You Don’t Scare Me

I had the slightest window to shower.

The master's annual Eid sermons and prayers were renown for their brief simplicity. He did not like to indulge in what nature was more efficient in doing. He also knew that the bulk of change in the conscience of man did not lay in public performances.

Indeed, he had a very long day ahead of him. A very long week, actually, filled with an influx of villagers who have worked abroad and were home for Eid. And with them, the master exchanged blessings. And for them the house was opened, allowing them to fill the house with noise and children and curiosity. Touching everything with their thoughts and words and fingers. Thus, for a whole week, at least, I was pent up in my room to avoid the nemesis of hermiticism.

Hence, that one small window of calm. When everyone's attention was averted to the Timekeeper and Eid ceremonies. It was the only chance for me to slip in and out of my room without getting ambushed with chitchat and stares. After a few years of miserably spending the week cooped up in my room in past Eid seasons, I had counted on that small window of calm to take my one final break from being eternally constipated and shower.

I stripped and stepped into the shower. Naked and soaped, I remembered that I was also facing a window of doom. If I had known about this small window, would not a lot of other people - more destitute and desperate for more important resources than showering - knew about it too?

It was the golden hour of loot. I've heard stories of thieves squeezing into the tightness of that window, pushing on desperation and murdering anybody found behind the unlucky windows they have cracked open.

I turned facing the shower door. Naked and wet, I thought, if I was going to share that window of calm with anyone I might as well try to get a full view.

That was when I saw it.

Looming taller and wider than the shower door, it stood behind me, blocking my view of everything else behind it. Its thick fur and stocky figure overfilled the shower stall. Its cookie-monster eyes rotated insanely, never meeting mine, offering subordination in its language. Naked and wet, I nearly slipped off my feet laughing.

Did the master send you? To protect the house?

And the master’s servant genderuwo's massive head stilled for a moment in humble and silent acquiescence.

Wrapping Up, Passing On

Prologue: Arabic Literature

I romanticize the idea that it is possible to teach the love of reading and learning. Or at least raise enough guilt to motivate the want to make better use of current technologies. Even if we’ve lost so many battles, the next one could be the one that counts. Always.

Chapter One: Why Audiobooks

• Because this is one of the oldest ways of learning. People used to sit around the fire after dinner passing each other stories.
• Oral tradition is more prevalent in places where literacy have been suppressed for late printing or censorship.
• Audiobooks are easy to go through. Listening takes less effort for the brain to process than reading.

TIP: Do something more boring than listening to stay awake through the reading. Do something monotonous or repetitive, like commuting, laundry, etc. Since the brain craves efficiency, you might manage to fill that efficiently sleeping part of your brain with stories.

Chapter Two: Why Sex

• Why else? Sex sells. It's fun. It’s a basic need. There will always be someone in the world interested in it. That is easy marketing for the audiobook format.
• Good sex education can go a long way in fixing a lot of things. Anybody who can have some should at least have them well-done.
• If they don't, here's one way of fixing that problem without risking embarrassment.

Chapter Three: Where Are the Arabic Sex Books in the Public Domain?

(Funny that I'm asking that question in English.)

If you know where the Arabic sex books are hiding in the public domain, please tell me. I have the time and interest to read and record them. Then fix the Arab world's problems one punta coition at a time.

Epilogue: Remember the Proof Listening Janitor?

Between information superfluity on the internet and the undercurrent bullshit of the social seas, the one thing that centers my scattered mini-universe is when I shut up and work.

When I have worked so hard that I can’t talk anymore, it is when I know that I have been happy.

I would have been happy if I felt like I’ve done this beat laptop, and every person who has given his time in researching, designing, manufacturing, selling, connecting it to the internet, to Librivox and the millions of hands that delivered Nafzawi’s writings to me, some justice.

Because all of their big kindnesses can only be repaid by passing it on in one project, one tweet, one kiss at a time.

The Perfumed Garden

The Perfumed Garden, by Sheikh Nafzawi. Translated by Richard Burton. Read by Alia Makki who is very excited about her inaugural solo audiobook recording. YAY!

[Notes: Project ran between August 4th until October 30th, 2012. That includes one Ramadhan, two Eids, one trip to Bali, thirty-four blog posts, at least five rolls of funny organic cigarettes, countless kretek cigarettes and cups of coffee, three kilograms of sugar dispersed evenly on the hips, complicated yoga asanas and unmentionable times of masturbation suppressed giggles.]

Please make time to tell me what you thought about my reading. Did I bore you? Did I enunciate clearly enough? I would like to do more solo recordings and I’m only going to be a newbie for a limited time only, so this is your chance to criticize my performance before I turn too snobby for feedback.

I’m just kidding. Feedback is the stuff that keeps my spirit of volunteerism live and running, man. Any feedback would be awesome.

I wish you an enjoyable read. And thank you for listening.

PS. Chapter Six is the one with the funky position names.

Guardians

I fall in love every time I write a new story. It is one of my terrible writing habits. And it is one heck of a potent source of power.

Love that is as profit-oriented as that can never be consumed. It has to be a zipless fuck. A fuckless love. Because fucking is too messy. Nowadays, the cost is always too high. The young ones might not understand this, but every fuck costs lots of risks and hail marys. And the older we are, the less risks we want to spend our time on hail-marying.

Yes, grown ups want to fuck too. Very badly. It shows in our gestures and grins and disgustingly intimate conversations. But we can't afford it. We can't afford everything else that comes along the choice to fuck.

Being older meant that we come a baggageful of plans. We did not plan on having these plans; they just sprouted and imposed themselves on us. Every day. For instance, he believes that if he was good enough, God will unite him with his wife, rest her soul, in the afterlife. I believed that if I kept my legs closed, I could write about the experience in a public blog and not suffer through the misery of not posting for another day. That was the plan.

Unfortunately, our plans came with a set of habits. A set of habits that we stuck with. We sure did stick with them. We cursed through every moment that brought such ridiculously fuckless plans and habits. But we did.

***

Like everything else that turns out with plans, this too surprised us. Mostly because we didn't plan on making a habit of being friends for such a long time. Relationships just happen on their own too. You don't get an internet identity because you wanted to end up in a foreign place twelve years later, at the airport asking the only friend left for you in the world (whom you have met as that foresaid internet identity) if he would like to hang out with you for a day.

You do not spend years living in an exotic country because you want to develop an insatiable taste for tomatoes available only in his dusty kitchen, either.

And you definitely did not learn an intellectual language to lose this argument: "I'm a greasy man. Detergent removes grease! What's wrong with you, woman?"

No. Things just happened. That's the way the world works: Plans and habits form whether or not you want to fuck. And every time we do something in the world, planned or incidental, we can only hope that it is going to return to us kindly. We can only hope that we are braced with enough habits to bear through massive tests of character with residues of our identity in tact.

We spent a whole day alone together in the privacy of his home, in our shorts and t-shirts, and separate beds. Through our meals and giggles, we kept our eyes lowered. The subject laid itself on our eyelids so heavily that we only sighed and cut more tomatoes when silence wrung between us for too long.

And besides, we, the older ones, have developed habits so strict that they come to us in crude, undeniable forms. They came to me fully-armored, whispering angrily, from the moment I laid foot in that house until the airport gates closed behind me in the next morning: "Who are you? You don't belong here. Leaveleaveleaveleave..."

***

I feel like I’m breaking new rules every time I write. I promised I would not exploit my private life. I promised I would not divulge on sex. I promised a lot of things to guard my writing voice.

I've broken most of them by the end of this post. Soon I won't have anymore rules left to write with, and I'll need to make up new rules. Or a new habit. I don't know if I should care anymore. Things just happened. Even this post just happened to come on its own - Finally! - after a thousand rewrites.

I fell in love with him every time I rewrote this. I don’t mind that habit. I'm proud of him, and hope he will forgive me eventually for writing about us like this. About the rules we that we broke to test our friendship. And to test the plans that we have duly observed. And the habits that served and protected our identity.

Maybe some of these broken rules have some truth in my writings, and strum words that reverberate with someone’s tune.

Sanctum Breach

"Do you love me? I don't love you. Sorry."

For honest credibility's sake, they had to look in each other's eyes when they said it. They repeated it to each other for the longest time. Once a year, at least. They wagered that they were going to be the last people on earth to repeat that sentence, and they would still not love each other.

So for the longest time, they were also the last people on earth, because everyone else had died from that disease called love. Everybody else got married and suffered all kinds of heartache. Had children who made their hearts ache. And loved their friends and parents and suffered so many heart attacks.

As if the love for one's self could suffice. As if the more they loved the more was got. This was worse, people who loved, they loved all the more because they knew it was non-refundable. The value was in its finality. Once you have loved someone, they had every power to destroy you, at least all the parts that you have reserved for allowing them to live in your heart.

And there was the kind of heartache from every kind of love. Love of food, love of country, god, ideas...oh the foolishness of man! If only they could love themselves a little better. If only they weren't so narcissistic to think that their simpering seeds and obnoxious offspring, springing from every imaginable place in germinal hyperactivity, spreading all over Earth like warts, was enough.

If only they could realize how deeply loved they are, each and every one of them, instead of posing like heroic saviors for every cause on Earth. That even Earth does not care for them. And the Universe is none the wiser with or without their love.

Which is why our hero and heroine never loved. And they have lived so long because they never loved. And soon after there was nobody left alive on Earth, they kept pushing it and to see where it might lead them. And to see who was going to mouth at the throes of death that same longing of recognition. Because love remembers. And even though they have loved nobody, a lot of people have loved them. And those who loved them have also been loved and remembered by a lot more others. And that was why, at the very end, when they were the last people who lived on Earth, the memories of everyone who have died loving someone or something was passed onto them, because the living's job was to remember.

(Even if there were people around them, they didn't see the others. They couldn't. The selfish are blessed with chronic unawareness.)

And so, the two most selfish people on Earth met every now and then just to reaffirm to each other of their lack of love for one another. And one day they met with the knowledge that they were dying. Their grey eyes aged and cold from watching all the people who have died for love. Indeed, they were the last people on Earth because they never loved.

They were the richest, because they never wanted, hence they never shopped superfluously. Also because they had the whole world divided between them and nobody to show it off to. Who'd want any more? What more could they have asked? They were the very healthy and fit because they had all the attention on their own biceps and abs. Smart and serious and sunny. There was nobody else beside them.

And they have kept it on for mere spite.

Then came that day, when they were tired, and it was the last winter of their lives. (They knew it. Selfish people always knew that they're at the edge of the world and everything is in superlatives every year.)

The fire was low and smoke was high. They held each other for warmth. By a mere look at first. Then broken sentences. "Do you remember when...? Not even if he...Do you think...?" A brush of skin. Then all three together: Look and skin and sentence. And then the fire got high and smoke low and a clarity passed between them. Something old and remembered and have filled the lives of so many and ended the lives of everyone. Something that was as sudden as it was undeniably real. Touchable. Theory. Fact. True. All. True.

And they didn't need to say it. Everything had already been said. And all that will be said has been said many times over. And saying it a hundred million times again shall not change a streak of paint or a micro digit of the millionth nth.

Inevitable as death.

“I love you.”

“I do I do  I do  I do  I do...”

Once they said it, they couldn't stop themselves anymore. A look became a stare. A touch became an embrace. And so on and so forth. And love grew, grew, grew within them. Choking their organs and blood flow, making them stupid and sick and slothful. They quickly grew wrinkled and excitable and unreasonable.

Then everything lit up around them. And everybody came back to life and cheered for them in a ghostly wedding and attended their graduate and graded and guarded parties and funerals. Everybody was there. Since they started loving each other they had to love everybody else too.

Once they said it, they couldn't stop themselves anymore. They loved everybody with obedience. They loved everybody with obligation. The more they loved, the less they remembered. Soon they forgot who they were. Soon everyone became somebody else's copy.

Once they said it, they couldn't stop themselves anymore. Until Somebody New came into the family. Then they either became like that Somebody New, or the other way around. Eventually everybody who loved somebody had to love everybody and everything that everybody did.

Once they said it, they couldn't stop themselves anymore. One love demanded his entire bands and tribes involved in that one love too.  They loved everybody because they had to. Because from this body he took money every month. From that body they were born. On the shoulder of one of those bodies their bodies were going to be raised. And so on and so forth until they had to love everyone and everyone loved everybody and that was that.

Hence, like when everyone else who have died before them, they too died out of love. Out of too much love. And everything more than just love. And everything that love brought along in a suitcase or a contract or a diseases or a set of children and series of hopes.

Love that lit their world. Love that ruined them. Love that made their ruin bearable. Love that made their unbearable ruin repeatable many times over. Till the end of time. Forever and always.

Ila’s Mother

Over breakfast, the Timekeeper started telling me a disgusting story about pigs and poop. I flipped, "I'm still eating, man!"

He laughed. "You ought to have a stronger stomach than that. I don't get sick from stories." A thoughtful pause. "I do get sick if someone got sick, though."

Then he remembered the night Ila's mother passed away. Ila’s Mother was the Timekeeper's step mother, the one who raised him after his own departed when he was younger. He was with her that night. She awoke with a fever and was vomiting blood. Her body couldn't take it and she died.

"How could someone die from vomiting blood, man?"

"She didn't just die from something she ate. She died from an illness in her lungs. Only, she never knew about it until she started vomiting blood, which was a few nights before she passed away."

And that resettled the air between us back to its snug storytelling mood. A life loved and productive to its last moments, oblivious to worry of illness, almost always promises a happy ending story. Death comes in many forms. This was one of the better ones.

When she awoke that night, she asked for milk. Since it was the Timekeeper who was on watch, he was the one prepared it for her. And she sipped it all with a straw.

Then the fever cooled, and it bloomed in beads of perspiration on her brow. The Timekeeper began to wipe her face, but she said, "Leave it, child."

Then she fell into deep sleep. And then some.

"It's one of the signs of a good death." And he said it in a heartbreaking sweetness that children reserve for the memory of lost embraces.

"Did you cry?"

He grinned. I shook my head laughing. How could I forget? One who sees both worlds is never lonely even in grief.

The hospital wanted to keep its reputation. Hence, when Ila's Mother's family requested to carry her body home that very night, the release process was fast. Fast is intimate.

They didn’t even bother casketing her. The men who loved her carried her body closely in their arms. They traveled through the night. They held her on their crisscrossing laps, inside a hired pick-up tub. The Timekeeper held her waist.

And it might have been the cold, or maybe as a private joke between them. That her post-mortem bladder relaxed, releasing its liquid memories into his living embrace.

For the Love of Librivox

The process from recording to publishing in Librivox's catalogue is kinda long. 

An hour of recording, took me nearly 5 hours of editing. I don't know if this is normal or if I'm just that much of a noob. So between re-read, editing and meticulous perfectionism that is almost paralyzing, I get to procrastinate. And when I procrastinate, I wonder, “Why would anyone bother?”

Actually, why would 5000 any ones bother? Since, you know,

Over 5000 readers have completed at least one section, 272 readers have each completed over 100 sections, and 17 readers have each completed more than 1000 sections. [Source]

(No wonder English is becoming the common language of the literate.)

Behind every one of those thousands of books and recordings is a Proof Listener. Someone who listens to the first recording, notes the mistakes and survives the burps and farts accidentally unedited out from the original recordings.

A Proof Listener is someone with a saintly strain in their genes, if you ask me.

For, if reading for Librivox provides the instant gratification of being able to speak forever uninterrupted, then what do Proof Listeners get? And if, in the long run, the reader's voice gets immortalized in the public domain, unless he is a Dedicated Proof Listener (which is, by the way, very flattering to have), the rest of the Proof Listeners don't get that much credit.

Hence, it is my suspicion that if audiobook readers carry the threat of spreading about their deranged obsession with their own voices, Proof Listeners are God’s way of guarding the general public from that sort of insanity. Listeners who enjoy listening to the voices of narcissistic people talking to themselves endlessly. Listeners who, in one way or another, share a passionate ardor for literature in spite of their social and educational backgrounds.

Like this Proof Listener