Do shellfish dream of electric seaweed?
Then I woke up of course.
It's just another life, described.


restlessness you associate with Awesome America, a constant wall of red tape and telemarketers between you and simple peace. You can get thrilled, taught, fed, entertained, excited, but you can’t ever take a break. But repose in Gambia is inherent, automatic, assumed. If it all seems frighteningly catatonic, the karmic equivalent of an oxycodone habit, then it’s probably not your cup of ataya. All-night mosques and abrasive touts will no doubt stymie your mellow, however, and you might discover a sense of relief in the concreteness of your limitations and a sweetness in the lifestyle you’ve cobbled together despite your finite facilities.
Any time someone newish enters your space, a certain amount of tailoring must occur, if not to eclipse any assumptions that your life is not “together” enough, then at least to afford them some comfort. It is not difficult when England comes your way to pull something holidayish out of the sandy surf and to make like (fake like?) your every day consists of reaching for a banana right from the tree*. Easy enough, I suppose, to sweep the lizard turds under the stove for those few days that guests stop by. In the end though, a closer friend comes with a certain amount of abusability reserved normally for family and particular electronics, and all bets for preserving the image of that sunkissed life are off. Underwear finds its way once again strewn on the floor, you condescend (embarrassingly) to your gardener, let produce rot in the fridge. It’s undoubtedly the less enjoyable experience for this visitor, who differs from the others only in his ability to maintain some space in your life long enough to wear down your defenses and expose his own Tesco-working warts as well. Somehow, though, you like to think that showing your slightly more sustainable side, a middling okayness with your existence, could, if he were able to stretch that far, be seen as a compliment to the evolved state of your friendship.
It's the British approximation of those E-network style countdown programs, the ultimate time-vacuum when you're stuck on a Jet Blue flight, but the likes of which you'd rather not admit you'd sat through at any other time in your life. Instead of one-hit wonders or admirable celebrity body parts, this one is trying to sort out the 100 most embarrassing people of 2008. You realize it's not your country when Sarah Palin comes in at a disappointing 52nd, but there's a familiar discomfort in watching this style of television- programmed to come at you quickly and go away even quicker and there's as much time spent telling you what's coming as there is content to come. Before we can find out who the other 51 failures of public popularity were this year, it's time for the Hogmany madness to commence. Night could imitate TV on a day like New Year's, with the drunk girls puking on the sidewalks, or inadequately dressed and clopping precariously through cobblestones and the boys shouting from rooftops and grabbing each other in new and exciting ways that only a night of strong liquid courage could liberate them to do. But instead nothing done or said this evening will register the kind of spite that the fishbowl critique show does- because no one is any position to judge. You're either puking on the sidewalk yourself, or you're holding up someone's ponytail so they can.