Marrakech has three primary colors. The grey blue of the sky and the tiles, the dry green of the palms and plants, and the dusty red of buildings and of sand. Heat sweeps into the middle of the day and rolls back out again at night leaving hot stone buildings like glowing embers in the desert. In the medina, ritual battles nature. Shops close and children disappear into houses in the afternoon, and then reappear in the evening to go back to work and play when the sun hangs lower over the walls. Women, sometimes covered from their head to their fingertips to their toes, rush around in groups or with children, often tied to their backs, limbs bouncing in time with their mother’s strides. The men are sitting, working, meeting, waiting, watching, patrolling, everywhere, more present than anything else. You see them cleansing their hands and faces in the streets before prayer and rushing back to work afterward. They wear long white galabeyahs that look like old fashioned nightgowns, but more dignified, with pressed collars and shirt buttons down the front.
Coffee Heath Bar Crunch
I just finished an hour long run and was walking home through the West Village thinking about ice cream. I passed an old homeless man begging for change on Bleecker. Usually I’ll buy these guys pizza or a sub, but I don’t give them money because when I was a kid my mom told me they’d just buy alcohol and I wouldn’t be helping them. The street is overflowing with drunk twenty-somethings. This time I think: if he wants to get drunk he’s just like these people, no better, no worse. So I give him some quarters from my pocket. Then I turn into my local supermarket, now distracted by what I want to buy.
Kiwi’s for tomorrow breakfast, some hummus for the leftover pita bread, should I get that ice cream too? I wander towards the check out. I probably shouldn’t get the ice cream because I’d have to eat it all in one go since I’m leaving town tomorrow. From the line I can see the freezers. I really would enjoy coffee heath bar crunch, but then I have those Popsicles left. I should finish those first. The cashier starts to ring me up and to my surprise, the homeless man from outside gets in line behind me. He puts a pint of coffee heath bar ice cream on the counter. He’s got my quarters in his left hand and a couple wrinkled bills and a plastic spoon in his right. How strange that we desire the exact same thing at the exact same time. We’re not so different after all.
“What’s great about this country is that America started the tradition where the richest consumers buy essentially the same things as the poorest. You can be watching TV and see Coca Cola, and you know that the President drinks Coca Cola, Liz Taylor drinks Coca Cola, and just think, you can drink Coca Cola, too. A coke is a coke and no amount of money can get you a better coke than the one the bum on the corner is drinking. All the cokes are the same and all the cokes are good. Liz Taylor knows it, the President knows it, the bum knows it, and you know it.” (Ch. 6 : Work, p. 100, Andy Warhol, The Philosophy of Andy Warhol)
