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Well I’m back from two weeks in Morocco. Britney and I were married in a little family gathering at my mother’s house in the hills of Santa Barbara on Oct 14, and then we flew on the redeye to Northwest Africa.
It was fun, exhausting, spiritually draining. I enjoyed the diverse, beautiful, sometimes surreal geographical landscapes. Some areas looked like Utah, Colorado, Arizona, the Mojave. We were driven around a lot. We both got fairly sick. Turned out I got Covid. We had to cancel our desert-camel ride and instead crashed in a small rural town in a massive hotel in a gigantic room wherein we slept all day and I vomited so brutally that it felt like the apocalypse.
I was rereading Henry Miller’s Tropic of Capricorn throughout the trip, so Miller’s rich, vibrant imagination, womanizing, early memories of Brooklyn and Manhattan in the 1910s and 1920s, early vestiges of becoming a writer, and overly ambitious use of the word “cunt” filled my brain alongside the narrow, twisting alleyways and dusty streets, horses and donkeys, flying mopeds, dirty seatbeltless taxis, and fake “guides” trying to wheedle a few Dirham off the rich tourists.
My “Harm O.C.D.” was nasty and hardcore, and assaulted my brain more or less the entire trip. It got set off by the flying (I hate flying on planes), the foreignness, the physical and spiritual exhaustion, the sickness. Intrusive, brutal thoughts which kept spinning and spinning and spinning, until world’s end. I should have meditated; I’d been doing well with that pre-Morocco. But I’d fallen off, as I always do eventually. (It’s a hard habit to keep, for me.)
I did, though, write almost every day, in a green spotted composition notebook I brought with me. That felt good, though I was craving the computer and keyboard the whole trip. It made me think of 2016, my 450-mile one-month journey walking across El Camino de Santiago in northern Spain. I’d filled half a dozen notebooks with vibrant, investigative prose. But one night I found an old computer with a printer at the hotel. The manager was confused when I refused an internet password. I just wanted to write. I sat down at the computer, with a big cup of English Breakfast tea next to me, and I wrote, hard and fast, for over three hours. When I was done I saved the document (I humorously imagined some Spaniard finding it years later) and printed it: It came to 14 single-spaced pages. Yeah. I took those printed pages with me. They made it home, with the notebooks, to the Bay Area (where I lived at the time).
It's weird being back in the USA. In California. In Lompoc. I like it, mostly. I’m a married man. I like that, too, despite the still-warm shock. Me, a man who thought he’d probably never get married—sort of. But I fell in love and it was time. She was (and is) the one.
Suddenly everything is quiet. It’s back to the old routine again. Wake up, read read read, then dick around on Substack, then write, then walk the dog, check emails, do some freelance investigating for gigs, then write again, post, etc. The same old streets and houses and blocks.
I finished Tropic of Capricorn on the trip; I downloaded the Audible version and sliced off the final 100 pages by listening. It was becoming draining to read with my eyes; sometimes, though I cherish Miller’s vision, his sentences become odorous. His rich imagination is both brilliant and yet also sometimes immature, childish, ridiculous. It at times feels like an intelligent 8th-grader’s attempts at writing. Or my own early work circa 2006. At other times his writing is genius.