Dubai Grinding

“Depression is melancholy minus its charms.”

Susan Sontag

It is Thursday morning and I smell of melancholy.

I let Shell sleep and I read before we head to the gym.

It is good to be back in the gym.

Like a strange omen, Shell comes down with the runs. As she returns from the toilet, I ask her if she is ok, as she answers she does not see a step, rolls her ankle, and crashes to the ground.

She clutches her ankle in pain. Her face looks near tears.

Grant – Are you ok?

Shell – No.

Grant – How bad is it?

Shell – I have the runs, I have rolled my ankle, I am lying on the floor. I have looked out the window and all I can see is dust, heat, people, rubbish, and cars and I want to be back in Hungary.

Grant – Not good by the sounds.

“No matter what disaster occurred
She stood in desperate music wound,
Wound, wound, and she made in her triumph
Where the bales and the baskets lay
No common intelligible sound
But sang, ‘O sea-starved, hungry sea”

William Butler Yeats

She puts on a brave face and finishes her workout.

We limp home in the dust the heat and the noise.

I read for the rest of the day.

What else is there to do?

Friday looks like Thursday.

We head to the gym and there are no accidents.

Organise a paddle at Ras Al-Khaimah for tomorrow. Maybe the sea will give us some of its energy.

After the gym Shell decides our apartment needs some plants.

As we walk out, she points out a large hole in my shirt and we go and change it.

A reflective moment. I picked two of these shirts up in Kuala Lumpur when I grabbed a weight belt.

The second shirt went to my brother, Mitch. We trained together until he went back to Australia.

I miss him.

Somehow this shirt represents the bond we shared training in Malaysia.

It is an end of some sort, but I don’t quite know what.

“Sadly enough, the most painful goodbyes are the ones that are left unsaid and never explained.”

Jonathan Harnisch

We get to the car and it won’t start. There is a light flashing, something about security problems, and no real explanation for how to fix it.

We have roadside assistance. Someone will be with us in 30 minutes.

It is now two hours since we called.

I have finished All The Pretty Horses and started The Crossing.

All The Pretty Horses is a beautiful book. While it lacks the violent hostility of Blood Meridian, the story meanders and the setting feels at once like a dream and a nightmare. In typical McCarthy prose, what is left unsaid speaks volumes.

“Long before morning I knew that what I was seeking to discover was a thing I’d always known. That all courage was a form of constancy. That it is always himself that the coward abandoned first. After this all other betrayals come easily.”

Cormac McCarthy

The car just needed a new battery.

We read for the afternoon.

Saturday morning the alarm woke us early. Paddling at Ras Al-Khaimah.

It is getting warmer, 30C by the time we get the canoe in the water at 7.30 am.

There is a nice swell, the weather is warm and the sea is calming.

“My soul is full of longing
for the secret of the sea,
and the heart of the great ocean
sends a thrilling pulse through me.”

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

We spend two hours on the water, paddling out in the swell and riding the waves back in.

I am exhausted but happy.

Tina and Gary have a birthday present for us.

Home for some lunch.

I spend the afternoon reading.

The Crossing is every bit as good as All The Pretty Horses. There have been a few novels that have moved me emotionally, violence does not worry me. The scene when the wolf is taken from Billy Praham, staked in a pit, and set with pit dogs was a difficult read.

In the subsequent scene, where Billy walks into the pit and shoots the exhausted wolf in the head to stop the baiting constantly intrudes on my thoughts.

“The eye turned to the fire gave back no light and he closed it with his thumb and sat by her and put his hand upon her bloodied forehead and closed his own eyes that he could see her running in the mountains, running in the starlight where the grass was wet and the sun’s coming as yet had not undone the rich matrix of creatures passed in the night before her. Deer and hare and dove and groundvole all richly empaneled on the air for her delight, all nations of the possible world ordained by God of which she was one among and not separate from. Where she ran the cries of the coyotes clapped shut as if a door had closed upon them and all was fear and marvel. He took up her stiff head out of the leaves and held it or he reached to hold what cannot be held, what already ran among the mountains at once terrible and of great beauty, like flowers that feed on flesh. What blood and bone are made of but can themselves not make on any altar nor by any wound of war. What we may well believe has power to cut and shape and hollow out the dark form of the world surely if wind can, if rain can. But which cannot be held never be held and is no flower but is swift and a huntress and the wind itself is in terror of it and the world cannot lose it.”

Cormac McCarthy

It is Sunday and I have work tomorrow.

For no reason I can think of, my mindset is positive about the coming term.

I do the groceries, prepare some lessons, and prepare my meals for the week.

I spend the afternoon reading.

Early to bed.

The alarm goes off at 4.20 am.

Time to grind.

“I don’t like work–no man does–but I like what is in the work–the chance to find yourself. Your own reality–for yourself not for others–what no other man can ever know. They can only see the mere show, and never can tell what it really means.”

Joseph Conrad