Everywhere at all

What's the first thing that comes to your mind? What's the first bit of mind-blowing stimulus, the first pill to get you moving toward the obvious overdose? What's the first infatuation? The first bent moment? The first speck of dust on that spongy surface? What are your assumptions? Your impressions?

Where the hell am I?

Cape Town. Eight zillion miles away from a Turkish rug salesman, eight zillion miles away from felafels and, thankfully, baths. We're here, docked in the station of awkward contrast. A journey fulfilled, but only begun as well in this constant never-ending cycle leading never to an end but only to a beginning in the most harrowing cliche of all. For cliches load up with more meaning when you pluck them from your every day rather than from somebody's single dancing line imbedded on brown parchment. Dance like no one's watching, right? Maybe I would if someone would take this damn song off of repeat. Nope, not a metaphor - a deliberate message to the semi-drag queen african running the seventies shop across the hall.

South Africa, where westernization means not westernization but rather richenization. Good roads. Nice restaurants. Rules to keep unnecessary luxuries like privacy and clean sidewalks as steadfast pillars of everyday life. South Africa, where black people are conveniently locked away in "townships" - whose steel roofed shacks, narrow alleyways, clothesline-strewn horizons, and kid-flooded grounds resemble quite nicely the rest of Africa save the pot-hole-less roads leading to their doorsteps. Where white people continue the "colonial lifestyle" as comics on stage flaunt the blatant racial disparities in the humor of metaphorical self-flagellation. "I mean, come on, while we watch this our maid is watching our kids, the gardner is digging up the soil..." nothing has changed. But then, only 12 years have passed since this Apartheid took the center stage that "our" apartheid dominated some 40 years back. The parallels..blah blah.

But Peggy's fascinations in white privilege as a dominance of the majority obviously has it all wrong. Here, the whites living in their whitewashed walls whose price tags would indicate preferance but which instead proclaim an aura of the indistinct, the bland, the most godawful boring as KFC flags whisper through the wind of this anti-entropic monotonous existence - these whites dominate the economy as it exists. To see an african on a multi-speed bike disturbingly disturbs in its flaunted irregularity. A white gas station attendant takes us by surprise, as does a pale-skinned begger, for so distinctly have the racial roles been imbedded in our minds in the few short weeks we've been inside of this massive country's borders. I cringe at the thought of my own return to complacent living - to being led instead of leading - as I roll through a township on the outskirts of Hermanus (the center of which is occupied by bland buildings, a beautiful sea front, and white people doing what white people do - marveling at the world that they have time to marvel at. Ignoring the toils in the outskirts). I see the seas of black african faces walking the sidewalks while a rain of white faces behind steering wheels plows through in its hurry to get wherever it thinks is the next important stop. And I don't know what I think.

In Livingstone, Zambia, the native Kenyan turned only-black-resident-in-northern-michigan had returned to see how to help. "Something needs to change. All this effort of 50 or more years of aid work, and nothing's been accomplished. We're all trying to hide from the truth." Repeated revelations that change hasn't come flow from all the quandrants of our one mind, and exasperated denial seems the easiest path. Easier, that is, than recognizing reality in pluralistic truth, in agonizing realities our minds don't believe in. In drastic action as simple action. There is no spoon.

I write, but find words difficult that would normally flow easily from fingertip to bland black keyboard to speckled abstract beautiful screen. Ideas from nothing don't flow today as many days, because of this insufferable gap in literature. A month? More? Of silence, there has been too much and not enough all the same. For I reveled in a month of somewhat idle existence, where I let myself live less deliberately; where without words I felt little push to achieve anything too extraordinary. I settled in for a nice relaxing stroll through regions of the planet where, I forget sometimes, most Americans couldn't even point out on a map. I gave in gleefully, and whale watching overtook township mingling. I slowly merged back into my color and my role, beginning with a first class cabin chugging down lake Tanganyika while the third class clambered up and down the rope ladders outside at every "port." I can't say I'm proud of the shift, but I'm not ashamed either. And nobody around here seems to notice. Or care.

But these damned three-week travelers do love to flaunt/revel in their oblivion. "We came overland from Istanbul?" Whoa. Holy crap. I can't imagine. "So you saw victoria falls, then?" I will punch the next person who asks if I visited the tourist-infested overrun town on the Zambian-Zimbabwean border where no one cares to acknowledge that the onslaught of fast water is, well, a wee bit exaggerated in its spectacularity. Instead, the city seems intent to paint over the obvious with a sidelong admission you'll miss if you're not looking carefully.

"You went to the falls this morning? Great! Now you can kayak, bungee jump, skydive, raft, riverboard, fish, abseil..." And the coverup begins. An entire community based around a natural wonder whose easy access has rendered all that much less wonderful has re-written itself around adventure. Use the natural wonder ploy, then suck the money. And all the three-weekers in Cape Town are in. They've been marketed to successfully. They're on their way. Clean the kayaks. Get ready.

That's just part of it, though. At this point we don't want to tell the newcomers about where we've been any less than they want to hear about it. They wouldn't understand. They can't. And we don't know where they come from either. Why they would never want to let a breath get in the way of their next uber-important sentence or plan.

But what's worse - an all-american two week jaunt through Europe, or a five month marathon through Africa, where Zambia alone is larger than France, England, and Ireland combined? But without it, of course, I'd probably still have no idea what a Boer is. And I surely wouldn't know just how godawful Ugali and Sheema are. Or that they're the same thing.

Trying to remember what the hell the question was in the first place. Cape Town, sure. But where the hell am I?