Creepy week continues

This has been a trying week, and not for the usual reasons. Not necessarily for bad reasons, a dose of the morbid has its benefits, for sure.

**It should be known, I wrote this last week, now it's been several days with much fewer Edgar Allan Poe moments, Hamdullah.**

Way back in PC Morocco's heyday (before the budget constraints of FY2011), when David Lillie was here, one of his last messages to us all went like : Live each week like it's Shark Week.

You can say I've done that lately, but more in the JAWS way than the National Geographic way.

Creepiness. It's one of those emotions that's very specific and once you get its flavor, sometimes it stays longer than you'd like. Psychologists might call it an unspecificied feeling of doom. And it's not so bad, but since it started, I can't help picking up the hints of creepy in the most banal things.

"Anything involving worms, and vegetables, and since I eat peas so much, and you always see worms in the peas at least once a week you can be sure I'm going to be creeped out." -Olive.

It began when I got some carbon monoxide poisoning. Not a lot, but enough. Three of us, at 4 AM, we all woke up and noticed we had the same symptoms. In my instance, I had a headache and I could feel my heart racing. We called Peace Corps and they told us to air out in the dark morning, and this was scary and not scary at the same time: scary from not having known when we slept that this noxious gas was in our room, already having breathed it in enough as we lied down to sleep to have developed a headache much earlier in the day; not scary in that, as soon as we realized what happened, all we had to do was spend 90 minutes outside in the early dawn. To help this time go by, we tried a suggestion of mine, to watch an episode of MODERN FAMILY, the new favorite show here in P.C.M., but the gas had gotten to us badly enough that, while we were fine and coherent conversing with each other, as soon as we saw the slick production values of the show and the rapid cuts between shots, recapping an earlier episode, it made us all go Rite-of-Spring at the same time, made us each scream out, averting our eyes as quickly as possible while wanting to hurl, our stomach's spinning and being totally unable to follow the thread of what the characters said or did.

IMPORTANT NOTE: Having drilled about it again and again during training, and having heard other stories, we knew what to do but we also knew that we were lucky, and were given a free pass.

I do not have this concern in my daily life in my casbah because our 3 or 4 butagas tanks are outside, far from my room. Even at Will's we had a detector and he makes sure to close his tanks before sleep every night. This just got us because all three of us had taken hot showers during the day, and it was too cold outside to open the doors for very long.

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''Apres moi, le dèluge''

A day later I visited Sam in Aoufuz, and another creepy thing, the first of many such things: he told me how in the morning the Muezzin man is different. And different in a bad way. His mosque is super close, so it already sounds like the voice of God entering and dominating any neurons in your brain for those 2 minutes of his call to prayer. But when it happens at 4AM , in the utter pitch black darkness of his room, low in the casbah but underneath the sky light of the courtyard, it seems to be less God and more a giant monster, stalking outside. Its a different person, one with a Russian bass of a voice, and there's no syllables so much as the sound of an enormous groan. He warned me about it, and sure enough it jolted me out of my sleep. The sound of a fog horn from an ocean liner, an Artic Cutter maybe, considering how cold the room was. ALLAHU AKBAAARRrr!!

He added to the creepiness a few minutes before I fell asleep, asking about my journal: ''Do you ever look at your journal, and get the feeling that the days that you missed writing are gone forever?''

I said, No i never did, at least not until you mentioned that. But now I notice this even more vividly than he does, because while he has a leather journal, I write my journal entries, bullet-style, in a daily planner, so it's literally a blank page staring at me, sometimes four or five of them in a row since I last picked it up to write. And trying to remember something worth writing down, that differentiated that day from the last? Sometimes I can, other times I can't.

TO make matters worse, in this same conversation, Sam was able to alter the way I viewed this 5x a day event: he said how the other four times of the day, the muezzin is the most stark reminder of his sojourn away from home. That said, the four daylight ones, he interprets that as part of the adventure, a positive reminder of the good things about being away. In the debilitating hours of wee, however, the doom and gloom of that different muezzin instead is a vivid signal of the distance, the Raven-like notification dramatizing the absence of all his loved ones. The confrontational, devouring nature of the exotic, rather than the post-card, welcoming version that he normally gets from hearing it. Since then, the power of suggestion took hold of me and I have a hard time seeing it in any other way, as well: the ticking of a clock, time lost and irretrievable, writ largely. A person with a loudspeaker shouting out the passing time, and therefore also your passing life.

Add to that the deteriorating health of my father, Zaid, who the first day back, before me inthe kitchen clutched his stomach and fell to his knees, hiding under the counter until his pains passed. Since then, twice he has let out growls of pain, lasting long enough for me to wonder if it is over for him. I couldn't do anything, and even as his pain continued and he curled up more, I took my bag and left the casbah.

The next day after I saw my host dad collapse, clutching at his belly -- they' had then become minute-long groans, the kind you hear from birthing mothers, though this week he has seemed better-- something very acute and surprising happened to me, that was able to make my heart race and cold sweat cover my skin in the same way that the CO did: vertigo.

I became lost in my own town, on the same road that I always used. Or, I thought it was the same road. But I came from a different direction than normal, further back than before (closer to the Sarghro side of town), and I expected to follow the path on the hill above the palm trees, back to my Casbah like normal. OK. Except the mosque had disappeared. And I emerged from this path, not to see the palm trees at all, but instead the hillside covered in mud houses, touring above me. OK, well, no problem, I know this area. But I went around to where the palm trees were supposed to be, and, the same thing. A different hill side covered with towering mud castles. And the mosque was gone. And I went around again and the palm trees appeared, but in a different place than I'd ever have guessed.

What in the world? It was as if you follow the same way to work every day, but you get there and the hospital is on the other side of the street than it's normally on. And I've walked here daily for how many months?? Not only that, but what I did see was not anything familiar at all. It all seemed to loom with this sinister sheen to it, the light too bright, my head spinning, and everywhere, the hills taller and steeper than normal, an unknown town transplanted here and being lost. Finally I found the casbah I was aiming for, but even then the distances seemed much larger than normally expected.

Now, this lasted a few minutes. Later in the week I was surprised to find a RadioLab interview related the tale of a woman similar to what I went through, the feeling of ''everything having been rotated, placed, 90 degrees differently than what it's always been''. It's fascinating but horriyfing and creepy at the same time! (Though, worse is the story of a woman whose sense of gravity pulled her constantly in different ways, at least in her perception-- that one can be found http://www.radiolab.org/blogs/radiolab-blog/2010/nov/29/vertigo/ )

Add on top of that the riots, the regime changes. Memories of being in a Bolivian lorry, rain hitting my head as I left Candelaria for the last time, the sun setting over the mountains above the dirt road going to Tarabuco. And, how I kept walking by the restroom, washing my hands and then the light switch would give me a few volts of unwelcome wake-up juice, not just a few times like it's done in the past but every time. And the potential for things to go badly due to the PC Investigation in the Senate, etc.

Now, I love Murakami's novels, that's one of the things Peace Corps has turned me on to -- i just started WIND-UP BIRD in Spanish. Nonethless, it's just not so pleasant to spend two weeks seeming to live in one, where everything has this symbolic, and not welcome, electrical charge to it. Close-relationships unraveling, my latest crush/obsession with the Nine Inch Nails and their 1994 concert--beautiful because of its creepiness-- even the books I've picked to read,Dave Eggers' HEARTBREAKING WORK OF STAGGERING GENIUS; and the movie that Will and I chose to watch before the CO scare, a Japanese boss girl movie from the 70s--seem to push me into this unwelcome territory, resonant with its allusions to the morbid and the moribund.

But, this too shall pass. I'm ready for Spring camp! The chance to lighten up some!



Another video from the 94 Woodstock concert: whereas the original had flower people, this one had mud people (see the video above). And I heard a quote about the 94 woodstock that likewise is very true and that has stuck with me since I first heard it: In place of peace and love, just twenty-five years later this one showed its break with the older generation with all the crowd shouting ''Die! Die!'' as loud as possible.

The return of testosterone, maybe? Maybe that's what I love about it. I don't know. The last word on creepiness? Probably it doesn't help that I've started reading IT again, the Stephen King novel.
Next time inshallah. I love you all!

Notes

http://www.mentalfloss.com/blogs/archives/20754
More about the Igor Stravinsky play

and a note to myself:
check out this movie, Ben! Might be good.