Somebody told Kevin Coster if you build it they will come. So he built a big, awesome baseball field in a corn field, and dead guys came and played baseball on it, and also you could commit baseball-assisted suicide by walking from centerfield into the corn. I don’t know if any disembodied voices make building decisions here in the UAE, but someone decided to build a nice, big, asphalt bicycle/running track 30 miles out into the desert. They built it, but nobody really came. Except me, and some camels. So the refrain should go, “If you build it, Abu Halen will come. But, later, when you’ve saved some more money, could you also build a shaved ice stand in the parking lot? Abu Halen likes snow cones. Thanks.”
Empty Quarter, Saudi Arabia; Apr 2014
There’s something romantic about the desert. The kind of romance where you’re by yourself, running in circles, listening to the wind rifle stiff and lonely through your hair. So, I guess I’m talking about the kind of romance where you just got dumped. But I like it anyway. That’s why I drove out into the sand dunes for a nice, long, solitary run.
Sand blew in wispy streams across the black tarmac. I thought about a lot of things. The way the world is crooked but we still hold onto it. The rhythm of forward motion, the futility of it, the value of it, the way it all zeroes out yet adds up to infinity in the end. The small town I came from and how far away I am from it. How I’m still pulling it around somehow. How I take comfort in that.
Bicycle/running track, Middle of the Desert, UAE; Oct 2019
Five miles into the dunes, a man in a dirty t-shirt and jeans rode toward me on a horse. I hailed him as he drew near, my sweaty arm raised high in a signal of greeting that I was certain would cut across the vast cultural chasm that separated me, the technologically-advanced and futuristic Westerner, from him, the simple desert-dweller. He glanced my way, reached up beneath his long hair that covered his ears, and removed a white, wireless AirPod. “‘Hey,” he called in a sort of bored, hipster manner, in accent-less English, throwing a bro-nod my way for good measure.
Then he disappeared like Shoeless Joe Jackson. Just kidding, he kept riding, to his house probably, to play X-Box.