English Teacher X - Requiem for a Vagabond: Middle Aged in the Middle East

The Men Who Don't Fit In by Robert Service

There's a race of men that don't fit in,

A race that can't stay still;

So they break the hearts of kith and kin,

And they roam the world at will.

They range the field and they rove the flood,

And they climb the mountain's crest;

Theirs is the curse of the gypsy blood,

And they don't know how to rest.

If they just went straight they might go far;

They are strong and brave and true;

But they're always tired of the things that are,

And they want the strange and new.

They say: "Could I find my proper groove,

What a deep mark I would make!"

So they chop and change, and each fresh move

Is only a fresh mistake.

And each forgets, as he strips and runs

With a brilliant, fitful pace,

It's the steady, quiet, plodding ones

Who win in the lifelong race.

And each forgets that his youth has fled,

Forgets that his prime is past,

Till he stands one day, with a hope that's dead,

In the glare of the truth at last.

He has failed, he has failed; he has missed his chance;

He has just done things by half.

Life's been a jolly good joke on him,

And now is the time to laugh.

Ha, ha! He is one of the Legion Lost;

He was never meant to win;

He's a rolling stone, and it's bred in the bone;

He's a man who won't fit in.

From THE SPELL OF THE YUKON AND OTHER VERSES available on Project Gutenberg:

http://www.gutenberg.org/files/207/207-h/207-h.htm

PART ONE:

THE SPACES IN BETWEEN

AUGUST 2009 JUNE 2012

Forty is the old age of youth; fifty is the youth of old age.

- Victor Hugo

I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude. A man thinking or working is always alone, let him be where he will.

- Henry David Thoreau

Whosoever is delighted in solitude is either a wild beast or a god.

Francis Bacon (paraphrasing Aristotle)

AUGUST 2009

ALONE IN THE DESERT

A funny thing happened to me, when I moved to the strictest Islamic country on earth, shortly after my 40 th birthday, my life stripped of drugs, alcohol and women:

I felt happy.

From -30 C / - 22 F winters to 50C / 120 F summers. Does that mean I'm tough as nails, or stupid as a rock?

WINTERS END

After nine years of debauchery and decadence in Vodkaberg, a city in provincial Russia, I was mentally and physically exhausted.

Somewhere along the line I had stopped enjoying a life which had, to that point, been full of alcohol, long nights at crowded humid blood-and-vomit-spattered nightclubs, unbalanced colleagues, and sexed-up and mercenary younger women.

My unhappiness had begun to evidence itself in many ways blackouts, sudden bouts of rage, erectile dysfunction, and a general sense of impending doom. It might be a funny story to drunkenly pee on the rug when youre 20. Not so much when youre 38.

My job had been as fucked as the rest of my life after nine years of teaching English in Russia and becoming a Director of Studies, I was making twice as much money as I had when I started, but the cost of living in Russia and all over the developing world had gone up five or six times. And the teachers were more expendable than ever.

While I was not exactly financially exhausted, my life savings had recently been cut in half by the stock market crash following the financial crisis of 2008. I owned nothing other than a laptop computer and a bag of cheap clothes. My total net worth was about $7,000 far better than most middle-aged English teachers, I realize.

Finally I fled.

In August of 2009, I arrived in the Kingdom.

The long winter was over and the sun was shining.

THE KINGDOM

Strangely, the Kingdom was much like Id imagined it.

There were sand dunes lining the highway and Id actually seen a few camels wandering in the desert. The buildings were low and brown and the men mostly dressed in long white thobes and the women all dressed in long flowing black abayas with niqab covering their faces.

I lived in the faculty dormitory" on the campus of the industrial college where I worked. The room was on the first floor, with a high ceiling and a big window that got plenty of sunshine. It was a small studio apartment, basically, nothing particularly fancy, but clean and bright and relatively new, with a kitchen on one side of the room and a desk and single bed on the other. They even threw in a TV and an easy chair. The small bathroom had a Western-style toilet and a shower stall, although the hot water was not exactly copious.

The college was located in the suburbs of a larger city, a five-minute walk from the waters of the Gulf. It was in a mainly residential area but nearby was a shopping center with a modern supermarket, an Applebees restaurant, and a modern bookstore-cum-electronics shop.

Across the road from the college lay a beach, and a long corniche sort of an embankment with a walking path and parks and benches that led several miles down to a nicer, more-developed area with fast-food places and cafes and ice-cream shops, as well as a larger mall, as well as another larger and nicer beach.

In short it actually wasnt bad.

GAINFUL EMPLOYMENT

My job was in the English language center of a large industrial training college. The salary they gave me when I started was about $3,750 a month more than four times what Id been making when I left Russia. The local currency was pegged to the dollar, so exchange rate fluctuations werent a worry.

When I arrived, there were a few morning meetings with my new managers; but then pretty much the entire school was on holiday for Ramadan and most of the teachers wouldnt come back until September. Classes would start sometime in early October.

This put me in the always-enviable position of being paid for a month of sitting around doing nothing.

BLOOD AND SHIT

I had to go through another medical exam in which I produced a stool sample. This was my second stool sample; Id had to give the first one in Bahrain, before Id arrived in the Kingdom. My second one came out a lot more easily after a breakfast of mango and cornflakes.

I wondered in an email to a colleague back in Russia, Crazy Bob, what the government did with all this shit we had to give them.

He responded that we had left quite a bit of shit and blood on the streets of Russia, as well.