Starting late, powering through

Dawn breaks hard in Beirut. 7AM - I’m ripped awake by a motorcycle revving up the narrow alley under my window, so loud it might as well have rolled over my head. There’s maybe 10, 15 seconds when I imagine I could still slip back into sleep, then the cacophony of the street descends in force. Honking cabs compete with the screams of children and the locust-like crackle of a downstairs radio at full volume. A trash truck rolls by—a juggernaut of a thing, looks like it was shipped in from a Soviet factory alongside crateloads of Kalashnikovs—and the roar of its engine leaves me momentarily breathless. There is a physical aspect to these sounds, as if their sheer magnitude were enough to achieve anatomical mass. It pins me to my bed like a giant hand.

Still, if I drag myself into the world of the living by 9:00, the day is off to an early start. The newspaper schedule, centered around afternoons and evenings, turns the clock face ninety-degrees to the left—noon to night is the new nine to five. Most people who ply the trade develop nocturnal habits, waking up at 11, 12 or one o’clock. I’m not there yet, but my nights tend to wear on later and later, and by default, my mornings as well.

For the moment at least, the street symphony keeps me on somewhat regular sleep cycle.

This is Beirut as I see it in the fourth week of my life here. They say that the emotions of love and hate can only be felt for things you know intimately, but I feel like I have a healthy degree of both for this place. It’s not a city of half-measures.

…To be continued

Countdown: 13 days

Every time I get here--into the final countdown--the the spiderweb of the world begins to shrink, condense. As the clock ticks, wandering thoughts twist inward and are transfixed by that immovable point, the day and hour and minute when the plane leaves the tarmac and the earth rushes away. Imagine a light particles caught in the gravity field of a black hole. I am the particle. The collapsed supernova is September First. And Lebanon is whatever lies on the other side.

Let's hope it's good.

If you're reading this--if you're a regular forager of our interlaced global circuitry--chances are you've got somewhere you're posting your own news, and if I'm not following it, tell me. I want all the feedback I can get on How We Do This. The blog is something of an experiment, a dabble into the new communicative technologies of the modern age. If newspapers go the way of the dodo, this may be the future of journalism. Tragedy? I'm wondering. The blog format lets you be all medias at once: news analysis, entertainment, journaling... its the great hybrid one-stop-shop. The trick will be luring in the shoppers.

Heh, I kid. This blog, like most blogs, is for all those people I constantly promise to stay in touch with, a promise too often defaulted on.