everyday decisions

A woman drew her long black hair out tight/ And fiddled whisper music on those strings/ And bats with baby faces in the violet light/ Whistled, and beat their wings/ And crawled head downward down a blackened wall/ And upside down in air were towers/ Tolling reminiscent bells, that kept the hours/ And voices singing out of empty cisterns and exhausted wells.
T S Eliot, The Waste Land, 1922

While most city clickers would see an ugly, boxy, right-angled pickup, the Bedu practically break out into song. To understand just how much his Abu Shenab means to Mohammed, you have to first understand life in the desert. In a land of such bleakness outsiders can only superimpose GPS satellite waypoints, resident once-nomadic tribes took to this new transportation like a camel takes to water. In this landscape, where survival is broken down into everyday commonsense decisions, most things that money can buy are superfluous, perhaps even useless.

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