Funky Rais

On-Going Serial in Bogus Rendition by Owen Curtsinger

From BR#3:

It was late afternoon, evening, I guess, and the sun was starting to get more and more red, the buildings turning red in turn as the city moved. I started walking, past fruit sellers and herds of goat, over ancient cobblestone and under muslim slogans on banners overhead, quickly into an alley before a bus overflowing with people and reflecting orange stripes of the setting sun in its windshield came barreling down towards me. The alley was mostly dirt and mud bricks and windows and clotheslines up above, save for a doorway below a sign that said something about the place being a cafe. I took a seat at a table across from three old guys sitting on a bench, grey beards down to each ones belly. They just sat there and kinda watched me. Didn't add to the feng shui of the place, the old guys looking at me, the dirt floor, the peeling wallpaper. Then again I shouldn't have expected much from a café I found in an empty alley in a gritty part of Cairo. A fat lady came out of the back and I asked for Sa'idi, the strong dark tea most Egyptian cafes probably serve. I noticed as she went back that one of the old guys followed the lady with his eyes, another still looked at me, and the third stared blankly out the doorway. Kinda funny, kinda weird. I don't know why I notice stupid shit like that. My tea came and I sipped it while vacantly staring around the little place, occasionally catching eyes with one of the old men staring at me. Not off to a good start in trying to discover the underground Cairo, the highway life of, the largest city in Africa. I was about to pay for the Sa'idi and leave when the old guys on the bench across from me muttered to each other and one yelled to the lady in the back, another stared blankly out the doorway, and the other looked at me with arms crossed and said to me in weird english, "You are no law, are you, boy?" I shook my head, but the lady was already coming back carrying a big hookah. I watched as the three old men in unison took out small tins from the folds of their dirty robes as she set the hookah down in front of them and they started to put little black balls into the gold laced cup at the top. They each took a hose protruding from the bulging round wooden chamber at the bottom and began to suck as one lit a match and the little black balls glowed orange. They breathed out in unison and smoke filled the cafe.
"You want Egyptian hashish, boy?" one said as he offered a fourth tube. I took it in my hand and we all smoked, the three old guys with beards down to their bellies and I. The cafe filled with smoke and I started to lose sense of time as three sets of eyes and tree beards smiled at me through the heavy grey as the hashish started to hit me.
"Hey," I said to one of the guys staring at me as I dropped my tube and leaned forward, "Know where I can get something a little stronger?" He grinned a grin that showed his dirty teeth, amused at my young touristy sense of adventure, and murmured to his friends.
"You wan' real shit?" he said, "You wan' unnergroun shit? Go with Ivan." Another old guy clapped his hands and a little kid with greasy black hair and a torn ninja turtles shirt came out from the back, through the haze. The old man whispered in the ear of the kid and the kid grinned and looked up at me with a gleeful light in his eyes. "Follow close!" the kid shouted and trotted out the door of the cafe. I looked at the three old guys on the bench but only one was looking at me. Another was looking towards the back of the cafe and the last was looking outside. In the alley the kid was quickly stepping towards the slanted light of the red sun coming from the street. "Hey!" I yelled and ran towards the street. As I came out into the open a huge herd of camels rushed towards me, some arabic stuff painted on their sides and suddenly the crashing sounds of the street filled me and I jumped out of the way and crouched down, dizzy as hell and out of the corner of my eye I saw the kid in the ninja turtles shit yelling,
"Follow! Follow close!" Tired and confused, hash hitting me hard now, I got up and ran across the street to him and he ran ahead. I followed. I followed over concrete, cobblestone, and bricks. I followed over dirt, weeds, and sand. I’m not sure how long I followed but when I finally caught up we were standing on wooden planks, water lapping underneath. On the edge of the Nile, big boats silhouetted black against the setting sun on the opposite bank. The fire in the sky was waning now as night was slowly taking over. The sun’s last light was struggling over Cairo’s upper class building tops on the other side of the Nile and dancing reflections in the rippling water. But more in my interest was the boat in front of me. It looked like a Chinese junk, a bulging wooden hulk like the chamber of the hookah I had smoked out of with the three bearded guys in the café. Weird music was pouring out of it, and little yellow circles of light from portholes. No mast, no sail, no nothing, just the floating wooden blob of the hull. Out of it
protruded a shanty wooden compartment made from scraps of plywood that stretched from the ship to the dock, like those tunnel-ramps that you board airplanes on. Inside I could see Christmas tree lights streaming up and in. It was strange and I got anxious looking up at it but it beckoned to me, and I knew if I wanted a real adventure, the kind no other simple tourist would dream about, I would go in. I looked down at the ninja turtle kid but he smiled at me and then seemed to dissipate into the warm evening air, the palm trees. I tightened my backpack straps and crouched into the tightly enclosed rampway. The strings of Christmas tree lights led up to an iron door in the hull of the boat, and in front of that a barefoot guy sitting with a machinegun resting on his legs. I couldn’t see his face, he wore an imitation Viking helmet on his head and a red bandana over his face with a hole poked through it and a cigarette sticking out which he lit now as he stood up to meet me, cradling the gun. The music from inside shook the little lights.
“You American?” he said from under the red bandana with cigarette sticking out, “Six hun’red pounds for go in.”
“Are you shitting me? That’s like—“ and he raised the machinegun to meet me, cool and calm. “Alright, alright, here, it better be worth it, whatever the hell it is.” I pulled out some crumpled sweat-drenched bills and slapped them into his open palm. A puff of smoke blew out the hole in the bandana. He pocketed the money and opened the iron door.
At first I wasn’t sure what I saw. I knew what I saw, but I didn’t know what it was. Darkness. The place was dimly lit with weird neon lights intertwining like Technicolor jungle vines. Smoke everywhere. People everywhere. Sitting, standing, milling, conscious or unconscious, or something else altogether. Someone in a corner was puking. Someone else I saw was sitting on top of a pile of pillows, bleeding out of his eyes. Someone bumped into me and I turned to see a hooded cloaked man wearing a gas mask. I tried to look into the eyeholes but all that seemed to be in the mask was the dull gray color of smoke. The humble image of the three wise monkeys in the café left me. This was what I had been looking for. To the bow, a bar curved with the angle of the ship. An old jukebox was playing some Arabic chanting behind the bartender who looked more than troublesome. To the stern, a wide more open area with tables, lots of bottles and hookahs on their dirty wooden surfaces and various interesting looking people scattered around them. In the center of the room that was the hold of the ship, something like a mix between a giant hookah and a giant lava lamp. Lights floating up and down its gritty surface without a real source. At the bottom of the thing, amongst pillows, many tubes protruding from its base were held by a bunch of grinning characters. In one guys grin I saw no teeth. Some had dark thick goggles that you normally see on old people or metal welders. They sat cross-legged, hunched over and completely absorbed in the isolation of their own minds. I made my way towards the stern, towards the tables. Above the smoke hung an intricate and ancient looking lantern, which, beaming orange down through the haze made the inside of the stern look straight from the days of ships exploring uncharted territory in the early stages of European expansion. Some looked at me as I walked by. Others looked like they didn’t have the physical powers to. People with tattoos on their faces and ivory in their noses, ears, mouths followed me with their eyes as I made my way to a corner where a man sat who looked the closest to someone who could speak English.

From BR#4

He sat cross-legged at a low rectangular table that he had to himself, placidly sipping a cup of Sa’iti and contemplating the scene around him. Under a beat up wide brimmed canvas hat I saw dirty curly hair, a dark face and even darker sunglasses. He looked up as I approached him and spoke.
“Are you lost, tourist?” he said, and although he didn’t seem to be shouting his voice entered my brain above the music.
“I guess so,” I replied as I sat down across from him at his low table. Besides the teacups there on the table there was a large wooden hookah with two tubes, and as he finished taking a sip of Sa’iti he would put down his teacup and take a sip of smoke from the tube. His skin was dirty, worn, with cuts across his face and hands. Pressing against his neck was a small skull of a lizard or rat or something, bound with leather string. There were beads across his neck too, and around both his wrists.
“I looked just like you did once,” he said as he breathed out smoke with a sigh.
“Really?”
“Yeah. Let me take a stab at it. Young, full of money and pride, got the latest cool backpack…just can’t wait to smoke some of that Cairo hashish, huh?”
“I think I found more than just hash in this place,” I said, and as we talked I noticed he wasn’t looking straight at me, but more at a point beyond me, as if there was a window into another world behind me that only he could see.
He chuckled. “That you did, boy. Care for some of my smoke? It’s potent, I’ll warn you.”
“Thanks,” I said, and I took from the hookah the tube facing me and took a hit. He was right. It was certainly potent. I felt like I had just received a punch in the face from a ghost.
He took a hit and breathed it out slowly. “Do you want to hear a story, boy?” he said, staring off behind me with those sunglasses of his.
“Sure,” I replied, and he began to speak, and as the activity of the club moved around us I began to follow his words, follow not only with ears but also my mind.
"I was thinking about my youth, you know, about that invincible energy that flows through us in our early years that may never return to me now. My name was Billy when I was like you, and with that energy that world, everything on this revolving globe was ready for me to grasp. I could choose a door to open and do so with tremendous ease. And Cairo, holy shit, young man! Like all cities new to a young travelers mind away from home it was teeming, almost infested with life, but on a much grander scale than any other city. More mysterious… more intriguing. There was a sense of fulfillment, a sense of belonging to the rest of wild humanity outside your suburban US home that was brooding under its streets, you know? Never mind.
They say that if you see Cairo, you have seen the world. That seemed correct to me in my invincible youth, when I was you, when my name was Billy. Since then I have been elsewhere...Russia, Germany, Peru,
Cambodia...yet I don't think it's far from the truth to say that if you have seen the entire world you have not yet seen Cairo. And yeah, like you I sought the underground Cairo, away from the tourist golf courses facing the Nile's artificial sunset and more deep into the mystery of the place... I remember standing in a minaret that belonged to some old mosque, looking out over the city, thinking that I would explore each and every one of its streets. And it was all within my grasp, you know? It was an amazing feeling. I could walk through the streets and see how real it was, and how I was part of it, part of something that was real. But even then I was obsessed still with what wasn't real, what lay in the materials, know what I mean, boy? Of course not. I remember rummaging through my wallet once in an alley I dropped it on the ground. A monkey had been waiting for the chance, and snatched it up and ran off. I shouted, 'Stop, you fucker!' but what good is shouting at a monkey? So I ran after it. That damn monkey led me on a chase. I ran down alleys and mud roads after it, for then if I was without my wallet I was nothing, and when he scrambled up a gutter, wallet in mouth, I dashed into the nearest building and frantically climbed the stairs to the roof, only to see a flick of a tail over another building, as I got close. So it was over rooftops then. That damn monkey, I tell you. My lungs were killing me and I knew I would eventually plummet to my death, but I leaped from roof to roof after that beast...for what? Well, when I thought I had caught up after rounding a corner I was faced with two barrels of a shotgun pointing at me from a window. The man holding it grinned. In his other hand was my wallet, and on his shoulder the monkey was baring his teeth at me. With all my energy and devotion I would have lunged at him, but I froze, my eyes on that gun of his. I backed away, but at the same time made a mental note of the place. I would get my wallet back. I spent a few days living off of scraps and stealing canned goods, and although it was an adventure, at the time I felt it was a pitiful one, not the way I thought I should have been living. So I stole some rope and a fishing hook from a street vendor and fashioned myself a grappling hook. During the night I went back to the place that I had remembered. I found a nice looking window and took a try with my grappling hook. It took a few throws, but it eventually caught the sill and I climbed up to the window. It was a small place, and though it was dark I could tell that nobody was home, so I lit a candle and began to poke around. Well, I tell you boy, the man and his monkey had been running a wallet-snatching ring. When I found my wallet under a cot on the floor it was with dozens of others like mine, all stupid rich tourists like myself. And I think that’s when I realized something. It made me see the poorer population of Cairo in a different light, I think. I suddenly saw that all humans want to do is to survive, to exist, and although the reasons why aren't always there, they'll do what they can to make it happen. This man had a monkey who stole wallets. That was what he did to live, that was his existence, you see? Who was I to infringe upon it? But I took my wallet back anyways. Left the others. Jumped from the darkness to the calming moonlight of the back alleys of Cairo and vanished from the place. I left not one trace of my being there, save the absence of my stolen wallet from the mountain under his mattress. But this was the plight of the lower class in Cairo. They did such un-lively things to live, you know? To merely exist…”

From BR#5

He paused for a moment, drank some tea, and sighed a long deep sigh. For a minute I thought he was done.
I shifted myself to get up, a little disappointed. From such a weird guy I had expected something more.
"Well," I said, "that was an inter-"

"I'm not done yet, boy." He grinned and sipped some more tea. "No, not nearly done at all. Do you want
to hear the whole thing? It probably gets more interesting, really." I relaxed, took a cup of tea and raised it to him before taking a sip.
"Tell on, old man," I said. I don't know if it was the drugs or his voice, but his narrative did seem to
have a luring effect, and I was glad he had more to tell. He grinned, still looking past me into another
world, and continued...
"So suddenly I had realized the plight of the more poor Cairenes. And as time passed and I wandered the
streets more, I became more attached to this group than the rich sightseeing foreigners I had been part
of. I began to visit the small underground shishah cafes instead of the luxurious gentlemens' bars. I
began to live in the streets. I began to frequent places like this that we're sitting in now, that
nobody but the real youth of Cairo knew about. And they were raided, frequently, you know. The Cairene
police would come to break up the place, looking for hash or opium, or anything they could get their hands
on. There was always something. I always managed to escape, though, intoxicated as I was, and as time grew
I became more efficient at slipping out through the back windows with a few others. I made plenty of
friends like this. That's how friends were made for me, through survival. "Yes...friends through survival. I remember the first time I saw a man get shot in cold blood. It was there and it was real, but by that time for me it was not too real. I was drinking in a small underground hookah bar much like this one and all of a sudden
about four policemen broke into the place and started taking names, arresting some who were smoking opium
and shishah. Having no identification on me, (my wallet had again been stolen by a pickpocket, but at
this point I didn't have the will or resolution to pursue it...) and no legitimate reason for being in
that type of place, I knew I probably wouldn't have a friendly time with the Cairene police, who might have
actually tossed me around a little when they would find that the little drunk white tourist had no money
to bribe them with. So I naturally looked for the quickest way out of the bar and out of harms way.
"Ducking between a crowd, I found a small window by a closet, and two young Cairene men were already
crawling out of it. One was my age, about nineteen, and the other a little older. I followed them out the
window. They were not angry with me for doing this... we made eye contact and understood, you know?
Anyways, we found ourselves in an alley behind the bar and were about to get off without a hitch when from
around a street corner a policeman came and yelled for us to stop. The older one of the two I had snuck out
the window with must have not wanted to get caught, cause right there he pulled out a pistol and BAM, shot
the officer in the shoulder, right above the heart. "Then the three of us did not hesitate. We ran, together, until we reached a large crowd in a square and split off, blending with the commotion around us.
Never again did I see the man who shot the officer. But the younger one, the boy about my age I kept
running into throughout the next few weeks until finally it happened that I was sharing a hookah with
him at a table in a bar. He introduced himself as Jin. The fact that a native Cairene stranger would
introduce himself to me so openly was not strange, for by that time I looked like I belonged to the city if
it weren't for my complexion. It was almost home for me, and I hadn't contacted my real home back in the
states for quite some time. I doubt they missed me. Anyways, like all homes I grew tired of even this one,
and I had begun to long for the greater expanse outside Cairo. I expressed this to Jin that night
that we met. When he heard this he leaned in close to me..."
And my storyteller leaned towards me through the drifting smoke as the character in his narration did.
His sunglasses stared straight into my eyes and he continued.
"'There is a man who lives in the desert across the Nile, to the west,' Jin told me, 'he is a prophet who
lives alone in a very remote part of the dunes. I hear villagers from surrounding areas make a
pilgrimage to him in times of need. He gives them guidance. Some say he's a fortune teller. Maybe you
should go see this man. Maybe he will give you what you look for.'
"Well I had been drinking in that place as well. Shit. After a few drinks anything seems possible. I
asked for the prophets name. 'They call him...' Jin said in a low tone, '...Funky Ras.' I laughed. I
hadn't heard of any desert dweller with such an awkward name. However, as my new friend was talking I
had become more and more intrigued, and by the end of our meeting I decided that I would find this desert
hermit.

From BR#666
"But I had not known the desert yet. To think of my vain ambitiousness, my out and out stupidity! But I was devoted, and that’s what made me follow up on the vision of this Funky Rais. The prophets' name had been imprinted on my brain and I would not let go, no matter how far from the truth I really was.
"The next day I met Jin at a small gritty bus station in the morning. He told me with a strange sort of anxiousness that we were to go meet a friend of who had told him about Funky Rais. Of course we weren't wealthy enough to pay for some simple bus fare, so we naturally hopped onto the roof just as the thing was taking off. That's the first thing you learn in Cairo, boy. There's always a way to avoid paying for the public transportation. It's not that we didn't have the money. We simply didn't care to give it to some stranger. Of course, we weren't the only ones with this set of ethics. On top of the bus with us was a family of six, and a toothless old man who smiled and nodded at us. As the bus rattled towards the other city, buildings and people and streets just whirled around my globe of perception and seemed to vanish into the past...and I felt as if I was already embarking on the adventure that I was looking for.
"Anyways, when the bus rounded a wide turn and came to a sandy lot with a large stone wall encompassing it, we said our goodbyes to the silent toothless old man and the family and hopped off the bus. Jin approached the gate in the blocky ancient wall with caution and it was then that I realized it was a graveyard, or what many Cairenes call in Arabic a City of Dead. I forget how to say it now. But I started to wonder at the mental stableness of my friend, right?
"As we crept into the cemetery we were immediately surrounded by a really tight maze of stone vaults, tombs, and figureheads that were made one with the sand through years of abandonment. And the wind! Always there was the soft silent wind churning sand against the huge structures that were symbols of death, those decaying forgotten artifacts that held inside them their own decaying forgotten artifacts.
"We twisted and turned through the ancient streets of that city of dead for what seemed like hours until we came upon a strange sight. On one grave plot, a young boy, twelve or thirteen at the most, had made his home. A sleeping mat lay on a granite slab near a pot of boiling water, and a clothesline hung a series of soiled garments that strung from one vault to another. The boy crouched next to the boiling pot. For some reason he wore a green army helmet, which hid his eyes as he intently watched the water boiling, but as soon as Jin stepped within range the boy jumped to his feet and was holding a pistol to Jin's head with eyes wilder than a beast. They screamed at each other in some language that wasn't even Arabic, Jin for his life and the boy for some unknown cause, which could have been his life for the way he shouted. I later learned that Jin had bargained from the boy a large amount of opium, and had yet to pay him for it. Anyways, it seemed as if this goddamn thirteen year old kid was about to blow Jin's brains out, but as soon as I heard the name 'Funky Rais' in their screaming the boy calmed down and let his pistol point to the ground.
"'Funky Rais?' the boy said, eyes still wide.
"'Funky Rais.' Jin repeated.
"The boy calmed down somewhat, but began to chatter quickly. 'He's speaking in one of the tribal languages of the desert,' Jin told me. He was still in shock from having a gun put to his head by a child. 'He wants to know what you want to know about Funky Rais. I can translate for you.'
"Well I can't describe to you the feeling I had when he said that, as if the floodgates had opened and all my frustrations about being stuck in the city, the kind I had felt before coming to Africa when I was in the states could all be relieved again by a symbol...a symbol of freedom from my restlessness. And there it was sitting in the desert waiting for me, and this kid was asking me what I wanted to know about it.
"I sat down on the steps of a nearby tomb, and through translation I asked the young drug dealer everything he knew. According to him, Funky Rais was a wizard who lived in the desert by himself and did not die. The boy had lived in a village in the sands, and to the villagers Funky Rais had always been there. There was not one person in his village that remembered a time when villagers did not make a pilgrimage to him to seek his wisdom on pastoral Saharan issues. He lived in a very remote part of the desert, inside the skull of a giant prehistoric beast, which had died long ago. To find their prophet, villagers would wander the dunes for days until they found the long rib bones jutting up from the sand, then follow them for miles up the spine until they reached the skull where Funky Rais made his home. It was this image of his strange and mystical abode, plus the fact that in an arid political land of warring tribes the hermit was attached to none, I got the notion that the people of the land quite nearly worshipped him.
"The little pusher kid had known all this apparently, because he had once lived as a very young child in one of the villages that believed in the hermit's mystical wisdom and quite often made pilgrimages to harvest his words. When the boy had come to the city on a grain-selling venture, he had been kidnapped, but, too tough for his captors managed to escape and took to living in the streets of Cairo. Got wrapped up in the drug world like everyone else, began squatting in different places to survive, and now lived among the dead of the city, his fellow outcasts and shunned."
At this point he stopped again. Now I was sure that the guy was fucking nuts. I was actually starting to doubt him, but true or not, it was a decent story, and he kept ordering drinks and smoke for me, so I had a little trouble leaving. He continued.
"Of course, the lure of the pusher kid's words had me, and now in my mind I had to find this prophet. Of course, I was stupid and young, just like you. How ignorant I was! I trusted myself so much, yet I did not even know of the desert. Do you know of the desert, son?"
"No," I said, leaning in close to him, "and I think you're full of shit, old man." I hadn't really meant to do it to piss him off, but I wanted to set him off his rocker a little bit. But he just laughed like a crazy old man.
"Ha!" he said, "full of shit! Listen, boy," and he almost frantically fidgeted with the beads around his neck until he found the strain with the little lizard skull strung on. He took this off and strung it around the neck of the hookah on our table, and the little skull seemed to sit and glare at me in the dim orange light of the ship. "Full of shit? Then leave. If you move with your heart like most of humanity at least tries to do, and in this if you passionately believe against my word, boy, then leave. It's simple. You could have told me this earlier, though. Now I feel that I've kind of failed in my narrative. But go on, leave already."
That fucking skull. It was glaring at me. I couldn't move. Didn't even budge, although I'm not sure I would have left even if the skull wasn't intimidating me. He smiled through his dark sunglasses, took a few sips of Sai'ti and said, "I don't see you leaving."
"No," I said as cool as I could, "I can stay and listen."
"Then you must forget. Forget everything you know about television, football, cars, money, and the stock market, because in the desert, my friend, there is none of this. The desert is stripped bare of those empty symbols which society creates for us. The desert is a religion of nothing. And don't think that I had an easy time converting to this bare sandy religion when I was you. Don't think that you'll have an easy time adjusting if you ever find yourself out there. Out there the sun is your enemy. Giver of life in any other climate, suddenly it takes it away. Out there you hate the sun. He is a thief of life and you are blind with hatred for him. You spit, curse, and scream at him, then befriend him and try to talk to him so that you may get close enough to kill him. These hands of mine...they've lunged at the sun to try and kill him with the blind desperation any other creature feels when the end is near. But I get ahead of myself."
He leaned back in his chair with the end of his tyrade, looked at his hands through those dark sunglasses, chuckled, took a long draw from the hookah. He blew out the smoke slowly as if in a long sigh and watched it rise and mingle with the dim orange bulb in the lantern above us. He continued.
"After hearing about Funky Rais from the kid I hired porters and we managed to steal a few supplies. Christ, I had to go through pig shit to get those porters. Literally, I mean. There's a lower class of Cairo called the Zibaldin who've been known to hire out workers to do the kind of labor I needed, no questions asked. They live by the hundreds in cardboard-box slums on the outskirts of the city, maybe you've seen them. Many of them farm pigs for the meat. Muslims, the dominant religion in Egypt, they don't eat pork, you know, but then most Zibaldins don't give a shit for the majority of Cairo or even the Muslim faith. They really are their own community. So to talk to these porters I had to trudge through piles of hog shit. But it's not like they didn't welcome me with smiling faces. I hired three of them, I think, and-"
"Wait." I interrupted.
"Yes?"
"What happened to your friend, that guy Jin...and the kid who dealt drugs? Did Jin come with you?"
He smiled. "No, I don't think he would have been up for it. God knows I wasn't. He walked out of the graveyard that day missing a finger, you know. The
Pusher kid probably strung it around his neck. It was quite an ordeal, watching them argue and babble in some other language about which finger Jin would lose for not paying his debt. Looking back on it now the whole thing was lunatic, but what was he going to do? That kid was most likely stronger than him anyways. I don't think I ever saw Jin again after that."
"That's not a happy ending." I blurted. He laughed.
"What were you expecting? A fiction? Come on now, some stupid asshole must have told you once that life is never a happy ending. Look around this club. Are these all happy endings?"
"Well, no, I guess not," I felt stupid for saying it, "I just hope I don't come out of this place missing a fucking finger, man."
"Then why did you come? Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that by coming here you're going to get a finger sliced or anything bad happen to you, but why make the journey if all you're going to do is return to the comforts of home that you started with? To tell your friends of all the hash you smoked? Of all the women you fucked whose names you couldn't even pronounce? Hopefully not. Proust...did they teach you Proust in High School?"
"No."
"Well...Marcel Proust said that 'the voyage of discovery is not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes.' If all you're doing it for is the after party, you will fucking terrorize yourself, boy."
I crossed my arms and thought for a while. "Huh," I said, "like 'the journey is the destination' thing." He smiled and nodded.
"Like 'the journey is the destination' thing...that's nice, you're learning something. Unfortunately that wasn't the mindset I had in me when I entered the desert, and that, my friend, is what ruined me. You know, everybody here in civilization is living for something, for a goal...contrast that with the nothingness of the desert, where the horizon presents no prospects but more arid lands of nothing...they're two very conflicting types of terrain...metaphysically. This is what plays with your head the most...the radical change. I was unprepared for it, even though I had with me my Zibaldin porters and camels and food and a few supplies. We crossed the river that we're on now, goddamn lifeblood of Mama Africa, right? We crossed her and rode in the back of a tobacco truck out past
Giza to the west...you know Giza, the three pyramids. It must have been a tourist attraction soon as the first slave laid the first stone."

Funky Rais took a break from BR#7. Hopefully to be continued in BR#8, spring/summer 2007...