Andiamo

It’s noon-ish on a rainy, humid, rather hot Monday in South Florida.

The ground outside our house is muddy and gummy to walk. I suspect  that, at any moment, the house may sink back into the swamp it was built on.

So where are we?

The bad news from Washington continues… I have stopped following it, but my wife still does.  That someone as grotesque as that pig in the White House is still in office is beyond me, but perhaps November may change things some.

But even so, it will not change who lives here.  What sort of people they are, on the whole, deep within.

And that is why leave we must.

On Friday the 10th of August, we travel to NYC for 10 days.

It will probably be boiling hot, while we’re there, but I hope it will be possible to enjoy some of the things that we like to do, like go to the Botanical Gardens in the Bronx, and see some of the exhibits there, or just stroll around the Upper West Side and see what there is to see.

I used to like going for long walks down Broadway on weekends, sometimes venturing from 96th on the West End all the way to Chelsea on foot. Then again, I was slimmer then.

But our real trip will be in late September.  Haven’t booked it yet, but will, and logo.

I know everyone is moving to Lisbon these days, and I would too — if I were 25.

I am very far from being that, but I still am a digital nomad at heart, even though I no longer look the part, and, after working on building and maintaining my wife’s e-commerce site for the last few years, my aging brain finally came up with a not totally stupid idea that I think would (a) be fun to develop, and (b)  might make us some extra cash on the side — which is always nice.

The town we are focused on is Tavira, in the southeast of the Algarve.

I love the fact that there is a tiny Moorish museum there, and that the word Arab in the Algarve (which stands for El Gharb, or The West in Lugha’t el Daad, as Arabic is known to Arabs) is not considered some kind of filthy smear — as it is here, in South Florida, where I live.

I have gained 15 lbs since April. when I returned from a long stay in Egypt.  I tipped the scales at 225 lbs; but now I’m  back up to 240.

Why?

Because if you cannot tolerate living somewhere, something has to give.

Some go by way of opioids, or divorcing and getting some trophy wife, or boozing it up daily, or getting that midlife crisis red sports cars — me, I hit the ice cream bar.

Well enough of that.

I don’t want to go back to worrying about diabetes and looking like a confirmed Winn Dixie habitué.

All I think about now, as I did around the same time last year, is leaving, and start over, someplace else entirely.

Some place far away from here.

Someplace where the air smells of pine trees, and sunrises unfold with stunning limpidity.

Maybe one day I will read on my computer screen that Iblees is finally in chains and thrown in the dark dungeon where he belongs and the news of the world will no longer be unrelentingly odious.

But I’m not holding my breath.

Mon souffle… or hayati, if you prefer, is about wanting to breathe sans lourdeur pesante, without that unyielding longing for defenestration, and we no longer have to ignore the muffled thud of innocents being bludgeoned in the alleyways.

Time to move on, and perhaps never again return.

In the meantime, I am about to install a Natural Language Interface on my wife’s web site this week.

Imagine that.

I am going to be 67 this summer, yet I am still fascinated by AI.

AI.

Imagine that.