It’s August 24th. Seven more days and this month is over. I will have survived another August.

I have been trying to understand my time out here in the desert. Not “Time” in the abstract. I mean the minutes, the hours, the days. Work takes up most of it. The gym rates about five hours a week. Then shopping and driving. Sleeping, of course. And running the combination washer/dryer takes up to four hours per each tiny load. But the vast majority of my “free time” in the Kuwait has been spent in front of the TV. Watching movies. I haven’t read an entire book yet. Short stories and plays only. I haven’t written anything at all. I have had no impulse for that – no creative thoughts going from me to a page (though there has been a false start or two). No – my focus has been the movies. I get cable and I have brought things from home. The good and the bad. Classics and horror movies. The Oscar winners and the “straight to video”. I figure by the time I get home, I will have seen every worthwhile film ever made (I get Turner Classic Movies out here).

These are the terms of my captivity. Keep it short and shallow. Why settle in with a novel or a piece of your own work? Don’t settle in. Keep it transitory and time will go by and then you’ll be out. It was always a risk coming out here and getting stuck – captive by the job. This isn’t unique. A lot of people are captive by their employment. Captive to the pay. You have a family to support, so you’re stuck with it. Or – as I see all the time out here – the money is too great. You can’t make it anywhere else. So you have to stay. Everyone’s job does that. Or you can be captive to the incentive – that pension somewhere down the line. We have a great one here, though it’s not as good as a government job back home.

But in the desert, I have a few special effects to add to the paycheck basics. I’m captive to the distance, which makes home and anywhere else so far away. Captive to the heat because when it is 120 degrees eight months or more out of the year, the outdoors is pretty much off limits. Captive to the lack of air. It’s either the dust outside or the constant, frigid AC inside (and how often do they clean those filters?). And captive to the culture around me that makes a single man without a family (and not on a compound) separate from the herd and looked on with suspicion. Really – how much time can you spend out in the malls if you can’t socialize? Somewhat captive by the language barrier. I was told the other day to beware of classes that teach Arabic because they turn into religious conversion sessions. Good to know.

So this is how it goes – what movie do we watch tonight? Maybe something’s on TV or I just pull out one from my DVD stash. This is how we go one day at a time. Keep it shallow. The days, the hours and the minutes go by faster that way. Then, hopefully, the captivity will end.

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