1) September 6 2025
Diary Entry #1
The European and the African have an entirely different concept of time. In the European worldview, time exists outside man, exists objectively, and has measurable and linear characteristics. According to Newton, time is absolute: “Absolute, true, mathematical time of itself and from its own nature, it flows equably and without relation to anything external.” The European feels himself to be time’s slave, dependent on it, subject to it. To exist and function, he must observe its ironclad, inviolate laws, its inflexible principles and rules. He must heed deadlines, dates, days, and hours. He moves within the rigours of time and cannot exist outside them. They impose upon him their requirements and quotas. An unresolvable conflict exists between man and time, one that always ends with man’s defeat—time annihilates him.
Africans apprehend time differently. For them, it is a much looser concept, more open, elastic, subjective. It is man who influences time, its shape, course and rhythm (man acting, of course, with the consent of gods and ancestors). Time is even something that man can create outright, for time is made manifest through events, and whether an event takes place or not depends, after all, on man alone. If two armies do not engage in a battle, then that battle will not occur (in other words, time will not have revealed its presence, will not have come into being).
Time appears as a result of our actions, and vanishes when we neglect or ignore it. It is something that springs to life under our influence, but falls into a state of hibernation, even nonexistence, if we do not direct our energy toward it. It is a subservient, passive essence, and, most importantly, one dependent on man.
The absolute opposite of time as it is understood in the European worldview.
In practical terms, this means that if you go to a village where a meeting is scheduled for the afternoon but find no one at the appointed spot, asking, “When will the meeting take place?” makes no sense. You know the answer: “It will take place when people come.”
— The Shadow of the Sun (1998), Ryszard Kapuściński
I’m tired. It is 3:06am Moroccan time, 7:06pm Pacific time. I’m sitting on a balcony of an Airbnb in Casablanca. Looking over at the apartment across the street, a couple is arguing – or at least talking very loudly at 3am in the morning. Or perhaps they’re drunk. It is a Saturday night after all. Saturday? It feels like a… I don’t know. Like Thursday? Thursday was the last full day I had at home in Canada. Mostly spent packing, cleaning, organizing. Getting ready to leave to Morocco for a three month stint. I cleansed my wardrobe of more than seventy-five percent of its contents, tossing out worn down t-shirts and shrunken dress shirts and stained jeans. Traveling for an elongated amount of time requires rigorous packing. And rigorous packing is exhausting. Buying new luggages that’ll survive the journey, getting rid of old belongings and clothes that you’ve hung onto for far too long for no particular reason, purchasing a new set of outfits that are now ‘you’ and are ‘fashionable’ (since your old style was at least 5 years dated at this point). After packing is the weighing. Got to be under the luggage limit otherwise you’ll get dinged an extra charge at the airport, which is what happened anyway for one of the four luggages we brought.
I witness a man arriving at the couples apartment, she opens the door for him. The light in the bedroom is on, blaring down on the bed. He walks in and closes the bedroom blinds, apparently it is time to sleep now finally. Only a jet-lagged curious onlooker would be up at such an ungodly hour tapping away on his laptop on the opposing balcony. I thought the jet-lag wouldn’t be so bad since we managed to stay up until about 8:30pm before we finally passed out. We being Mon Amour and I. Ordered some sushi that got delivered to us on a Moroccan version of DoorDash or UberEats and ate it while watching the movie Heat – a DeNiro-Pacino classic I had never got around to seeing – then finally put our weary heads to rest.
Only a couple of days before we were selling my car to a used car dealership called Malibu, to a car salesman called Steve Carless. I kid you not. His quip at the end of the transaction: “Now you’re carless like me! … (pause) … It’s my last name.” I’m convinced he has made that joke more times than he has eaten sushi in his life. It is a great joke after all. Out of a movie. Also, making the decision to sell your car and then actually selling your car in a 16 hour turnaround was cinematic to say the least. I thought I was going to hold onto my car until I drove it into the ground, but alas: life has different plans for you than you have for life.
That is a consistent theme throughout this summer. A long, mostly hot summer of Big Decisions (in capitals of course) and existential quandaries. The love of my life lives in another country. And not just another country: a country that I have no familiarity with, no shared languages or religion or culture, no previous exposure to apart from my one vacation there after quitting my corporate job and finding myself on a farm in the middle of nowhere in Morocco only 6 days later. It was a great vacation. Morocco is a wonderful country to visit, very hospitable and inviting. But to live there… that is another thing entirely.
And now I find myself four months later in Morocco, having packed up my whole life and moved here. I kept my apartment back home that I had bought in January and moved into in March. So I only got to live in my new apartment for all of… (finger counting) 6 months. Wow. Just realized that.
It looks like a full moon, or at least getting close to one. The clouds are slowly moving past it. A Casablanca moon, something I never thought I’d witness. A man sneezes loudly a couple of apartments down the street. It reverberates the entire alleyway.
That is a peculiar aspect of Moroccan living I am beginning to come to terms with: that people stay up into the wee hours of the morning for no apparent reason. My theory is that it’s due to the intense heat throughout the summers, so people are forced to socialize and eat a lot later once the sun has gone down. Sure, North Americans stay up late. But it’s usually for a purpose, an event, a gathering or party. The sort of unstructured lounging around wouldn’t necessarily occur in the same way. My other theory is that socializing occurs by default and doesn’t necessarily need to be as structured and rigid as back in the West. The door is always open for friends and family in a way it isn’t back home.
I swallow some kombucha. It is cold and refreshing. My throat is sore though, it has been for about two weeks now. A consistent soreness, not getting better or worse which is unusual for me. Normally it would be like daggers getting jabbed into my tonsils for 2-3 days, then it gets better. But this is different I think, stress related and not sickness related. I’ve had no other usual cold symptoms: runny nose, phlegm etc. I did have a very dry cough though. I always have wet coughs, rarely dry ones. Hence why I think it’s stress. I could be sick though, not entirely sure. I’ve been running around like a madman for the better part of a month so my immune system isn’t exactly in tip top optimal functioning.
Moving is stressful. Moving to another country where you don’t even speak the language, have never lived there, are going because you are in love and fully trust your other half more than you trust yourself… is definitely stressful. The good kind of stress that you want though, not the “I can’t pay my rent” kind of stress. I’m in the fortunate position that I can up and leave my apartment without a job and move to another country because I simply can. Being unemployed is awesome actually, when you’re not broke. They don’t want you to know it but it is awesome precisely because you are free for the first time to really think, really step back from your current life conditions and view your little existence with the necessary magnifying glass that you’ve always wanted but never had the time or mental headspace to give to yourself. ‘They’ being some sort of vague notion of capitalists or industrialists or your family members who simply can’t fathom you not having a job. Because a job is fundamentally not about being employed and having a steady income. Even if it is those things. But it is in fact more about an identity. Something you are instead of something you merely do. Work is important, I’m not denying that fact. But working for some hellish corporation that could give two flying fucks about you and replaces you within two weeks after you leave means: you were not that important. Your uniqueness and witty individual contributions were not unique after all. And that is the difference. Working on something important for yourself is vastly different than slaving away for some billion dollar company that tries to convince you that you’re part of a family and to participate in their ‘culture’, only to give you a 2% raise after you’ve made them millions of dollars in the span of one financial quarter.
So yes I do feel fortunate. An adventure awaits but I’m also not a vagabond or will have to work construction jobs or bartend for a living while on my travels.
The street seems to be getting louder, more activity and mopeds buzzing around. It is 3:49am though. Surely people aren’t waking up this early on a Sunday to start the day?
How does one explain to close friends and family that a summer spent in emotional turmoil results in moving to Morocco to go live on a farm with ones soulmate? It is not easy. The turmoil wasn’t over the decision, that was easy and made for me. But was instead over the realization that I was in the process of changing, morphing, shedding my old skin. Like a lizard or snake that has to rub on a sharp rock in order to slither out of that last remaining portion of skin that is stuck to them. Change is good in my world, but isn’t in most people’s I think. Or at least that’s what I’ve gathered. Change is scary, is uncertain, is the Great Unknown. It is why people shy away from it and are naturally and inherently conservative – at least about their own lives. Stability is a necessity, I can agree on that. But change is an ontological constant, a reality of the universe that is so harsh and so pressing that it would be in your best interests to not ignore such a baseline phenomenon. Heraclitus was right of course: flux is what it’s all about. “You can’t step into the same river twice.” How about the same country? Or the same farm? Or the same job? The same personality?
Traveling has always been in my blood since I first stepped on a plane at 7 years old. The notion that you can hop into a tin can and be projectiled into another foreign land within the same day is still an enigma to me. It is a dual relationship: one of reverence and one of disgust. The technological marvel that is the modern aeronautics industry is unparalleled. You place your wholehearted trust that this piece of machinery will flawlessly fling you into your desired destination, and you even have WiFi onboard to message your loved ones pictures of the rising sun and clouds outside your oval shaped window. I revere such an experience because not only is it the safest form of travel statistically but requires virtually nil amount of cognitive overload. You show up to the airport with your piece of government approved cardboard confirming you’re a citizen of XYZ country and your boarding pass, which is almost always not in paper format now and exists on the digital device of your choosing, and you can explore vistas and cosmoses that you could only dream of before (or indulge in online). All the while sitting back and sipping on your beer or wine and enjoying a leisurely experience whilst vast amounts of computation, engineering, and collective competency get you to your destination.
And that is where the disgust comes in. Should man have experienced such forays into collapsing cultures down into mere flight destinations for tourists to book tickets to and voyeuristically devour to their consumerist hearts are content, only to return back to their cushy Western lives having not changed or experienced a single drop of authenticity from their travels? It used to be that traveling by horse or camel or whathaveyou meant that you had to traverse the landscape, interact with fellow travellers or stay in less than desirable places in order to get to where you wanted to go. Jet-lag seems to me the bodily manifestation of an utterly modern phenomenon: you are quite literally skipping timezones in order to arrive in a foreign place within the span of hours that it would have taken you days, if not weeks to journey to without the aid of air travel. There is something revealing about jet-lag: you have subjected yourself and your body to fatigue in the form of time-compression, but have not got the narrative based lived experience to come along with it. At least with car or train travel (which can be rather fast if you’re in the right country), you still get the necessary landscapes and temporal journeying that comes along with the territory of travel. But now you can plonk yourself on a plane, take a prozac and a shot of vodka, and find yourself in completely exotic land within the span of half a dozen hours, woozily waddling off the plane into either stark heat or frigid cold, without even the glimpse of any human interaction or connection.
However, there are sometimes stories to tell while air-traveling. Our flight was interesting, to put it lightly. Upon arriving in Casablanca airspace, we descend down towards the runway, going lower and lower, only to get caught up in thick fog. You couldn’t see anything out the window. The wheels of the plane come down. All was going according to plan. We’d be on the ground within less than a minute. But then suddenly: WOOOSH. The pilot takes a sharp upward pull and we start ascending again. This is odd. Never happened on a flight I’ve been on before, and I’ve been on many. As we rise back into the air at an intense angle, the pilot comes on the speakers saying that we couldn’t land due to visibility issues but that we will make a second attempt in 15 minutes or so. Just hold tight. Alright, thanks for the explanation. So for the next fifteen minutes or so we are doing loops of the airport, only to come back down again. Wheels come out. All is going normal. Still got intense fog out the window. Looks even thicker now somehow. Down, down, down we go. Surely he has talked to ground control and is confident about his second attempt at landing. Then: VOOOMMM. Holy shit. Again. He pulls up hard. The whole cabin is a bit nervous now, you can see it on all the passengers faces. I’m normally a very calm air traveler. Have only had a few times I was nervous or on edge while flying. This was one of them.
Pilot comes on the speaker again. Fog was too much, had to abort landing. Says that we have to land in Marrakesh instead in order to refuel. So we gun it to Marrakesh, only took twenty minutes or so. No fog at all. Landed safely. We fuel up. Flight attendant tells us that we’ll be on the runway for a while in order to know what decision is going to be made. Either we off board here and then get rerouted to Casablanca somehow, or we try a third attempt. We ended up trying a third attempt. Which all went swimmingly. Fog must have lifted. Phew.
A bit of excitement and uncertainty upon arriving back in Africa. Memorable to say the least.
I get distracted by my phone. Emails. Texts. Markets. All things I’m used to and partially want to get away from. To relieve myself of the incessantness of modernity, of convenience, of instantaneousness, of hyper-connectivity. The burden of immediate communication. It’s still dark out. Writing at this time in the morning is glorious. Won’t exactly make it a habit though. Maybe 6am is fine but 430am is a tad too early. The light of my laptop screen is bright, illuminating half the balcony. I feel as though I should have a typewriter, that would be the real authentic writerly experience. But really it wouldn’t be. It’d just be pretentious and irritating as fuck. The portable laptop is an invention I am thankful for. I do need to buy a printer and stapler though, both of which I left behind. I could have brought the stapler but hesitated when packing the items in my office. It was a rushed pack. At least the office belongings. Clothes, shoes, vitamins: I was highly organized.
Could I have said bye to more people in person: yes. I feel slightly bad about that. As if I left slinking out the country without a peep or sight. I’ll have to make some calls in the next week or so. Good calls mostly. Update calls. People want to know how I’m doing because they care. Got to remember that sometimes. Even if it is hard to explain your decision to essentially opt out entirely without much communication. It was an intense August to be honest. Solely focused on the future, on planning, on packing, on organizing, and on committing. There was never an ‘opt out’ of the plan though. Only a slight trepidation, which I think is entirely normal and to be expected.
I think having to leave a week or two earlier than expected also changed things. Mon Amour’s eye surgery in Barcelona put a spin into the calendar. More travel. But less stress. A bit of sight seeing perhaps. But mainly recovery from surgery and a tranquil stay at a fancy hotel. Some good food I assume. Oh and that guitar I want to pick up at some music store I contacted. Need to call them tomorrow. Had to leave my guitars at home, so figured I could grab one in Barcelona and bring it back with me to Morocco. Instead of lugging one half way across the world.
Need to make this Diary thing and actual… thing. I conceptualized it a week or two ago. That I should document my travels, experiences, human-all-too-human moments here. But in diary form. I’ve never written a consistent diary, perhaps because I’ve never thought that my life was worth documenting in written form. Even though it would very much have been worthy. That is the difference now: I have something to write about and with a passion to write that is growing with each month that passes.
That was my goal of the summer: to write. Quit my job and write. Which I did. I quit my job, flew to Morocco, spent a life changing two weeks here, flew back. Then I wrote. But writing isn’t for the faint of heart. It’s difficult. It is not idillic at all. All my usual habits of being hyper plugged in, trading markets, while attempting to stay focused, doubting myself, and trying to furnish my apartment for it to be ready to accept visitors was at times all consuming. I was productive though. Read seventeen books or so and a bunch of long form articles, made a chunk of dough, published four articles on my blog, got a 1.0 version of my website almost up and running, and wrote ~50 pages of a new novel. All in all: not a bad output. I did some things, but not enough things apparently because I’m judging myself for not finishing the novel and not fully launching the website. Which is quite preposterous when you step back and think about it.
Productivity isn’t always about the end result. It is more than likely about the process. Creating processes, refining yourself down, getting rid of distractions and noise, honing in on what is actually important. That is the great irony: productivity that only focuses on outcomes is missing the forest for the trees (an overused expression I know). What I mean is: the incessant need to be doing something is embedded into the Western consciousness. Maybe that is what Kapuściński is on about in The Shadow of the Sun, which I started reading on the plane. Absolutely fantastic by the way. That in Africa – “In reality, except as a geographical appellation, Africa does not exist” he clarifies – such notions of productivity would be rather foreign and maligned. The Book will get written when the words arrive on the page, is perhaps what I should be saying to myself. In true African fashion.
This diary things seems to be performative. As if I’m writing for an audience and not for myself. If that is the case then so be it. At least it is documenting something. For that is all I’m trying to do: document, describe, humanize, empathize. Day One is always the biggest step. Biggest step in a journey. Biggest step towards change. Because it’s the hardest and looms the largest in one’s mind. Once day one is over, then there is day two. And two is more than one. More experience, more grounding, more knowledge, more knowns. Less unknown unknowns, less hesitation, less doubt, less uncertainty.
It is 5am now. I need to take a piss. Getting heady too. Going to be a long day of driving. The Farm awaits. Hopefully the jet-lag isn’t too bad. I’m not too hopeful though about that. I am hopeful about everything else though, why shouldn’t I be?
G.
"Heraclitus was right of course: flux is what it’s all about. “You can’t step into the same river twice.” How about the same country? Or the same farm? Or the same job? The same personality?"
Love it. Loved my time in Casablanca, too. I wish I had written about it. Keep writing, George. Eagerly following along, and continuing my travels through you.