Horseface of Arabia

Bore: To weary by being dull, uninteresting, or monotonous.

I have been mulling over the difference between comfort and relaxation, and boredom, the curse of the hyperactive personality. This is usually a good indicator that I am contemplating doing something stupid. Most alcoholics have a lot of experience living right on the knife edge of control. We like to push the limits, see what we can get away with. We think: "WTF. I'm going to give it a shot." Or we dispense with the thinking part and just give it a shot. Then later, sitting in the emergency room or the back of a police car or some doghouse or shithouse of one kind or another, we think: " WTF was I thinking?"

Now I'm sober, after a fashion. However, I still like to run out into heavy traffic from time to time, just to see what will happen. I'm not too good at sitting in a comfortable chair in front of the TV. I want to see what's out there. The trick is figuring out where "there" is, exactly. I'm a little better at it today but my tuner is still not hooked up right.

To me it's like going to my favorite restaurant and ordering my favorite meal (tripe stuffed with haggis, at a great Norwood place, in case you're interested). If I try something new, I miss the meal I love so much. But if I get the same meal over and over, it starts to bore me. I don't think this way when I'm retching up the raw oysterettes on a bed of caramelized kelp eggs, but I start out thinking this way.

A few years back I went to Morocco with Thai Stick and we took a long camel or dromedary or whatever TF we were on ride out into the Sahara. Sounded adventurous: Horseface of Arabia. After about 2o minutes of the 3 hour ride my ass was numb, my back was in full spasm, and the animal's funk was overpowering me. We ended up at a tented camp where the heat of the day quickly gave way to freezing weather. I'm in the desert trying to thaw out my frozen hands over a wood fire, eating something that I couldn't clearly see in the dark, thank god. The tent where we slept -- on the ground -- was actually heavy blankets strung between poles. It was not purchased at The North Face outfitter's store as far as I could tell.


By the time we went to bed -- there was nothing on satellite TV that night -- it was so cold that I climbed under the blankets fully dressed: shoes, coat, everything. And if you think that desert sand is soft you're sadly mistaken. I would doze for about an hour before my aching body awakened me, at which point I would contemplate whether or not I should risk losing some of the precious heat my skinny body had managed to generate and ignore the pain, or try to find a more comfortable position. It was definitely Lose -Lose.

The next morning we awakened before dawn and climbed a huge sand dune that we could vaguely sense looming above us the night before. We figured we could quickly scramble to the top but we had definitely lost all perspective of size and distance in the vast open spaces of the desert. So there we were, perched a hundred yards up on the side of this dune, watching the sun come up in the Sahara. There was nothing to catch the eye but rolling sand dunes stretching as far as the eye could see. There was no color other than desert brown. There was no sound except for the wind. The stars that absolutely lit up the sky the night before were winking out.

Wouldn't trade the memory for a million bucks.