Now I have walked the river feeling envious of people laughing and eating and canoodling on blankets. Lax or no prohibition against open containers, apparently. Danish flags are everywhere, I’m not sure why. Maybe it’s National Denmark Day? I am sitting on some benchy step-type things above the canal in Christianhavn and watching a raven tear at the shredded lettuce and whatever else is inside some crumpled sandwich paper left by a trio of thuggish Danes who were supping here until recently, when they left without first becoming my friends.
I think I’ll take a walk over to Freetown Christiania, maybe buy a joint, see if that’ll help me sleep during a time more broadly regarded here as night. Yes. And on the way I will scan the ground for generous bits of remaindered cigarettes with which to roll a spliff.
One fellow in a clump of drunken others still eating sandwiches and getting drunker in the vicinity is singing Destiny’s Child.
Hi. I’m in the Sahara. Helping these Berber guys install toilets in the new toilets tent because the existing one got buried in sand. There is sand everywhere. It’s in my shoes and my socks and my bed and my hair and my teeth and building up behind my eyeballs. They don’t even fight it. Everyone just goes around barefoot except when the sand is too hot to touch, which is approximately between ten AM and six PM. Around midnight or one AM last night, when it had finally cooled off, we took a mattress up into one of the dunes to not bother the tourists who were sleeping outside and lay in the sand and smoked shisha and looked at the stars. Today for lunch we had a tagine because Aziz asked me if I wanted tagine or something I couldn’t understand and I said tagine. He says tomorrow I will be the one to make it, Inshallah. Everything is going pretty well given that these guys speak no English and I, no Arabic and no Berber; we’re getting by in French even though theirs is even worse than mine. Now I have to go because Souleymane has the hookah up and running. Sorry you’re not here. I love you,
thinking of you as I walk past the cage in the Athens airport where they keep all the smokers. I’m pretty tired right now but maybe I’ll come back in the morning to see if I can pay extra to pet one.
I asked Sigrid — Danish, German, she — how long it took her to learn Greek. Many years, she said. I was smoking then, she said, and then she described a habit of listening to what people said to her and writing it down on the inside of her cigarette pack and — and here she pantomimed, a flat, out-turned palm extended and slightly aloft, for Sigrid is petite and the generic remembered Greek interlocutor, probably taller — holding it up for them to review.
