Long Weekends – now please now

“Do you think that I count the days? There is only one day left, always starting over: it is given to us at dawn and taken away from us at dusk.”

Jean-Paul Sartre

Thursday

It is UAE National Day. At the last minute, the Government declared it could no longer be called National Day. It is now Eid el Etihad.

All the posters must come down, new posters made.

The UAE takes small things very seriously and looks the other way with more serious matters such as slavery.

The UAE has a population of around 12.5 million yet only 1.5 million are Emirate. The remaining 11 million are expats. Almost all of these expats are Nepalese, Indian, Pakistani and Africans earning almost nothing.

Less than ten percent of the population rich in oil supported by millions of slaves.

Eid el Etihad. What a day to celebrate.

“I therefore hate the corrupt, slaveholding, women-whipping, cradle-plundering, partial and hypocritical Christianity of the land… I look upon it as the climax of all misnomers, the boldest of all frauds, and the grossest of all libels.”

Frederick Douglass

Friday

Gym and Shell has a coffee with a colleague.

I finished The Gilded Age.

It is the best work I have read of Twain, and not great. I am not sure what I am missing.

A parody of an age of excess, its wit is clear, yet I see no brilliance.

“No country can be well governed unless its citizens as a body keep religiously before their minds that they are the guardians of the law, and that the law officers are only the machinery for its execution, nothing more.”

Mark Twain

The good news is that now I have backtracked to read Melville and Twain I could now push forward with my original plan.

Next on the reading list, is F. Scott Fitzgerald, This Side of Paradise.

I am only a dozen pages in and I love this book.

“It was always the becoming he dreamed of, never the being.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald

I read and we decide to watch a movie.

We stumble across The Banshees of Inisherin. Written and directed by Martin McDonagh who seems to be a genius. He wrote and directed the incredible Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri.

The Banshees of Inisherin reunite the In Bruges cast, Colin Farrell and Brendan Gleeson.

Making the McDonagh connection in all three movies we decide to start from the beginning, as you should.

Stunning film.

Saturday

“Do you not see how necessary a world of pains and troubles is to school an intelligence and make it a soul?”

John Keats

Sleep in and hit the gym.

As the years have gone by I have had to modify my training. Age matters.

I hurt my back, or hip, or back and hip in the gym.

I was doing nothing special. Not lifting heavy or doing something risky.

Nothing planned today.

I will go close to finishing This Side of Paradise. I can’t put it down. After the grind of Melville and Twain, Fitzgerald is a very timely reminder of just how much enjoyment reading brings me.

“It’s just that I feel so sad these wonderful nights. I sort of feel they’re never coming again, and I’m not really getting all I could out of them.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald

We watch The Banshees of Inisherin.

Bleak and sad with dark humour similar to In Bruges. Another great movie.

My hip and back are causing me grief.

I can’t seem to get comfortable.

Perhaps an Old Fashioned might help?

One becomes many. Dinner becomes liquid. My back is feeling better already.

“First you take a drink, then the drink takes a drink, then the drink takes you.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald

I am thinking of Korea.

It snowed this week.

I dream of snow.

and yet there is an odd beauty to what I have now.

I can’t say I will miss it, but there is something about this place that draws me in. A place you love to hate, but love none the less.

Sunday

“That is part of the beauty of all literature. You discover that your longings are universal longings, that you’re not lonely and isolated from anyone. You belong.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald

No gym today.

Even if I wanted to train my back is still causing me grief.

It has shifted from my hip to my lower back. Less pain, but more localised.

It is not the first time I have injured this region. It is definitely vulnerable. The injuries are becoming more frequent and less predictable.

We sleep in. Lay in bed and I talk to Shell about the book. She raises an eyebrow and teases me that I am reading romance.

As far as she can tell, Fitzgerald is no different from Mills & Boon.

I finish This Side of Paradise and jump straight into The Beautiful and the Damned. There is no chance I am telling shell the title of this book.

I read This Side of Paradise in two days. It has been a long time since I could not put a book down.

It is a beautiful book. Written when Fitzgerald was just 23 years old, it is every bit as good as The Great Gatsby.

“And he could not tell why the struggle was worthwhile, why he had determined to use the utmost himself and his heritage from the personalities he had passed…

He stretched out his arms to the crystalline, radiant sky.

I know myself,” he cried, “But that is all.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald

I take some Ibuprofen and nothing seems to help.

Wine might be the key.

We open a bottle of Chianti.

Sundays are lovely when there is no work Monday.

“The best work that anybody ever writes is the work that is on the verge of embarrassing him, always.”

Arthur Miller

We watch a movie – The Black Phone.

I have always been a fan of Ethan Hawke. If The Breakfast Club defined 1980s school culture for me, the 1990s were crystalised in Reality Bites. A very average movie with an exceptional Ethan Hawke.

Dead Poets Society, Gattaca, Training Day. Hawke has the Midas Touch.

No work tomorrow.

Monday

“With no surroundings there can be no path, and with no path one cannot become free.”

Gary Snyder

I went to sleep with high expectations that my back would be marginally improved and a gym session likely.

I wake up and my back seems worse. I refuse to do nothing.

Cardio is my only option. The Elliptical puts pressure on my back. The treadmill is out of the question.

I end up doing an hour on the recumbent cycle. Zone 2. I used to hate these bikes, now it is all I can use.

I hope tomorrow brings some kind of relief and my back begins to improve.

We head to the House of Wisdom. To get out of the apartment as much as for coffee.

The weather is mild, by Dubai standards, but my back is so bad I cannot walk anywhere.

Frustration.

“Every man’s life ends the same way. It is only the details of how he lived and how he died that distinguish one man from another.”

Ernest Hemingway

We watch a very bad movie, Fly Me to the Moon. Rachelle chose it even if she denies that she did.

Just terrible.

There is wine to be finished and Rachelle is in the mood for a port.

There is a lot to love about long weekends.

Tuesday

“I suppose it is out of laziness that the world is the same day after day. Today it seemed to want to change. And then anything, anything could happen.”

Jean-Paul Sartre

Gym.

My back is feeling better. It is still tight and there is a vulnerability, I can sense if I do something too fast or move in a particular way, it will ‘catch’. That is what it feels like, it is just waiting for an excuse to spasm.

Shell sets herself up on the lounge and directs me about with chores and general business. She moves so little that her watch records her as asleep.

It is time to prepare for work tomorrow. Meals and classes.

Only two days.

How will I survive.

I am growing tired of Harari. I feel like there is a repetitiveness to his books. Perhaps because I am reding them back to back and they were released almost a decade apart. Nexus is definitely the most interesting of the three.

But I am not excited about moving back into Aristotle. It is like reading for study. It is a chore rather than a pleasure.

After Aristotle comes the Epicureans, I look forward to better understanding this philosophy. Epicureans were the counter point to Stoicism. I have gone deep into the Stoics but have completely turned off them since the entire belief system was hijacked by bearded hipsters trying to sell things.

“We must also reflect that of desires some are natural, others are groundless; and that of the natural some are necessary as well as natural, and some natural only.”

Epicurus

We start the series Say Nothing. The first episode is excellent.