Dec. 5, 2013
Arrived day before yesterday in Jeddah. Plane touched down at around 3:45 local time. I didn't get through immigration until about 5:30 p.m. There was no driver from the university awaiting my arrival. A makeshift situation from which Saeed, the driver of a private limousine service, emerged, a small man dressed in white thobe and a smoker of cigarettes. I paid him 400 riyals for his service, including his helping me buy a phone and taking me to the hotel. L said it was an exorbitant price, the taxi ride to the hotel should have been 200. I write with the qalam (pen, pronounced 'golem') of the Trident Hotel. The following is the words I recorded at the San Diego airport and on the American Airlines flight to JFK in my brother's copy of Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse 5:
Dec. 2, '13 SD airport

placid looks of satisfaction
like under anesthesia with a smile
just after the announcement about
unattended baggage an airport cop did appear,
strolled by me, chest puffed out, and gave m--I was
called to the gate and asked if I would like to change
my seat to a window rather than the middle one I had--I refused, preferring an aisle seat. No dice.
He gave me a curt nod.
All is for the convenience of others, never the cipher the Other--why should I give up my seat for a couple that wasn't seated together in the first place? I can't even be
with my wife!

Starbucks has infiltrated the deep bowels of the terminal--one right over my left shoulder, and Gate 31 is a few yards away.

Why would a stranger approach me to carry an object?

What sort of object? A box cutter?

I was going to say something about the couple that
met by chance and exchanged pleasantries about
Thanksgiv["Have a good day, and good luck on your boots"]ing, then sat with an empty chair btwn. them, now looking quite calm as cows, but not before they chatted
while playing their finger or thumb on the face of their
phones, as if they were comfortably knitting.

I tipped the skycap at curbside 5 bucks for
checking me in. The better way to go (don't go, Al Rasheed!
don't go to the gate to check in. It's a ruse!) rather than an
officious ticket counter person.

I want to begin to transcribe my journal entries before I leave this place on vacation and hopefully it will be for good. I arrived December 3, 2013 from JFK and I only had a feeling of foreboding even dread of coming here, but I have made it through, and there is almost a week and a half before my departure June 25. An experience of sensory deprivation is the only way I can describe how this experience has been for me. It is very hard for a person who has never been in this part of the world to understand. The desert is a place that has to be transcended in order for it to be tolerated. You have to submit yourself to the heat, if anything. Mark Twain said that God is discovered in a place like this because there is absolutely nothing redeeming about the desert and you have to look up to escape the oppression. One of the friends I made here referred to it as an "open-air prison." In the end the smallest infraction committed against his way of doing things was an irritant that became a straw that broke the camel's back.