The thought had been growing inside my head

for a long, long time. Like the nagging dryness of the desert shemaal, it was a part of my whole existential landscape, and with the same sort of persistent reminder of its presence, it filled my senses, inhabited my cells, and entered and exited my lungs with each ragged breath I took as I pounded the deserted pavement.

Of all things to ruminate on while running, the Really Big Questions are best left off the list...like Life, the Universe and Everything... Life, for instance, is a funny nut to objectify at a self-propelled ground speed of four and a half miles per hour. Especially when your body is so intimately attached to it. There's no objectivity possible, no matter how hard you try, but I reflected in passing that that hadn't seemed to keep me from brooding on the subject as I continued to put one foot in front of the other in a loping jog. A few yards further along the pavement, a stray fragment of thought flashed briefly into focus. I had been watching the satellite news on our television last night. An older, but well preserved woman...she must have been in her 70s...had been shown leaping off into bungee-anchored infinity, somewhere in Australia, near the end of the BBC World Service news broadcast. A split second before she dived off the small platform on which she stood--over a river at the bottom of a 300 foot chasm--millions of middle eastern viewers were able to catch a glimpse of the legend borne on her pink T-shirt. The vivid letters had stated bluntly: "You can die a thousand small deaths, or one big one: take your pick..." As her feet left the platform, she had been grinning like a certified looney.....

Riyadh, in the midst of its superheated summer months

(50 deg C.), has all the aesthetic appeal of a ceramic crucible, filled with noontime molten sulfur as the full apical focus of the sun's cosmic Bunsen burner flame sears away at it. It is a good time to stay inside, with the ubiquitous little wall mounted A/C unit going at full chill. And there I was, at 5:30 PM in the afternoon of an especially hot, dry day in August, doing laps around the periphery of the compound's 3 km wide residential complex. At such moments I have to ask myself "Why?" in spite of the rich superfluity of such fait accompli questions.

Why, indeed? Why attempt to maintain a modicum of physical fitness in order to prolong life? For that matter, why attempt to prolong life? For that matter, why stay alive in a world which was clearly careening off the great ski-jump of reasoned wisdom into the void of abysmal ignorance with greater acceleration each year? Where was the quality, amidst all the quantity?

Even at 5:30 PM the heat of the Saudi sun is a contentious force to deal with. No doubt my brain was sizzling merrily inside my skull, overloading certain synapses, upsetting delicate cellular thresholds, and silently pleading with me to stop wasting energy on such useless lines of thought. But like the unquenchable and endless stream of bizarre thoughts which fill the head upon wakening in the dead of night--a problem seemingly endemic among expatriates in this physical and mental wilderness--I could not staunch the flow, and was shortly reflecting on man's seemingly unquenchable potential for doing harm to his fellow men....for his apparently unlimited capability of killing, maiming, torturing, hating, brutalizing, hurting, taunting and ignoring truth. All, usually, in the name of religion or religious belief, tribal bias, racial prejudice, national animosity, or, if for no other reason, simple sadistic pleasure! The exhaustive oppression of all this mental effluvia filled me with a dreary sense of emptiness as I rounded the hospital's residential compound for the umpteenth time. Haunting visions of BBC television cameras being thrust into starving children's faces by chic, well fed and sleekly groomed media persons, as the background male voiceover track oozed carefully scripted declamations of obscenely sincere empathy. No matter how many times you vicariously watched it, comfortably seated in a sofa...with all the ghastly close-up shots of flies darting in and out of the mouths of listless, emaciated babies, eyes glazed and open, gasping and hanging onto life by the barest of threads...you could not suppress a shudder of revulsion.

Depressing as it was, with perfect timing

the concluding segment had concentrated on the threat of the growing AIDS crisis in Southeast Asia, and a looming population explosion among Indians and members of other vast, impoverished countries. The news had ended with several smaller fragments of equally devastating accounts of man's inhumanity to man, one dealing with the terrorist execution of a 7-months pregnant Irish mother of 5, another recounting the latest tale of regressive, recidivistic carnage in Bosnia by the Serbs, and finally a bit of full-color video footage of further slaughter of the African Hutus by machète wielding Tutsie tribal government troops.

As scene after scene of this 'news' played back and forth through my thoughts, it impacted with an oppressive purposefulness that rivaled the brutal Saudi sun overhead, bringing with it an unavoidable sense of dismaying fatigue. One of the reasons I had left the United States to return to Insha'allahland had been to get away from the equally oppressive, almost smothering miasma of such doom & gloom reporting of domestic violence in the States. And here I was, once again swimming in a sea of misery, only this time on a far broader and much more basic scale of human suffering.

Unmindful of the ugly brown haze of wind-borne sand which the shemaal was throwing at Riyadh, the irony of mankind's undaunted, damnable and eternal optimism in the face of all this world-wide tragedy hung over me like the blanket of sand which was starting to blot out the horizon. The 'blessed curse' of hope, of faith in something greater than the squalid, savageries of human life! The irrational, persistent belief in some sort of a caring, personal greater universal consciousness!

The image of the little 70-year-old Australian granny,

leaping into the chasm returned. I thought of another T-shirt slogan I had spied on a runner some time ago back in the states: "F*CK CPR!" it had stated. The wearer appeared to be the sort of exceptionally fit person who would never need it anyway, with a toned, healthy appearance, great gastrocs swelling up out of expensive runner shoes, and a typical California whole body tan. Possibly a doctor, or a medical tech. Someone involved in the great caucus race of modern health care provision who had obviously studied Ivan Illich or other left-wing medical economists in graduate school; someone who dared to protest the "live at all costs" philosophy which modern medicine and the American legal establishment had successfully implanted in the unthinking social ethic corpus of American culture...if only through a T-shirt message.... A flashback intruded into my thoughts like some sort of pop-up menu on a mental PC. Back in the days before the awesome institutional power of the Roman Catholic Church's Dominican Sisters managed to dismember Santa Cruz Community Hospital, several of us on the heart surgery team were in the habit of taking a daily run in the afternoon. I had spotted the "F*ck CPR" T-shirt wearer loping along Capitola Street, at the end of a long day in the now-defunct Santa Cruz Heart Institute. As a member of that first successful heart surgery team in Surf City, and we had taken great delight in tweaking Sister What's-her-name's blue-veined beak by beating Dominican to the punch in the heart surgery market share competition. My own T-shirt bore what I considered a political statement emblazoned upon it on both sides, in keeping with our revolutionary spirit: "Future GOMER." Of course, few ordinary individuals would recognize the meaning of the word, except those interns, nurses and technicians who dealt with emergency room Gomers as part of their routine daily business. It was a sort of secret visual handshake among frat brothers. Most people would pass by without even a puzzled look on their faces, but every now and again someone, also running, would spot the words and break out into a grin of recognition. Future Gomer, indeed...Grand Old Man of the Emergency Room, Get Out of My Emergency Room! That would be a fate to be avoided at any cost, for anyone in the 'healing' profession...and was that why I was running? So I could continue to remain fat, oblivious and content well into old age, while the rest of the less fortunate inhabitants of this planet died off like the flies hovering around starving African children? It was a question to ponder.....but not while running under the last furious rays of the Riyadh sun.

Thoughts centered once more back in the empty Riyadh desert,

feet pounding the fiery tarmac in my Nike Airs, I grudgingly gave a bit more thought to the eternally disturbing subject of life. I had now been in the Saudi Arabian "wilderness" for nearly 6 years, at various times and various places, and I thought about the concept of life from the Alice in Wonderland perspective of these holier-than-thou Islamic people. A quick glimmer of recognition occurred to me that the shift in focus might provide a brief respite from the gloomy insanity which had been threatening to overwhelm my thoughts just a few moments earlier. The wind was starting to pick up.

Nope! This simply opened another, separate floodgate of associations, all connected with the extremely conservative, politically motivated, and socially intermerged dictates of the Al Saud holy men, who categorically insisted--in the finest traditions of witch doctors and oracles everywhere from the dawn of recorded history--that they, and they alone, were able to not only understand what God was thinking, but also how to interpret Her intentions, thereby providing earthly counsel for all of us ordinary people who apparently lack their admirable ability to communicate telepathically with the Great Logos... Allah's will...

This, considered from a certain standpoint, was infinitely more depressing than simple, morbid thoughts of starving babies and genocidal slaughter, and it was becoming clear to me clear that the erstwhile runner's high was conspicuously dysfunctional out here in Allah's back yard. Wrenching my train of thought forcefully by the throat, I abruptly left this fruitless tangent in mid stride, and tried to return to marginally less masochistic ruminations.

"F*ck CPR."

Now there was something to think about. The whole vast, ponderous and institutionalized logical positivist philosophy of Twonk Zone American mainline medical thought, summarized and neatly factored out, in one short phrase! Some small part of my inner, misanthropic, sense of closet-reactionism rejoiced as I took a few moments, between wheezes in the bone-dry (4% relative humidity) desert air, to ponder this, a figurative mouse of a statement, perched on the edge of a bottomless cliff, and defiantly flipping the finger at the screaming eagle which was about to utterly demolish it.... I had to admit that I liked the concept of 'F*ck CPR.' Visions of Joan d'Arc, Saint Sebastian, and countless other martyrs flooded into mindfulness as I allowed myself to envision the rage of the American Heart Association's institutional fury as it brought the fully calcified and unswervable bulk of its ponderous dogma to bear upon this sacrilegious impertinence by those who refused to be indoctrinated into the "life at all costs" doctrine.

I thought of Dr. Kavorkian....good old 'Dr. Death,'according to the news media. No matter what you thought of him as a person, there was something very right about daring to suggest that individuals might wish to be entrusted with control of their lives, and if necessary, the means to end them--bereft of all the moral hand wringing and religious second-guessing over just what exactly God thought about that.... Especially so, mindful of the millions of ignorant, uneducated, unwashed hoards of humanity less favored by wealth, health and fortune, who continued to breed like rutting deer, filling up a limited planetary ecosystem which was already starting to show strains from overpopulation.

And then there was Christianity's greatest of dogmatic gurus,

the Roman Catholic Church's Pimp (...er, POPE), who continued to refuse to permit the philosophy or mechanics of birth control to be entertained by devout Catholics...another cheerful thought on the run as I continued to pound the heat-mushed tarmac of Al Kuwarezmi Road. And my own 90-year-old mother, God-fearing believer that she was, despite possessing a college degree and therefore seeming to be capable of knowing better than believing in anything. My mother who was starting to suffer the start of a decline into senilia, doubtless surrounded by members of the medical establishment who firmly believe that a long, slow, and degrading decline into complete physical and mental impairment, with no dignity whatsoever, is preferable to an ordered, humane and painless departure from life into the sensationless void that lies beyond...

For anyone interested in basic human irony, surely there was enough material in all of these imponderables to write a thousand Holy Korans, Christian Bibles, or Books of Mormon, and maybe even a few hundred Robin Williams screenplays as well. Any sentient extraterrestrial being from somewhere far off in that vast black void out there, who happened to be visiting our neighborhood, would definitely be hard pressed to make any sort of intelligent guess whatsoever as to what exactly the human life experience was all about, based upon simple observations of human behavior. And what was even more apparent to me, in my running-induced state of global omniscience, was that if that much was allowable, it ought to follow that humanity--which clearly didn't have the faintest glimmer of how to make sense of its own circumstances--could possibly have the unmitigated temerity to claim to understand something as vastly mysterious and incomprehensible as a deity!

It was already a lap too many for me,

as I skirted the water tower that loomed up like a concrete phallus over the desiccated emptiness of the Riyadh desert. Some 45 minutes into the jog, I was overheated, philosophically flummoxed, practically emptied of sweat, and despite the late hour of the afternoon (6:30), it was still hotter in the shade than the late Ayatollah Khomeini's rhetoric (it was actually 130 degrees outside). Several other fanatics were also out running, I saw, from glances about as I came down the street; doubtless they were wondering, as I was, why they were trying to expend so much energy under such awful climatic conditions, during the hottest month of the whole Arabian year.... All of them--two men and a few women--were employees of the same hospital I was working at, most of them from western countries, and similarly immersed in the mission of preserving human life and carrying the burden of 'modern' health care about on their shoulders like a sort of invisible albatross.

Rounding the street corner, I wondered if they had 90 year old mothers, if any of them were Catholic, or whether they had seen the 70 year old granny wearing the "Eat right; exercise regularly; die anyway" T-shirt jump off smiling into the jaws of infinity. As I neared our villa, I mused on how they might feel about the non-stop procession of depressing newscasts about the continuing depredations of a world going increasingly mad, the endless close-up shots of fly-infested starving infants, the dismembered bodies of terrorist victims, and the unfeeling "keep 'em alive at all costs" philosophy which mankind appears to be plagued with as the world starts to overpopulate itself to oblivion...... Surely I wasn't the only afflicted western soul in this project?

As I came to a halt, just outside of the gate

to our residence villa on the compound, I heaved a final deep breath, wiped the nearly non-existent sweat from my neck, and entertained one last thought before heading indoors to bathe in the wonderful air conditioning that awaited me--"I've got to get myself one of those F*ck CPR T-shirts.....no codes for this kid.....and when Allah, or God, or whatever the hell it might be calls, it's time to go. Anyone tries to resuscitate me, I'll kill the son of a bitch!" And maybe I'll watch some more TV later, too......

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[Riyadh, KSA, summer 1989]