I am in India to have a midlife crisis. This mid-life crisis has been brewing for some time in the form of a desire to write a book, the completion of which will theoretically banish the feeling that I haven’t accomplished anything in 35 -- and rapidly approaching 36 -- years of life.
The problem, of course, is that books don’t write themselves, and I spent the better half of the morning staring at half a page of words and wrestling with the notion that perhaps I don’t, after all, have a book in me. I had decided, on my year-long sojourn from work, to choose a city to plunk myself down in to write and, knowing myself to be an antsy traveler, I would allow myself to move to a new city only with the conclusion of each chapter. In Kodaikanal in Tamil Nadu, I wrote the introduction, chapter zero: a boring recount of the process of getting to Afghanistan, from assignment to arrival. It needs revision and the addition of details which, one hopes, will maybe make it vaguely interesting.
I fear that I will be stuck in city two, Hampi in Karnataka state, for the foreseeable future.
I tried to cull from my blog (“When the flight from Kabul breaks through the clouds over Farah, it does so over a vast expanse of nothingness…”), but found myself silently chanting “no one cares, no one cares, no one cares.”
When I lived in Afghanistan, I blogged about life -- about life with the military on a remote military base and everything that went along with it, with the exception of anything related to work. I couldn’t write about work, really -- the Embassy would’ve lost their mind, and if any of the Afghans I worked with ever found out that I was slowly broadcasting their lives to an anonymous audience on the internet, they would have never spoken to me again. And, in the worst possible scenario, the Taliban could have found it and slowly killed off everyone I wrote about, even if I changed their names.
But I am now separated from Farah by almost half a decade, hard to believe though that be, and I feel that enough time has passed to make it safe to write about both work and Afghans, changing names for all parties just in case. And so, instead of dwelling on the red mud nothingness of the Farah landscape, I tried to charge in and write about the First Big Work Experience of my time in Farah -- the assassination of a government official that led to a breakdown in rule of law in a remote district in the hills of Farah.
I am still struggling to make it interesting.
This whole midlife crisis thing would be much easier if it just involved purchasing a fancy car and getting a couple of ill-advised tattoos.
The problem, of course, is that books don’t write themselves, and I spent the better half of the morning staring at half a page of words and wrestling with the notion that perhaps I don’t, after all, have a book in me. I had decided, on my year-long sojourn from work, to choose a city to plunk myself down in to write and, knowing myself to be an antsy traveler, I would allow myself to move to a new city only with the conclusion of each chapter. In Kodaikanal in Tamil Nadu, I wrote the introduction, chapter zero: a boring recount of the process of getting to Afghanistan, from assignment to arrival. It needs revision and the addition of details which, one hopes, will maybe make it vaguely interesting.
I fear that I will be stuck in city two, Hampi in Karnataka state, for the foreseeable future.
I tried to cull from my blog (“When the flight from Kabul breaks through the clouds over Farah, it does so over a vast expanse of nothingness…”), but found myself silently chanting “no one cares, no one cares, no one cares.”
When I lived in Afghanistan, I blogged about life -- about life with the military on a remote military base and everything that went along with it, with the exception of anything related to work. I couldn’t write about work, really -- the Embassy would’ve lost their mind, and if any of the Afghans I worked with ever found out that I was slowly broadcasting their lives to an anonymous audience on the internet, they would have never spoken to me again. And, in the worst possible scenario, the Taliban could have found it and slowly killed off everyone I wrote about, even if I changed their names.
But I am now separated from Farah by almost half a decade, hard to believe though that be, and I feel that enough time has passed to make it safe to write about both work and Afghans, changing names for all parties just in case. And so, instead of dwelling on the red mud nothingness of the Farah landscape, I tried to charge in and write about the First Big Work Experience of my time in Farah -- the assassination of a government official that led to a breakdown in rule of law in a remote district in the hills of Farah.
I am still struggling to make it interesting.
This whole midlife crisis thing would be much easier if it just involved purchasing a fancy car and getting a couple of ill-advised tattoos.
No comments:
Post a Comment