Drinking in a bar looking out the window.

Soaked in the rain, too early to go home.

I've never drunk alone in a bar, but this today I needed it. A day like no other when everything changes.

5pm, looking out the window, people rushing home from work. Endless buses pull up and pull away.

In the bar a man is talking too loudly to his partner, trying to be overheard.

Music is playing in the background, The Doors Break On Through and The Stones. I pretend I'm sitting in a bar in the US somewhere.

Lone men check their phones or suck on vaporized nicotine.

Looking out the window. A woman I used to know walks by, on this day of all days. Once she said how funny it is that we always bump into each other, and she doesn't bump into anyone else as much as me. I offered up some rational reasoning excuse on that day. But I had thought that too, and often thought about why we kept seeing each other.

At the bus stop opposite, a girl is waiting for the bus, an old lady approaches with two dogs, I can see from the conversation that the old lady wants the girl to hold the dogs' leads' why she goes into the supermarket behind the bus stop. She also has a laundry basket, the wicker circular kind, white in colour, that she must have just bought, she leaves that with the girl at the bus stop as well.

I finish my beer and leave.

The girl at the bus stop is texting, probably telling a friend that an old lady has asked her to look after two dogs and a laundry basket.

I walk home. Clothes still damp from the rain. I think about the woman I used to know, and synchronicity and fate.. And I think about how your life can change in a moment, when you weren't expecting it.

It was a good beer.

Essaouira

Faded greens and flaking paint. It's autumn, and the high season is over.

A faded colonial out-post, past it's glory, clinging onto the coast. They speak French. Refreshing citron pressé in the beach front cafes.

Endless beach, with the waves coming in all the way from the Americas. Men try and sell you special cigarettes on the deserted beach. Someone says Jimi Hendrix once stayed here. It seems Jimi Hendrix stayed quite a few places in his short time. I was to hear the same story years later in Nepal.

In the boat yards, they build boats the traditional way, out of wood. A man spontaneously shows us around, telling us the history and how they build the craft.

The Atlas mountains seem a long way away now.

Later in a bar. There is a Japanese cartoon playing on the TV with Arabic subtitles. It's one of those old small portable box shape televisions on a wall bracket above the bar. In the background I can hear a familiar song, Neil Young Out on the Weekend is playing.

But that was 25 years ago. I was a kid then. I guess Essaouiria has changed too.

Cyber Subtopia (ain't that bad)

This is anytown, anywhere

everywhere is everywhere

generation after generation

traded its spaces

traded their bodies

junk upon junk

you bought the subtopia

and the subtopia bought you

first they took your high street, then they took your virtual space, and then they took your mind

we wanted it and they gave it to us

this is dead ground now

we bought the boxes at exorbitant prices

lived in them, bought them with a smile on our face

then the corporations took the virtual space

more boxes

endless twitter feeds, cyber subtopia

new media nothing more than comments on old media

the new moguls just like the old guard

mainstream media still dominates the hashtag

TV channels feed the news feed

stroke the keys with a key stroke

caress the technology with a touch of the touch screen

and no one is listening, there's too much noise

the star in a novel no one is watching

screaming in space

you traded it all

for mediocre media

for distorted audio streaming

and a billion sub par instant images

variable ratio reinforcement

push the opium button

distraction eases the pain

blandness knows no bounds

the physical space is gone

except out on the edges and in the cracks

its possible to live another life

but you can take a corner of virtual world

and you can take your mind back whenever you want.



On the other side of the world

someone is smashing rocks to extract the precious metal ore

and someone else is putting that metal in smart plastic boxes

for survival wages

factories the same as they always were

a new subtopia is being born

****

this subtopia ain't so bad

go for a walk in the countryside sometime

if you can live with it

this time is as good as any other