Ramallah for Real: Last year in Palestine

Last year in Palestine. Sort of. It's 2007.

I have all but packed. Well, sort of.

It's a tough place to be at, sometimes. Even harder to leave. Although the food's delicious, for many, it's becoming increasingly difficult by the day to get fat, let alone find ample reason to sing. You catch my drift. Nothing worse than long, drawn-out goodbyes. Except for Palestine.

I loved it here. I spent a full tenth of my young life here.

I turned thirty, and we took a boatload of people out into the sticks. Simon, who'd considered reaching the threshold an unlikely scenario, also turned thirty. Simon who, pretending to be a rightwinger often tried but somehow always failed to post ludicrous comments on this blog. A noble can't-beat-them-mock-them sort of effort. 

We drove out to Tireh on the outskirts of Ramallah for two consecutive Fridays, trunks rattling with drink and other supplies. And by other supplies I mean more drink. We somehow also managed to engage in a little slapdash barbequing, brought super soakers, and a Frisbee, which notoriously went missing in the course of the first outing. Good Frisbees are hard to come by, and a lot easier to misplace than, say, a boomerang.

We stocked up in town and rode out, speakers crackling with seventies oldies. A more than apt thing to do on your thirtieth. "The dawning of the Age of Aquarius."

An empty hill dotted with stubborn shrubbery between the last Palestinian houses and an Israeli army base is our playground. A goatherd quickly shoos his flock away from our deprivation.

The days are filled heeding Erasmus' call. Ramallah's pendulum of tragedy and fun swings decidedly to the latter. Let's call it a survival mechanism, a switching off. Be sure to bring enough ice to keep your Taybehs cold. Not that they're given much opportunity to warm up anyway. Over the past three years, and in the course of these blogs escape has been a recurring theme. In a sense writing itself acts like a necessary valve. 

My life in Palestine was not the life of Palestinians and so, dear reader, you've been spared the worst of miseries, the pain, humiliation, and thwarted hopes festering in your backyard, the seeds that Hummers and concrete mixers help plow under of hate and an assured lease on strife. It's there though, as real as the joy, potential, ambition, friendship, love, music, curiosity, arousal, jealousy, compassion, and spanning bridges.

Ardent Zionists often point out how this land is too small for two peoples. In a way I'd like to concur to the point where the conflict is situated on too small a plot to be labeled anything but a civil war. And damned, we stopped the Bosnians from butchering each other, am I wrong? And yes, they'd still be at it if no one had stepped in and went "What, are you nuts?"

The comparison is sketchy, but all paintings begin with a little penciled doodling. I'm not writing a policy paper here. These aren't blue prints. A lot is just throwing up crazy ideas; a stick in the henhouse as they say. That's how evolution works. A genetic lottery that now and then produces ideas that 'stick'. So to speak.

So go crazy. Top your Turvey. Erasmus was onto something. Fun itself is a leap of faith, that sometimes produces real-world applications. It's what separates us from the animals, I believe. Use your noodle for more than hunting and gathering. We need a new paradigm here.

Fighting's old. God is dead. This is the Age of Aquarius, if only because of the sports drink. We're going to Mars soon. I say cherish your old books, they hold great meaning, but dare to peak at your neighbor's narrative.

We. Must. Move. On.

It is possible to escape, and cast away your worries for entire hours at a time. But... This is the point where, at the end of the column, and of this blog, I smartly reach back to the boomerang mentioned at the beginning. This is the point where, for the umpteenth time, I invoke fun and then shockingly juxtapose with "Hummer!"

A great day in Ramallah fizzles out and I feel like a Jay Gatsby and Tom Sawyer rolled into one, some distance from the campfire, staring at a light. A glaring reminder; the roof-mounted intrusion of a Hummer search-light.  

I'm off to Belgium now.