“I don’t have a drinking problem ‘Cept when I can’t get a drink.”
Tom Waits
We have decided to take a month off drinking.
This plan lasted a week and is probably why there has been no posts since we returned from Italy.
There was nothing to say.
The category for our day to day life is called ‘the grind’.
I feel this grind from time to time and I love what I do, and I do it all over the world.
I can’t imagine what it must be like in some shit town in a job you hate watching your life slide by.
Over and over. Repeat.
Somehow, society, government, corporation, whatever, has convinced all of us that the work hard and pay your taxes and retire model is the best way to go. This cannot be the path to happiness. Twenty years (roughly) of education, 45 years in a job they hate buying shit they don’t need to fill a huge house out in the suburbs. More cars, more TVs, new phones… until they need an even bigger house for all their useless crap. They get to 65 and are bitter and tired, but have earned their ‘freedom’.
And all they have is regret. They are angry and blame the youth for everything and die miserable and no one will ever remember them.
And they wish that in their best years, they did what the heart disired.
This is the grind.
There are a few exceptions, some loved their work, some ran their own businesses and grinded on their own terms. But they are rare, and when I see them, they are happy.
“Humanity has passed through a long history of one-sidedness and of a social condition that has always contained the potential of destruction, despite its creative achievements in technology. The great project of our time must be to open the other eye: to see all-sidedly and wholly, to heal and transcend the cleavage between humanity and nature that came with early wisdom.”
Murray Bookchin
Friday is a day of rest.
I hit the gym while Shell has a coffee with a friend.
Not a sentence you will see often. Shell has a new friend.
I tackle the chores and do the shopping.
There is buffalo from Pakistan on sale. Shin with that big bone in it. Marrow, when it cooks slow it melts into the sauce.
What is the carbon footprint of a buffalo from Pakistan slow cooked in Dubai?
On that subject, a wine from Italy and another from Spain…
Tonights wine –
2021 Bodegas Terras Gauda Rífas Baixis (Galacia, Spain)
70% Albriñio, 23% Caíño and 7% Loureiro. It is very complex with a heap of orange peel on the nose. I struggle with the colour and Shell tells me there is a green tinge. I like these Rífas wines. Low alcohol and a heavy palate.
2019 Marchesi Mazzei Ser Lapo Chianti Classico (Chianti, Italy)
We drank a lot of this in Kuala Lumpur. It was good value and options were limited. I think this bottle may have copped some heat. It lacked freshness and was low on acidity. Certainly drinkable. If this was my first tasting of the Ser Lapo, I wouldn’t get another, but I know this wine can be good.
It is Saturday and we are both up early.
We decide to drive to Hatta in the mountains and hike some of the mountain bike trails there.
The sun rises over the mountains and it is a little brisk outside, only 13C.
Desert walking is surreal. I feel like I am on another planet.
“I was the world in which I walked, and what I saw
Wallace Stevens
Or heard or felt came not but from myself;
And there I found myself more truly and more strange.”
We do a quick walk and then head to Hatta town centre for a karak and a punnet of strawberries.
Head home and spend a lazy afternoon reading.
I am out of books and I am not enjoying the Kindle right now. The only real book I have is The Catcher in the Rye by J.D Salinger. I was handed it for free at the Sharjah Book Fair a few months ago. I have read the novel a few times. The first time was in high school, and I enjoyed it. Each subsequent reading I have liked it less.
“I am always saying “Glad to’ve met you” to somebody I’m not at all glad I met. If you want to stay alive, you have to say that stuff, though.”
J.D. Salinger
Books don’t change, people do.
Sunday morning and we have set the alarm.
I met Shell on the water. She was already training at the outrigger canoe club I joined when I injured my shoulder at a power lifting competition. I was looking for something less damaging to the body.
I fell in love with her on the ocean in a canoe and the coffees we would have afterward.
“but what can I make of love when we are all born at a different time and place and only meet through a trick of centuries and a chance three steps to the left? you”
Charles Bukowski
We spent countless hours in the ocean swell talking and watching sunsets on the lake.
One of my favourite pictures of us is on the beach at Patonga for an outrigger race in 2013. We were not together in this picture, but the body language…
Today, for the first time in eight years we are back in the outrigger. Our paddles have travelled to Kuala Lumpur and Cambodia to finally get wet in the Arabian Gulf.
Three hours later and we are exhausted and happy.
It was so good to be back on the water.
“Those who live by the sea can hardly form a single thought of which the sea would not be part.”
Hermann Broch
We get home exhausted. Lunch at Al Jawareh and home to do nothing for the rest of the day.
There is nothing more satisfying than the exhaustion of exercise.