Friday night at a bar. Karaoke on stage, multiculti hormones bouncing all over the barroom, and I saw these three fiftysomething white men hanging out in a booth. Like that, I had a blog written: There is an uncomfortable feeling I get sometimes when I see these solid older white guys in Africa. They were here for the bad old days. Men from a musty time which would have been scandalized by the Benetton-like heterogeneity of this room, with its promise of nigh imminent interracial horizontal bopping.
I had these pentagenarians pegged, my inner voice drowning out karaoke. Until I noticed the bald 50+ nudge the red-faced one and smile. They began singing together: "Because I got high, because I got high, because I got hiiiiiiigh."
For the uninitiated: the song in question is by American one hit wonder Afroman. Fifty year old guys singing Afroman are not threatening. Clearly these guys are not all that exotic, and the killjoy narrator is the most annoying perosn in the vignette. Stupid globalization brings Afroman to Ghana and ruins my entry...
Other than karaoke night, it was a weekend spent mainly at the Hotel Brittania. Sounds like Lords and Ladies should be hanging out in the lounge, yes? I bet they did once. It’s got a tasteful little courtyard and an open balcony made for surveying the cityscape while discussing its business and politics. But these days the steps out front are completely shattered and sunk into the earth, and the height of entertainment is when the TV is wheeled out and the kids get to watch WWE Raw in the courtyard. No phone, no AC, and the bathroom has no sink. I have to wake up the bartender to get a drink.
Fine. For whatever reason, sleeping on crappy a mattress and using shower with no temperature control hasn't been annoying me. Everything's been smooth. The only hard part has been the tightening of nerves before each arrival in Africa: Why am I fascinated by this? How did I even pick Ghana? I can’t remember. Why do I have to do this stuff?
But this time those misgivings melted away before I even got on the plane. On the car ride to JFK airport, we passed a huge, freestanding supermarket that was having a grand opening. Out the left window. On my drive to the Nairobi airport to fly back to the US for my July weddings, I’d seen the exact same thing: an enormous freestanding supermarket with illuminated Grand Opening signs. Same window.
I saw this supermarket go by and my brain just slipped right back into the spot it has been two months before. Like a bookmark kept. Exit Back to Africa heebie jeebies, enter another country. Guard up, head down, let’s go. And the guard went down pretty soon after getting here anyway.
I know this sounds like the Wal-Mart family’s wet dream right now. But that's how it happened. Afroman in ubiquity and bookending supermarkets. I don't know what it means.
But I do know that Hotel Brittania's nonamenities have actually been helpful, in that I have little choice but to sit around and read the books and papers I need to be reading. No in house TV to pull me away. I can keep a train of thought chugging along for hours, my story ideas got fleshed out rather than forgotten, and occasionally iPod lyrics yield meaning (Prine’s “Great Compromise?” Now I got it.). The only question that didn't get answered was why I didn’t get out to Africa sooner.
