currently be witnessing the last generation of aerial circus that does not make heavy use of technology.   

Lonely Planet India in the ticket office
of a train three days coming
I packed my motorcycle with such focus
I forgot the book

nail clippers
what the hell happened to you yesterday morning?

nylon quick-dry travel pants fell carelessly
from me to a mosqito coil
your hidden zippered pockets melted
They were genius.

Waterproof sandals
four continent friend I miss you
were our adventures really over
when you left me on the tide?

Helmet oh Helmet, Made in Japan
expensive protector of heads
someone stole it off the handlebars
when it was parked at the Ashram
those bastards

funeral for an iPod
who fell and died on the concrete floor
in my cell in Ethiopia
I was all alone
when I needed you most

favorite pen you taught me
zippers only work when zipped

Sun Glasses
Best pair in Colombo but treacherous!
you stranded me in Nepali snowfields
four days up

towel
beautiful towel
microfibre veteran
the parting gift of a lover
now lost

headlamp and three triple A’s
a final gift to my Saharan friend
I cried too
I was going home
at least you can get anything there

After ascending and descending the tower of the Jama Masjid (attendant wanted backsheesh as I was 5 minutes after closing, damn him) I wandered into the Muslim quarter of the city, tight noisy always as usual, and here I was rewarded.

Because it was a neighborhood. People sitting in their shops cross legged. Kids lounging against walls. Busy restaurants spilling out into the street. The fruit vendors and juice vendors and meat vendors (muslims have so much more meat!) and all those little white caps, and just as in Dubai I really got a sense of life at street level… which I don’t on most Indian streets, they seem just too crazy too fast too commercial too desperate or something.

A man in the middle of an intersection was selling small succulent red pear-shaped fruits about the size of a thumb. He’d pick each one up from the pile, cut the ends off, and slice it lengthwise. I gestured for a few and he covered it with the “salt” mixture before I could stop him, that strange yellow sulfur-smelling salt they put on fruit and in drinks here. But he added sugar too, and I decided to give it a try, chewing on the sweet fruit with its pungent overtaste. Good. Sort of like a prickly pear fruit. I’m glad there are still delicious fruits that I don’t know the names of.

Overhead, vast tangles of thick cables snaked and loped through the air. Really big ones, poorly hung from the racks and oft-tilted poles. Like elephant’s trunks, occasionally looping down to within touching height. Everywhere signboards advertising money exchange (but which currency?) and, simultaneously, seemingly without fail at every money changer, Pakistan visa application forms. And I thought: right. Pakistan didn’t used to be a separate country. There must be a lot of Muslim families in India with relatives across that border.

I walked down the street on a cloud and smelled roasing meat again. Stopped at a chicken grilling shop.  Gestured-spoke to the cashier, a spectacled young man who turned out to have some English.

“You want a chicken leg.”

“Yes! How did you know?”

“Because I know your heart.” (huge grin)

“You do? Do you know my future too?”

“Yes. You will eat this and you will like this.”

And I laughed all the more because it was just the joke I was hoping he would make.

The afternoon was grey and occasionally splattered with rain, forming dalmations on the pavement. While I was eating my (delicious!) chicken, the wind picked up and suddenly the street was in the air. Small objects flew sideways just outside the door, an additional element of pandemonium. I dipped my chapatti in the mustard-butter sauce and stared at the blue tiles and the rickshaws and carts and the oven-heat sky with its menacing grey promise of rain, stared at all of it, the signboards and the little white hats and the beggars and the carpet sellers and the men drinking tea and everything, everything, all that texture that I am years away from getting into words, if ever.

I am in Dubai and it is a strange tropical paradise. Russia was killing me, with its winter and its winter people. Here I stepped off the plane and was immediately assailed by warmth and the smell of the ocean. And later, other smells: cooking food, diesel exhaust, the garlic-eating masses. The sun rose this morning in a clear blue sky. I put on my sunglasses, felt the sweat
began to seep out of my skin, and was home.

Of course, Dubai is truly weird, just as promised. This desert port — it’s not even the capital — became a huge skyscraper hub virtually overnight, all in the last ten years or so. They’re still going. There are huge swaths of sand being converted to dense skyscrapers wholesale. Literally blocks upon blocks of towering office buildings and luxury condos all under construction, all topped by yellow cranes. I am told that Dubai used up every available crane in the world at one point in its recent history. There are the golf courses, amusement parks, and “investment parks”, just squares of former desert marked out between massive new highways, farther and farther from the old fishing port. Superlatives abound to the point of insanity: the Emirates Mall has a an indoor ski run, and the tallest building in the world is a hotel that rises 500 meters — and it’s still under construction (planned height: 703m). Then there are the man-made islands, dozens of installed, paved and gardened sandbars which form the shape of an enormous palm tree. That’s “The Palm” of course, and there’s also “The World”, which is a huge (kilometers wide) archipelago in the shape of a world map. I hear Brad and Angelina bought Ethiopia. Fortunately, there will be lots more islands for sale because two more palms are under construction. Everything in under construction, including a massive amusement park and what will soon be the biggest airport in history: “Dubai World Airport.” All of these unbuilt things are on the tourist map, a combination of cartography and wish list.

Most of the people living in Dubai are not from Dubai. 85% are expats, mostly with serious amounts of money. But not the ones with jobs. As soon as I arrived in the airport I noticed that most of the people in line at passport control were not Arab. The people actually working in Dubai here are all from India, Pakistan, Malaysia, the Philippines, Nepal. They’re all brown; they all speak English (more or less) because that’s the only language everyone can agree on. My cab driver yesterday makes the equivalent of $800 a month, and sends it mostly home to his family. This is not a lot of money in Dubai, but it’s hugely more than he could make in Pakistan. The class divide (which is also usually a race divide) makes me deeply uncomfortable. I wonder how these Emirates and the expats living here can deal so easily with the fact that everyone who works to provide their vast array of vital services makes essentially no money, and probably never had and never will get a real education. There is something weird and wrong about it all, and I like to remind myself that this is really just a microcosm of the global situation. It might be good for us to see this reality on a daily basis, it might bring about some changes — but maybe not, as the equilibrium of Dubai shows.

It’s a city all based on oil money, black money; but then America is a country based on oil consumption. There isn’t really public transit to speak of. The scale of the streets is huge, and the sidewalks are often broken or missing; but then Dubai is just amplifying all the worst mistakes of Los Angeles. I’m probably the only person wincing at the carbon emissions from the huge airports, I’m probably the only white person ever to ride the bus. 

But for all of its fearsome scale and hostility, Dubai took me in when I found Bur Dubai, the old town, the low town, the souk. Here the smells multiplied as I walked down narrow streets fronted by ugly three story-apartment buildings with balconies and an air-conditioner sticking out of every window. It was beautiful to me, because the streets were alive. I was looking for hardware to maintain my battered laptop: some memory and a new battery, wandering along through the electronics quarter. Interspersed between the ramshackle computer shops were restaurants: Indian, shawarma, Halal, the food of Middle Asia. Rich smells wafted into the streets where men in white robes and white caps walked briskly about their business. Other
men wore suits, or the pan-cultural uniform of jeans and t-shirt. Some pushed carts; others haggled in front of the shops, angling for a price on, say, twenty 100 Gb hard drives. Women were rare and not necessarily covered; I saw no veils, but a sudden trio of schoolgirls giggled from beneath their black robes. And above it all, the call to prayer ringing out in synchrony
from the scattered minarets of the quarter. 

I hadn’t realized how accustomed to Muslim cities and South Asian crowds I have become. I’ve now spent months upon months of my life in Malaysia, Morocco, Indonesia, and Islamic Africa. I’ve befriended the Indian quarters of Toronto, San Francisco, Singapore and Hong Kong. Although this is my first time in the genuine, Arab Middle East, I find that I am completely
accustomed both to the texture of Islam at ground level, and to a type of street life never seen in richer, tighter countries. No — “street life” is too weak. It’s a sort of hustling joy that suffuses the best of urban living among those who industrialized not so very long ago, who still have a cultural memory of a time before cars, loitering laws, and vendor permits.

My travels have changed me. Culturally, historically, genetically, I have far more in common with brittle Russia than I do with the bizarre cosmopolitan confluence of Dubai, but I rejected Russia, or it rejected me. A desert city of the Middle East populated by Arabs and Indians now rings the bell of of home in me. I eat my curry with my right hand, look up at the
hot blue sky, and feel a clear joy.

I began to realize this when I flew overseas. I found myself in a brand new jungle, with Moorish walled compounds sprouting from the ground and entirely new species of cars. For a month I rented a room in the seaside town of Taghazout, Morocco. It had a small sink in one corner, and opened onto the central courtyard of the second story. By day, light came from the sky. By night, fluorescent tubes cast muddy shadows on the faces of my hosts. And every door in town was blue.

No one could tell me why the doors were blue; the doors were invisible to the Moroccans, just there, just doors. After an hour walking through town and puzzling, I realized I was blind: I didn’t know what color the doors were at home.

A year later, returned, the question came to me and I checked. I exited my apartment and turned around. My door is made out of dark, carved wood. The hallway is lit by an incandescent bulb in a glass shade. The floor is carpet, dark blue, industrial. Everything is perfectly level and right-angled, and all of this is so usual that it had never existed before.

Everyone already knows, or should know, that the people are different in each place. But not until I was immersed in the strange textures of a different culture did I understand that everything humans do can be subtly different, down to the smallest details, the shape of the nail heads in the walls, the tiniest material flora and fauna.

Sometimes, the differences mean something. That sink in my room was there because Morocco is a country of scant plumbing, which means shared bathrooms. But it was also there because Muslims must perform ablutions before their prayers, five times a day, and because hand-washing is more important when you eat without utensils. Meanwhile, the doorframes in my hallway are rectangular because the rectangle is an easy shape to build with. Or is this, too, just tradition? The right angles of Latin lettering are nowhere to be seen in Arabic, and those Moorish doors are arched…

And did Allah lovingly craft a different style of cookware for each race? I drink tea out of mugs, the British have tea cups, and the Turkish use what we would call a shotglass. Water is served warm in Vietnam and Mauritania. The Japanese word for “meal” actually means “rice.” Bolivian propane cylinders are actually ellipsoids, and yellow. Government buildings are decorated with columns in Europe, with gods and lucky swastikas in India…

Yes, there is language and culture; yes, you can get a PhD writing about differences in the conception of self between East and West, blah blah blah need to get out more. Can you see the invisible air of your own culture? Not the theories, not the great forces history, but the base physical details, those first flowers you notice in a new jungle. Tell me, what is the most common color for a bar of soap in America? And in India? Does soap even come in bars in other countries?

The modern spoon is differentiated by culture. The Western spoon is small, metal, with a shallow bowl. The Eastern spoon is typically deeper and made out of porcelain, with a more angled handle. The African spoon — perhaps the precursor to both — is mostly large and wooden, and is more of a cooking than an eating utensil.

The view out the little front lounge of this “pensian” is a landscape of huge limestone towers, a strange spiky panorama. It’s like living on the moon. The towers in and around the town are even riddled with moon-cheese holes, long ago carved into dwellings.

But I couldn’t immediately see that in the darkness without my hat. I stared at my guidebook map under a streetlamp and headed in the general direction of the accomodations. Several places sounded promising, but no one answered the door. Too early.

I arrived in Goreme at 5:00AM, kicked off the bus in the very cold dark with my eyes half open and my brain not booted. That’s how I left my Darjeeling beanie on the bus. It’s the only piece of souvenir clothing I ever owned, because, well, it said Darjeeling on it. Damnit.

I eventually walked into the only building with light. It was a bakery. Three men were rolling a cart of fresh loaves out of an enormous, closet-sized oven. “Hi,” I said, “nothing is open. Can I stay here… for… out of the cold… until…” I smiled sheepeshly. They immediately pointed me to a chair and brought me tea. All smiles. I thought they understood perfectly, until another man showed up and asked me in thick cheerful English what the problem was. I explained, he translated. Oohs and ahhs of recognition, but I think they had understood enough already. They cracked apart a loaf of steaming-hot crusty white bread and gave me half.

The first call to prayer rung out over the valley, still dark. (I have this theory that perpetually rising early is the leading cause of Islamic angst.) The sky began to lighten at last. Winter. Dabs of snow that had not melted the day before and could not be expected to melt today either. I missed my hat. I knocked on doors again. Nothing!

I wandered until I found a guesthouse with someone inside. There were three Asian kids there eating a breakfast of kim-chee and noodle soup. The proprietor spoke Korean.

Great, I said, I love kim-chee. I took a bed and ordered a meal. I was tired of Turkish breakfast anyway.

So here I am in an international back pocket I would never have claimed as fiction. The posters on the walls are in Korean, Turkish, and English. A Turkish double-tea pot sits on the wood-fired stove that keeps the multi-room cave warm. A laptop hums in the corner, playing Lionel Richie’s “Three Times A Lady.” All the bedspreads are pink with Disney brands. Outside, a bread truck rumbles over cobblestone streets and old men drink sugary tea. Maybe they go to the white marble mosque and pray; the minaret is almost as tall as the fairy chimneys that dot the moonscape.

An old white cat roams the cave with classic Anatolian eyes: one green, one blue.

I think the ones in front of me are speaking Dutch. They’re tall and elegant and seem to me somehow more relaxed, more cautious and more forgiving than specimens of the monoculture. I may be projecting here, but they’re definitely in shape from all that bicycling. Waiting alone in a row of vinyl seats is a middle-aged Japanese woman, missing her family, clutching her purse and some grace that my Western mind can barely comprehend. Just ahead of them is a dark-skinned family speaking an African language I can’t place. Maybe I’ve never heard it before. I don’t know the sense of what they’re saying, but the rhythm is familiar, those big hollow sounds and white smiles. It makes me smile too, remembering the smell of a night-time street restaurant in Bamako.

I say over and over again: there is a world out there. It was always waiting to become part of me, and there are parts of me still out there. I cried a little to hear about the shootings at Leopold’s, the cracked marble floors of that old Bombay staple. I once shared a sweating bottle of Kingfisher there with a very cute Russian, so It’s mine now. It’s all mine. I see the Arc de Triomphe in a movie and I’m reminded that I own Paris.

I stand in line in the terminal and once again I’m everywhere. I’ve already said goodbye to my friends; I’m already among strangers. I’m already gone, and I suddenly I don’t know what happens next. That’s my favorite part.