Long Division (chapter one)

Anyone who has ever had their heart shit on, done needle drugs, or lived in sub-Saharan Africa just might have seen things, and might have something worthwhile (worth what I haven’t the faintest idea) to say. This is a story, it could be mine or it could be yours. In all reality it doesn't matter, the Africa part, because you and I both know a new town is a discovery and a new chance to do old things in, like placating unchecked impulse or spending other peoples’ money.  

This could be you if you have a penchance for travel. If you have ever reveled in sunsets in foreign countries with him or her around your arm. If you have ever lusted over others' lives for alternative endings than sitting in this hot room. If you have ever fucked around with someone else’s significant other to this end.  So you have fucked someone over too. No doubt you have promised yourself you would never do it again, walking home at dawn, when the heartbreaking purity of birds chirping made you feel like dirt. This is you if you are going through a midlife crisis at 30. Don’t worry you’ll only make it to 60.

You are a filthy traveler. Whichever came first, the road or the dirt, doesn’t matter, having low standards can get you further in life than you think. Further, because you wish to lose yourself in the ways of other countries, and translate your thoughts into numerous languages until you no longer understand them. You are not one for a guide book or youth hostels. No, guide books are like coloring books for experience, and for hostels, well all the flag flapping makes it hard to get any forgetting done. And besides, it is hard to smoke exotic drugs without alerting several bunk mates with conservative tendencies.

You travel with a knife; you travel for life because of a fear of boredom. You don’t want to go home because you can’t write letters there. You drink too much in certain cultures but you stay away from those places. But you have been there-In once another country and meditating. It was just another experience in life. One of the infinite choices that it impossible to chose ONE, like a kid in a candy shop. You see, this could be you.

Perhaps you are my age and perhaps you are not. What proceeds is a tale of an ageless idiot, or God’s divine creation, depends on how you look at it. You be the judge of God’s divine creation. And if we are talking about judgments let us get this clear-

On some level people are all the same- most of us are frantically groping for happiness (although we wouldn’t know it if it were staring at us from across the floor), we think about what our mother’s would think, and are fascinated with world peace. We all like to hum a good song with a girl who would die for us. From this perspective we are one and the same, we are human, and an understanding human folly as such is what great thinkers and centuries of cave dwellers deem as “wise”. That people fundamentally good, only mislead, and only hurt others because they are hurting themselves. It took my Grandfather a 30 mile radius to realize this in his lifetime and it took yours truly unnumbered travels.

But down here, from where I write this, people are different and have been pulled apart with (y) our intelligence. The mind is a formidable thing, and in its attempt to find pattern makes a mockery of the world, like trying to calculate the right angles of a circle. Like a long division problem resulting in yourself remaining and the rest carrying over to a number past the point of any reconciliation. Yes, you find that culture endearing, how they kiss each other on the cheek as a salutation or how their wipe their ass with the left hand. But in the end the traditions, allegiances, birth rights, and wives tales don’t sit right with unbridled freedom. This is where we differ. I have spent quality time with people that would love to see my native country fall into the ocean; it is part of their culture. Or, for example in a gift giving culture such as many in Africa wealth is informally redistributed, and in “tall poppy syndrome”, those that practice material accumulation are cut down. This means, tall poppy, that white people pay a higher price. You will continue to pay because you will never be black. As for myself, my class covets the financial ruin of the wealthy because we figure they merit naught and make money off of people. I guess jealousy is the universal there, but don’t expect that to unify anything except a lover getting even on a one night stand. And make sense of this one-in several African languages there is a saying “better off a lie that unites than a truth that separates.” So, then, the truth will set us free-from one another.

And it will take a hell of a lot of wisdom to put the world back together after we have pulled it apart with our intelligence. But we haven’t finished just yet. This is this book. It isn't about what is but what isn’t. I look at the world like animals must look to man- in sheer and unqualified disbelief. What have we done?

 If you are faint-hearted, or are looking for an exhilarating road story by Kerouac or witty and oh so observant Bill Bryson, then  pour yourself a cocktail and continue to thumb through your lonely planet in Tuscany. From a top a verdant hill you can contemplate your retirement and the cold comfort of your marriage. And travels.

…What you have just read I wrote to justify a visit to a prostitute. Justifications are miraculous things and are far easier to come by in life than apologies. Reasoning with oneself is the cherry on the cake of evolution, allowing thousands to continue to gaze harmoniously at themselves in the mirror. Figured I could write a travel story for the wicked, and a hooker would serve as a character study.

I was in Africa when I wrote this. Not Sodom, nor Gomorrah, but Dakar. The sound of ceiling fans and panting dogs licking their balls on bar room floors as the sun was high overhead gave me the impression that I was in a film, doing something far more important than I was, like running guns to the underdogs of yet another civil war. Indeed, the third world is deluding in that it makes one feel like a big fish in a small pond because people treat you for someone more important than you merit. I tossed around the idea that I was capable of great feats of evil.  I was thirty and out of a 7 year relationship. I recommend this to everyone; it is conducive to flights of fancy.  

Now I am starting to picture myself without this girl, and this after 7 years (a quarter of my life) I am starting to make sense of what happened. I know wholly that bitterness is a coping mechanism (and I am sure she is walking around the West Bank at this moment cursing my name) but it is no more deluding than love. And what is most shocking of ending a long term relationship is how it can all add up to nothing. No one last bang, no flares, fires, or fatal stabbings. It just piddles out. Not even one suicidal thought. None. No, in all reality I am starting to feel an overwhelming sense of peace and freedom (this is no doubt an aspect she hates about me-that I could find all this liberating). No more emotional blackmail and insults in French during mood swings. No more family planning (she did all the talking about that one). Just all piddles out, until 7 years of travel photos make you sigh "pity", and avoid looking at them, like turning the frame on the mantle face down.

I digress. I never did see a prostitute, because I am not wicked. I’ll be the big man and apologize. There. Are you happy now?

Those who talk about it never do it and those that don’t... Well, if I did it I probably wouldn’t tell you, now would I? Just like I won’t harangue on the beauty of adventure because you don’t deserve it reclined in your easy chair. Besides, beauty often rides the winning horse in a race that means nothing to the public. No one hedges their bets on compassion, the bookies couldn't care less about humanity, and he who watches the sunrise over Everest gets nothing in the end except the wind in his face.

No I am not wicked or very tough. A mere fishermen’s tale of myself…this should be fun.

You and I, we put our backs into any adventure, for boredom travels wide, and we shit ourselves the whole through it. We never laugh until it’s over. You collect stories so as to become a grandfather, about your only contribution to making that one come true. And travel is a good as any way to go about it. While on the subject, travel writer Paul Theroux once wrote "tourists don’t know where they have been and travelers don't know where they are going" I would like to add that adventurers don't give a fuck.

No, I believe Americans have been fed the idea by one too many Hollywood blockbusters that they deserve complete freedom and adventure and are therefore essentially bored people because they fall short of the product. We throw around words like liberty and salvation as if they were the least of things and attainable in short installments of extreme sensations. Andy Warhol once pondered if art imitates life or life imitates art. Meaning one sees one too many movies of Africa and goes looking to find the answer to this ridiculously vague statement.

This is how I came to be here.

 Gri, a friend from any place in France, and I were visiting gold mines in southern Senegal. He was working on a project for an NGO on social cohesion between vast numbers of immigrants in the region. He was and is 25, just for the record. He has short brown hair and a collared shirt. Medium height and build. A smooth talker. Can you picture him? He is a spiritual fluke coming from the 5^th Republic but burns through money that would make any hedonist jump for joy. He chain smokes and meditates in formal wear. I, personally, was on vacation from an internship that I took less for the position than the location. Microfinance! As if I knew how to manage money any better than a goldfish knows how to ponder the future.

"It's not the right time to quit smoking" he had told me on the phone a week earlier. I laughed at him losing our bet, feeling comfortable that my will power was at least stronger than someone's "I'll have another beer" is what I said when I got there. We had been on a three week conversation before he left, jumping from Buddhism, self improvement versus acceptance, womens’ emotions, and life in Africa, or more precisely Africans. We both agreed we needed little in life, except a lot of money, and this so that crowning jewels of development itself, institutions such as banks etc, would leave us the fuck alone. We were both buried in debt. There was obviously no conclusion to our conversation, except only that whatever wisdom we had was hard to apply in a context of being constantly ripped-off. But enough sob stories, back to Kedegou.

The temperature was in the triple digits, with dust and humidity simultaneously present, or omnipresent. The sun, pregnant, shined proud like a newlywed in an unwavering blue sky that sits atop the continent like a piece of construction paper. No depth, only two dimensions, hot and wet. Kedegou. Last outpost before hot a fiery hell and the Guinean border. No particular reason to be founded there, but on the trip south from Dakar in a jammed bus that felt that it must have been built broken for their was such structural deformities far beyond the wear of time, one realizes that perhaps Africa has its own particular way of creating sprawl.

But then again why did anyone settle a vacuous plain like Oklahoma? Why not put down roots in Kedegou? The Gambian river does skirt the village (ok, a miniskirt in the dry season); there are mangos by the million, and south east Senegal is the only break from the potent flatness of the remainder of country. On the way south through the pock marked roads the hills rise out of nowhere, as if you ran your hand up from a girls cut stomach. Lush mountains. Although the land in this pocket of the country is relatively fertile no one practices agriculture. I was told it wasn’t highly respected. Consequently, at night in a sun baked shack we ate plates of imported fried spaghetti, mixed with fried potatoes, and maybe a fried egg if you had the change. A diet fit for hole in the stomach. The town, like many 3^rd world countries (or underdeveloped, or developing, or Southern, - there is no nomer devoid of a connotation that equates to “The West is better and the model society”) has middle age (European middle age of course) trade divisions. Mechanics and blacksmiths can be found in a certain neighborhood, while woodworkers and masons are over there. In the market one finds salt and meat and limited vegetables. One also finds the rest of the flotsam and jetsam of globalization,-posters of Mecca, Obama lighters and bootleg New York Yankees hats, Flip flops made in China, cheap underwear.

And nearer to nowhere and in untouched and unspoiled earth, just like the virginity of a girl, someone came across gold. No one knows how long it will last, just like that virginity, so they force themselves with speed upon and into the holes of the earth.

I was told gold was discovered here in the late nineties by the local sheriff. Today, in 2011, towns were scattered along the dusty arteries of the bush. If you are cutting through the corrugated gravel roadways on motorcycle huts will appear at random and then multiply like rabbits until you have a village with all modern day conveniences, like plastic sacks blowing in the trees, Indian soap operas, and T-shirts made in Bangladesh splashed with American vacation bible school promos. And was that your adolescent camp counselor that just walked by you?

When you don't know how long you will stay in a place (no, not on the earth but a town) it fundamentally alters your behavior. You stay outside the town, all the while inside the town, and home is only a bus ticket away, and your sleep your only anchor. And the rest of your spare thoughts are over the approaching hill. If this is true for one who enjoys putting a town behind him, it seems to hold true in a mining town. The village is like a tent pitched in haste before the rain. The one room school house had broken benches and a maudlin professor. “Help us” he said bluntly in a renounced and sincere tone, as if every white man was capable of feats of aid. “Drop-out rates are so high because everyone wants to make it rich in the mines” The last class appeared to be in pronunciation of French, as attested the chalk board velo, voila vole. Although these children spoke Halpular, Wolof, Hausa ad infinum with their family, they would be learning the history of Jean D’arc and how their ancestors were Galois, and the fluid monotone of the French language, just as their parents and grandparents once did. The health clinic was empty. It was getting a fresh coat of paint, but the stock of bandages, malaria meds, and whatnot didn’t seem to be there. Perhaps it was a burgeoning effort, the first confession that perhaps the village was not transient, but that in time it would grow into a bustling thoroughfare of trade and prosperity. Naked babies were running around before bath time. Babies with aged faces and swollen bellies. The stuttering drums of Mablax pumped out of cheap Chinese speakers that arrived on a boat, and were lashed to a rickety roof of bus. They were then moved on a back, on backs and backs until they were stacked on the makeshift shelves of the local merchant. The well pumped all day for washing the gold and the babies who multiply from one night stands. Nothing else to spend the money on for good times I guess. The type place that if they had a bridge they’d take the logs and use them to build a fire.

Where was I going with this? The search for wealth, yes. If you happen to hobble down the gravel track in the environs of Kedegou and care to see how much of a spoiled and lazy person you are (and even worse, reveling in the human ingenuity and shadiness of it all), then go to the Diallo. In these conditions man is reduced to an ant, and because you yourself part of humanity, therefore you are jaw dropped that an ant like you could drop himself down a shaft. He returns with a stone, they crush the stone in a mortar, in time, beating out that same age old rhythm of chain gang. To the dust they add water. And gold is heavier than water. But blood is thinner than gold. Add the mercury and watch the silver mix with the gold. Like spit sizzling in a spoon on lighter. And the ant takes it to this place trades it for other metals and paper. And it goes to Bamako, and god knows where, but I know it ends up in Switzerland. Just like Jews capped teeth in world war two.

 “The Malians are aggressive and Guineans are thieves. And when there are problems it is the Senegalese know how to reconcile them” said a Senegalese security guard, a Tomboulaman, as they call them. Picture a sheriff in the Wild West and the silver screen is not far off the mark. In perfect French he continues as we drink instant coffee in the scorching heat “When one man strikes gold he gets married and when he becomes poor she finds another man and the problems start from there.” “Then there is the problem with the women…when they pull the buckets up from the pits” as he mimes the belly being perpetually folded from using a pulley sitting down “There is a lot of miscarriages”. So much for women in this work place. Gri continues to interview several “heads” (head of the Malians, head of the Guineans) in his diplomatic and social science manner with open ended questions. He picks their brains as the saying goes. I admire his patience as I fidget with my camera and speak broken Wolof to the coffee shop (a palm leaf lean-to).

And he comes back with this “It is capitalism à l’African.  The largest division of labor possible for the dozen steps to wealth. The exploitation of migrants in a semi-formal police state (there are far more “police” in this area than all of Senegal) that sits atop the locals, runs on fear,  and taxes all passers-by to the mine.  The head of the village is elected by only the minority of Senegalese. He represents them but his interests first. The Senegalese merchants speculate upward for the sale of gold in the area (“Futures” if you will). Millions come out of these mines in bags and on the burly backs of migrants and nothing returns. The 5% of the profits made by foreign mining companies slated for social based initiatives lines the pockets of ministers in the capital”(The mayor of Kedegou lives in Dakar, 700 kilometers away).

Yet when it comes down to it what we need in life- food, drink, a roof, and lay- is taken care of in this village. Maybe they have it right and we have it backwards-our long winded courtship rituals (dinner and movie, Margaritaville, and love in general), private property like a white picket prisons full of armies of soccer moms with blogs for recipes for crumble. Here a tax is raised to pay for pseudo religious slaughter of sheep and sacrosanct debauchery. So I guess we both drink all night and wake up dehydrated. I suppose that is universal. There, I was wrong again, but don’t blame me for man’s deep rooted and transcendental desire to get fucked up.

But what do I know? Happiness is a choice, some have it (the choice that is) and some don’t. Some people stumble upon it in a bar in the form of a girl. Often those who have the chance squander it on a time share in the Alps. Some go to the end of the earth to fill their lives with experience like a crowded library of books, too many to remember what that nugget of wisdom was.  I estimate that I am happier than most, but only because I have spent my life dedicated to this central concern. Happiness is selfish and high maintenance, like a 16 year old blond girl from Los Angeles.

 And them? They have weighed the choices and they smile as they go down into the earth barefoot, like children to early graves. The men and women are incredibly affable and even appear content. They don’t seem to need much , just a lot of money like us, or at least the hope of it. And they are together, with more family values than conservative church goers could muster up on a Sunday. They work in groups and hug each other for the photo and ask for a copy "next time you come".  It is unheard of that we will never be back. It won't be the first or the last place you'll never return to.

So there I was the clicking of the ceiling fans and the panting dog. The luke warm beer my only companion to talk to me about all this. I figured that a beer buzz in sodden hot afternoon would render me miserable enough to mirror the misery I saw so as to better articulate it. But it's like this- whenever I was young I was told if you dug far enough you would reach China, as if Texas sat precisely above this huddle of poor reds in their bread lines. I was also told not to waste as "people don't have enough to eat in Africa". But images of Ethiopian babies don't make TV dinners taste like cordon bleu, and besides, rarely are humans able to fathom other's misery let alone do something about it. I am not talking about symbolic and well intentioned gests, (and for the record although Bono might have thrown more money at Africa than I ever will, I loathe his sense self satisfaction). Nor am I rambling on about young white middle class children that try to align themselves with poverty. We all live our own life and it is of no consolation seeing poverty. Because destitution doesn’t buy your fake needs- your bank account is still blocked and you’re screwed when you (I) go back to France. Poverty won’t make you feel relatively accomplished- your ex-girlfriend gave up waiting for you to "be someone" (instead of fame you strive for anonymity), and it won’t ease the burden of being the patron saint of good times.

I will never live their life. Even when I have slept on the street, money was only a phone call away.

Who am I then, to write all this? Well here I am in all my glory, your average traveler. Mediocre. And what is more painful in life than being mediocre and having the choice to be something “better”? You know, middle class dreams, ideals, and morality. There really is little that is more sickening than middle class aspiration-The poor can get satisfyingly shit-faced knowing they will never “make it”, and the rich already have. At least the poor have revolt. And us in the middle with our squabbling hopes and disappointments gripe about our unequal share of wealth, and bitch about justice. We donate to causes. We petition. We write our senators with an unfailingly conviction in representation. The middle class is quite an invention, perhaps a fluke in history, and is decidedly fleeting. Marx had it all wrong; he was the opium of the masses.

No, I have no real dreams. I simply have nothing better to do than fuck off in the world for kicks. But the question is then, who are you?

The author of your own destiny? That rings your little bell doesn't it? Centuries of social and material gain to arrive at this ostentatious thought. What would that modern day bard, the scientist, say? That you are the product of your genes. Let us examine the fat. I’ll begin.

My Grandmother preferred dogs to human beings. I don’t think she particularly cared for people, but she did dress for them. Slightly paranoid, she used to listen to the police scanner to stay "up to date". She also spent some time in a psych ward during my mother’s adolescence that is to say around the 50’s. Although, this is not a gage of sanity because I imagine they would have locked me up in the 50’s as well, and I am as fit as a fiddle!

My mother, a thin blond, given over to fads, was slightly manic depressive in her earlier days. In my youth we lived in a trailorhome. I recall her professors coming over at night to our trailer and her rewarding which one of my brother and I could fall asleep first. I don’t judge her for this. She did what she had to get through. I think she has only been happy since she was 50. 

My grandfather was an angel. He was Santa Claus and the tooth fairy every year.  Robert Sewall grew up in a country that no longer exists. A country where people knew where they were from, because places were different from one another. I am talking about contemporary America of course. He went to war for this very country.  Worse yet, he took everything my grandmother gave him. No one bleeds like him without a crying. He waved to everyone as he passed them in his pickup on gravel roads in East Texas. He passed alone under fluorescent lights in a nursing home in America early this century. I was in San Francisco living my life without regret up until that point.

And my father, John Talbert went to a reputable medical school. I was told he had a high IQ, no doubt in an attempt to dissuade me when I decided to drop out of school. He, on the other hand, was forced to attend said medical school by another grandmother from the moneyed side of our family (the side I never really knew). Drunk one night he smashed a bottle over the head of a man for what I was never told and was barred from Johns Hopkins. Could have found a cure for cancer but works at Wal-Mart in the North east of the United States. He remarried after 20 years of solitude. For a good time he drinks beer by himself, listens to music on headphones and writes.

This is what I am doing at this precise moment. The fruit falls from the tree, sure, but I did drop out of college, now the alumni of my own destiny. And I’d like to think that if mother didn’t remarry someone from Australia and we didn’t move like military children to numerous cities and other random huddles of concrete, that I would have made it out of nowhere, Texas. If not I would no doubt be in the brand-new prison on the hill with the other men too scared to get married to a house.

Does this mean that one becomes our parents? Probably not, but you’ll find out some day. I am a rail thin and blond, but I don't wave too much. I couldn’t care less if Texas slid into the ocean either (my apologies to my sweet aunt in the suburbs of Fort Worth, Townes Van Zandt, and several unvisited graves of relatives). 

Yet, my mother did live off her parents until she was 30, so maybe there is a gene for frivolity? But she had kids at that time. I guess I could pass as a kid by any modern standards. I wear my clothes for weeks on end, and blow through money when going out with Mr. Hyde. I could see myself smashing a bottle over someone’s head. Although I like people as an idea I don't really care for many of them as a reality. So much so I would perhaps end it all if I had to be someone else. I would, however, die for my friends.

So what does all this have to do with travel you ask? No doubt you have traveled long and far with prejudices and reputation, those bags that someone else packed for you. Well, I am not overly obsessed with being right, just like you. It takes courage to be wrong as you know, far more than being right. 
I am not overly concerned about relating to you the finer aspects of adventure-lions, amiable women, finding refuge in a temple in a monsoon, hitchhiking at dawn through the Carpathian Mountains, or making love at the bottom of the Grand Canyon. These are experiences to be lived, not shared, and I don’t want to discourage you from moving. Besides others can describe, with far more pose, orcas as if they were unicorns, but I prefer stories of land mines and student riots.

So where were we?...