it’s late sunday evening, or early monday morning. i can’t sleep because my shoulder is bothering me. each breath stretches my skin in excruciating directions. and i have been warned that over the next two or three weeks that it will, along with my growing fatigue, continue to get worse. and i say again, ouch.
what a two or three weeks this will be. i am surrounded by chaos. our house is in utter disarray after a weekend of bedbug extermination. our belongings are heaped in countless trash bags, and each needed item means an intensive search. my pajamas… would i have put them with pants? or with underlayers? or maybe they were gathered up in the furious dash to ready the house for the exterminator’s arrival. perhaps they will remain hidden until we are able to unpack, if and when all signs of the bugs have disappeared, in two or three weeks.
it’s been so long since i’ve lived out of bags. it is at once liberating and endlessly frustrating, as are most of the times i have lived out of bags. the single, over-stuffed backpack that sustained me through my african travels was my lifeblood. it carried all my worldly possessions: my recording equipment, a few changes of clothes, the occasional precious souvenir. i would lock the zippers closed with combination locks and then lock the bag to some immoveable object – the rod at the back of the luggage compartment of an ancient trans-tanzanian bus, the roof rack of a death-trap minivan, the plumbing in my hotel room. sometimes bags nearby would be even more fiercely protected, wrapped in a metal mesh with its own set of locks, secured with motorcycle-style cobra chains. of course, all my precautions notwithstanding, i was still the victim of a robbery, losing my recording equipment and my irreplaceable journal full of notes and translations and dreams. possessions are indeed fleeting.
so if i don’t return your call this week, or make it to your show, or properly respond to your facebook invite, it is probably because i am lost in a bag somewhere, looking for my pajamas and gingerly applying radiagel to the primal burn on my shoulder.
