Namlia

i woke up at 3am today to find ants in the guest bathroom and the main living room, where i am sleeping on the floor.

it is cold and still rainy and wet outside; an empty warm house is a magnet.

naml in arabic means ants, and namlia in old egypt — the egypt you see in the pic above — was a kind of cupboard with a fine wire screen that kept out pests.

i lived in egypt, before my family decided to commit suicide on the slow by emigrating to america.

this horrible little house that i’m empting out was where my parents checked out from normal living and turned to alcohol before dying in sordid, pathetic circumstances.

my parents, part of cairo’s golden generation of the 60s, reduced to living in this tomb, this namlia that couldnt even manage to keep out the spiders and ants and crawly creatures.

later today, i will box up all loose stuff in the top floor of this house. then everything will be ready for wednesday junk removal day, when a bunch of strangers will come and consign 35 years of my parents’ life to the dustbin of history.

if i am lucky, nothing else will go wrong with getting this fucking house ready for the closing, a week from thursday.

and when it closes, and the money shows up in my bank account, i shall never think of this place, egypt, or my parents, ever again.

the past is irrelevant.

does anyone today care what doc gooden once was?

all i have now is a continuous present, and, a week from now, the means to move anywhere i choose to and live as i please, within reason.

i can take care of my damaged knee when i get return to florida, spend the summer losing more weight and getting in fantastic shape, before taking off in September to, say, Europe, as in Portugal’s Silver Coast, or perhaps rent a place in La Marsa, to be once again by my beloved Mediterranean and hear people speaking French and Arabic, the way it was for me growing up.  too bad tunis is too fucked up for that dream to become a reality.

i truly do not give a shit about who is going to be the next president of the united states, or if american democracy is going to survive.

it’s not my problem, and besides, i have more interesting things to do with my life.

this is my time now, and i intend to make the most of what’s left of it.