not worth $18

This is something I wrote that I didn't intend to post here on the blog. But, it's mildly relevant and is easier than writing something new for you. Also, accompanying photos that went with this writing sample into the application.


The Insects Are All Around Us

Where I've been, Portland Oregon, is obsessed with apocalypse. It’s impossible to go anywhere without seeing at least one zombie. Oh, okay, all the barstaff are zombies this night. A zombie bicycle gang just rode by, sure. Your neighbor is killing the aphids on her organic heirloom beefsteak tomatoes and bellowing for all the neighborhood to hear, "BRAAIINS!" The usual crazy screaming guy of big cities, the one who stands on a street corner talking about prophecies and the rapture to anyone who will listen and even to those who won't: he isn't in Portland. Impending doom is just too real there for that public decrying. My university offers a Philosophy of Disaster course (which I aced). My roommates and I used to drink wine on the porch and talk about what will happen when transportation collapses, while our neighbor with the bad hip takes 45 minutes to unload her groceries into her house. We schemed escape plans. When the food riots start I'll know exactly what to do. I'll know where to go, how to get there, and who I am going to take with me. This is why my generation rides bicycles, not because we are over concerned with emissions, which of course we are, but because with bikes and my wilderness survival training I will be able to get me and my select friends home to my parents’ ranch in eastern Oregon in just a few days. This is why I don’t move to New York. Instead, I moved to the place I thought to be a hinterland, where the Sword of Damocles doesn't hang over our heads like a pendulum of time running out.
When I got off the plane in Yemen I noticed that there were more burqas then when I boarded. Ninjas are stealthy like that. At first, they are glaringly obvious. Ninjas selecting the best eggplants at the produce stand, ninjas bowling a perfect turkey at Bowling of Islam, the ululating of ninjas echoing off the crater walls as they zip by on jet-skis. But after a while they began to be unnoticed by me, which is the main purpose of wearing abaya, higab, and burqa. And then there was a brief period where it was seemingly all I could do but to make lusty eye contact with them before finally mellowing out and realizing that this is my real life here. To get here is a whirlwind tour of desertification, decrepitude, and dilapidation. From the airport, don’t get a taxi but instead walk over a few dunes to avoid paying the airport exit tax and wave down a yellow and white van, there’s a million and they're impossible to miss (no, really, spend some time here and you will get hit by one). Don’t worry about shutting the door behind you because it’s probably tied to the frame of the van with the seatbelt cut out from your seat. The van will make one turn around a roundabout by the rusted military jet and then when you see the largest picture ever of the mustachioed president tap a few coins on something metal and get out. Cross the plaza where the shoeless children are playing soccer on the cobblestone to the giant burnt out tv. Don’t feel guilty about not giving alms to the beggar, the old man is probably a spy and seems happy enough so he must be well paid by the police, a passing "salaam alaykum" is all that is required. Next make sure to walk on the right side of the street to avoid the white rain of the Egyptian ravens, then over the rope speed bump and through the cement blockade. Don’t mind the skinny dogs sleeping on the piles of sand, Scabies and Rabies are more afraid of you. Find the blue metal door on the white wall with the broken green glass on top and press the button to make the sound of screeching falcons and alert the guards. Don’t fret about their interrogative remarks, just drop my name and they’ll let you in through the metal detector. Here, if you wish, you may remove your burqa. The path splits where the termites are devouring the corner of the building, turn left there and follow the corridor past the prayer rooms and around the corners of the building’s exposed visceral wires and ducting which lead to a dead end. Find the wall with the door handle and pound loudly so I can hear you because I am in the basement flat, or the Bellows as its name is known here. My music is turned up and I am drawing pictures of robots and imagining someplace where I don't have ants in my pantry.
This is where I am. I just killed the biggest cockroach on the planet. Normally they get away from me but this one was too fat to escape down the drain. Seriously, it was like a small horse, you could have put a saddle on her. She was in my kitchen, the scuttling of her feet muted by the gas leak, a sound which is in turn softened by the muezzin’s call, reminding me of my shameful walk home. Every day, I am able to clock out just in time for my colleagues to pray at Maghreb (sundown). This means that as I am walking home, the prayer room of the school is full and often overflowing into the narrow corridor behind, blocking my pathway. Rather than highlighting our religious differences by watching and waiting for them to finish, I simply walk behind them when they bow to prostrate themselves before Allah. Normally this goes off without a hitch. Today however, the last man stood up before I could slip past. Okay, no problem. I turned around and would just wait for them to kneel again. But, here too the man on the end stood up before I could make it by, and like Pharaoh in the Red Sea, I was trapped with no way to escape short of divine intervention. In a cadence they stood up, obliviously, closing me in until I knocked a few over like pious bowling pins. After this holy awkward moment, I took a cold shower.
Aden is hot, let me tell you. In Aden I had been saying to myself, there is nothing worse than a hot wind in your face. But yes, yes there is. I know this because a while ago I took advantage of an opportunity to go to Dubai. The 45 degrees Celsius Gulf sun mixed with a balmy four hundred thousand percent humidity and then a peppering of brutal dust blowing off the Empty Quarter and right into your face make a most unpleasant sandy, sweaty tourist-underpants stew. After my fourth change of clothing, sometime late evening, I had a moment. I found myself riding alone in the backseat of a massive air-conditioned suv going through the desert from old Dubai to new in what my dad would call two-dot fog (as in, the fog was so thick you couldn’t see more than two dots on the road ahead of you), but was actually a sandstorm. When the Da Rude song Sandstorm came on the stereo, the two German men in the front seat started talking about their “yout.” I sort of rolled my red eyes and that was when the towers of new Dubai came into view. The vivid neon, blurred through the sand, disappeared three-hundred feet up into the haze. In unobstructed daylight, that was about the elevation where the construction is still ever-so-slowly completing these surreal monstrosities. The song changed to some other techno hit and my moment was over, but in that moment I simultaneously came to three conclusions: 1: I am on drugs. 2: I have been abducted by aliens. 3: The apocalypse is upon us.
New Dubai is clearly extra-terrestrial, the most unearthly thing about it being the lack of green space. There's a timeline in the Dubai Museum detailing where traditional Emirati life diverged by the arrival of the aliens. You can see explicitly when they landed their spacecraft, now called towers. The omnipresent feeling of being drained, or probed, is thrust upon you by the twinkling lights juxtaposed in the hostile environment. Somewhere, I thought, a mistake had to have been made.
My error was not in guessing how the apocalypse would happen or when, but in what would occur afterward. Like vultures, insects wait for us to undo ourselves, knowing now as well as we that the end is nigh. And we humans sit passively as if on display in an alien zoo. We sit in our ivory towers of academia, mindless and zombie-like, feeding on brains. We seclude ourselves stealthily like ninjas daring the world to pass us by just one more time. Well I’ve seen the coming apocalypse with my own bloodshot eyes, there’s little more speculation. If it happens the way it's panning out then the cockroaches can have it, they deserve it. But as for me I'm not going out this way, I'm going feral and creating a future where I belong. This is where I'm going.

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