some guy in lebanon

Two weeks in the United States – and already Lebanon feels like a ghostly place, a world that seems to have been swept away like a dream, groggily whipped clean and evidenced only be sleepy eyes and the strong need to brush ones teeth.

And I am left feeling like an alien, strangely unkempt and unused to 24-hour electricity, highspeed internet, and unknowing stares as I try to approximate Lebanon to those who ask “Where have you been?” – I find that my Middle Eastern home is a place of course that that is as alien to those here, as I was to it last November.

“Yikes,” is a usual exclamation, followed by the type of face one makes when the milk has gone sour. “What’s it like?” Of course there is no reasonable explanation – “It’s fantastic,” illicits the same ‘sour milk’ response as before.

Two weeks in America feels more abroad than two months abroad – I find that I am clinging not to myself, but to the self I was before I left. Or worse, to the self I was years ago – as if a thirteen hours on a plane is enough to bring about a pubescent attitude about everything, and a sort of general anesthesia, or worse, a full pathology, marked first, by devolution and second, by amnesia.

Even my writing is clearly suffering – who writes ‘anesthesia’ and ‘amnesia’ in the same sentence?!

What to say… what to say? On brighter notes, I seem to have shaken off both my fear of flying and of deep water – Yesterday I crewed with Merit in Wednesday sailing races in high winds, which of course led to crushing victory despite nearly swamping off of Hermit Island.

And yet I am ashamed to say I am jumping at shadows. I am not myself. Gone is the strength of mind and purpose I possessed just two weeks ago – I find that I am paranoid about business dealings and personal relationships. I left for Beirut seeking adventure and success – having found both, upon re-arrival, I simultaneously have lost both the love of my life and the civilian sense of American reality that bound me to the coast of Maine.

Rolling distant thunder claps two days ago reminded me of wedding firecrackers and celebratory gunshots drifting over Beirut’s hills – but instead of smiling, perhaps because I wasn’t taking my obligatory stroll to the Mediterranean to watch the sunset at Cafe Rawda, I again frowned: Who and what have I become?

I don’t know for sure. More to come.

The Dao that can be experienced is not true;
The world that can be constructed is not true.
The Dao manifests all that happens and may happen;
The world represents all that exists and may exist.
-Dao De Jing