These kinds of posts used to be popular back in the youth of my blog so I will give it a go and see if that is still the case. They are also easier to write because they can be completely incoherent. I’m supposed to now say something like number 8 really surprised me and I couldn’t live without number 33.

1. On the morning of my 38th birthday I killed a scorpion in our bathroom. If you would have told me on my 18th birthday that in 20 years I would be living in West Africa killing scorpions in my bathroom I would have said you were tripping. And at that time, 18-year-old Phil was probably actually tripping.

2. I’m thrilled to see psychedelics starting to get their due as therapeutic medicines with enormous transformative and healing potential. I haven’t done any in years and I know that I would need the right structure and guidance if I tried them these days. I certainly couldn’t casually wash down 3 grams of mushrooms with warm Dr. Pepper on my way to a John Scofield concert (my first experience with psilocybin). My brain is a bit more fragile now. When you’re young you think you will figure things out as you age. You think you will become more confident about your place in the world. It turns out, the opposite can happen.

3. To that end, you also tend to think that having children, running a business, and aging in general, will transform you into a highly functioning, responsible, rational adult. No, you can still do some really stupid things despite all that. Is stupid the right word? Sometimes, yes.

4. It also turns out not being confident about your place in the world and regularly doing things that seem incompatible with your age and experience are actually perfectly normal.**

5. Two German words that I have been enjoying lately: zugunruhe and fernweh. Zugunruhe is an ornithological term that means “migration anxiety.” When it’s time to migrate, migratory birds start getting restless and if you watch their behavior in a cage, they will start hopping towards the corner that is in the direction of their natural migratory path. The other word, fernweh, means a longing for somewhere you’ve never been. Basically wanderlust, but more beautiful. Because it involves longing.

6. How do migratory birds know which direction to go in? They can sense the earth’s magnetic field. Scientists are still debating how they can do this. For more wonder along these lines, read Ed Yong’s book An Immense World (you better believe that is an affiliate link. Give me my stack of nickels, Amazon.)

7. I love this bird.

It is a yellow crowned gonolek. I first saw one while stumbling around with Matt on a shortcut to the Senegambia strip during a Scoot West Africa trip. Now I see them regularly in Senegal and I swear I just saw one the other day in Bamako, although we may be outside of their range and my vision is notoriously bad.

8. Yes, I am in Bamako along with the whole family. It’s great to be back. Bamako remains my favorite large city in West Africa. But this visit has been difficult. We have spent a lot of time saying goodbye to friends who are leaving the country. We are also moving out of our house, where we have lived since late 2014.

9. I wrote about Mali in my last post. Nothing has changed since then except that the euphoria in Bamako following the MINUSMA expulsion has evaporated. There is no more political capital to be gained from that event. They are packing up. The reality is setting in. The money and the jobs are leaving. What happens to the precarious security situation remains to be seen but it’s hard to be optimistic.

10. The departure of MINUSMA also means that our hotel and restaurant business is about to take a huge hit. The majority of our customers are expats. We have a loyal but smaller Malian following that we will have to grow if we want to survive. One reason I have posted less here is because I have been working on a few other things that will hopefully hold me over as the majority (or all) of my primary income stream drys up. In a perfect world, we will sell many scooter trips and not have to worry. You can bet your ass I will be resisting traditional employment for as long as possible.

11. The coup in Niger. The one country in the Sahel that was arguably making small small progress on security and decentralized governance. What a catastrophe. Say a prayer. Call your preacher, your marabout, sacrifice a black chicken or a white pygmy goat. Pray that there is not a military conflict between West African nations in the Sahel. At this point, the people of this battered region deserve centuries of unmitigated peace and prosperity for everything they have already dealt with.

12. Life advice: If you are swimming to an island, check the official distance. I can guarantee the island looks closer than it is. 

13. I am obsessed with shea butter. Raw shea butter, with all of its earthy pungent smells. I apply it liberally after my post basketball shower. It supposedly does all these things. I’m after the anti-inflammatory effects above all. The Sahel is ground zero for shea butter so I’m in the right place.

14. I am obsessed with basketball. My 18-year-old self would beat my 38-year-old self, but my 38-year-old self is having more fun. There was a moment when I had to be nagged into going. Now I schedule around it. I’ve joined a game in Senegal and play at least two times a week, sometimes three. That game is a mix of expats and Senegalese. It’s not too rough and tumble and I can still walk up the stairs afterwards. In Bamako, I also play 2-3 times a week but it’s a far more physical game with young athletic Malians and only one other expat. On Mondays, Wednesdays and sometimes Fridays my body is in shambles by the time I lay down for bed. I still love it. I bathe myself in shea butter for recovery and pretend that I’m fine.

15. There is some music that sounds great on studio headphones and then there is some music that sounds great on a tower of speakers 50 meters away, with the high end blown out and the sound carrying over heavy, humid air and a intermittent breeze.

Here, a glimpse of Doussou Bagayoko’s elegant voice recorded on a street in Bamako in the rainy season 12 years ago. I remember it perfectly.

16. I have been making some short videos to try and get some more eyes on the Postcards from Timbuktu project and I’ve been learning a lot about Mansa Musa as a result. I knew he was the richest man in history and all that, but I did not know the details of his reign. In 1324, he embarked on his pilgrimage to Mecca from Mali. He traveled 9,000 miles with 60,000 people overland, through the Sahara and the Arabian Deserts! 60,000 people! Most of them on foot! Two Years! How is this unbelievable event not discussed more often? Mansa Musa’s 9,000 mile (15,000km) pilgrimage to and from Mecca was among the greatest peaceful events of the Middle Ages.

17. On the subject of Postcards from Timbuktu, there is now an AI-generated-camel-in-space postcard on offer. I very much enjoy that this imaginary camel that was just electrons colliding in a human brain and then in an artificial brain was then printed onto a physical object that is now being passed around from person to person, motorbike to bus to airplane to truck to postman in your neighborhood. Make it go.

18. I do believe that AI could be the end of us. But I think climate collapse could take us out first. At the end of the day, I am an equal opportunity doomer. Jokes aside, on most days I really do think that we’re fucked. Every once in a while I have a split second vision of AI robots curing cancer and building houses with 3d printers powered by abundant renewable energy. And then I think about our performance during COVID. And with the climate. I think about how we treat migrants. Countless deaths at sea and in the desert. We do a very poor job of looking out for each other and our collective future.

19. On this trip to Bamako we were able to renew Bintou’s tourist visa to America. It took us over 10 months to get an interview appointment. It was a long wait and we missed our annual summer trip to the states because of it. But we can’t complain. Other people are waiting as long or longer and getting rejected. And others still are risking their lives to enter the country by whatever means they can. It is a horrifically broken system that we are as far away from sorting out as we ever have been.

20. ChatGPT knows about the place in which I am writing this post right now: “The Sleeping Camel is a well-known hostel and restaurant located in Bamako, the capital city of Mali in West Africa. It has been a popular destination for travelers, tourists, and expatriates visiting Bamako. The Sleeping Camel often provides accommodations, a communal atmosphere, and various services catering to the needs of travelers passing through the city.”

21. AI can do some amazing things but it struggles in some areas. For example, this sales pitch that was sent to me could have been a bit more restrained.

And here I didn’t even know I was in the pharmacy industry!

22. AI image generation on the other hand is a great activity to do with your children. It can’t quite keep up with the breakneck speed of a 6 year old’s imagination and sometimes there are extra limbs and appendages and other AI “hallucinations,” but it’s all part of the fun.

Here is a typical Andre creation. Try to guess the prompt.

Here are two others.

Midjourney did quite well with a “chicken eating spaghetti in Italy,” but when you replace chicken with “long-tailed glossy starling” (one of his favorite birds), the AI makes some changes to the spaghetti. And Italy. It’s a pretty good long-tailed glossy starling though.

23. Here are amazing bird photos. Need some more Africa representation but still really enjoyed this and have gone back several times to browse the photos with Andre, who is becoming a prolific birdwatcher himself.

24. LOTS OF BIRD CONTENT TODAY. In late April we were visiting friends in Abidjan and they hosted us for a few days in this beautiful lake house in Assinie, on Cote d’Ivoire’s eastern coast. When we were driving back to Abidjan this bird flew in front of the car, hovered in mid-air for a few seconds and then continued on his way. It was a very unique looking bird.

Because of that crazy 20cm long tail that the males grow every year during the breeding season! It’s called a pin-tailed Whydah. What is a Whydah? When you look it up you will find (1) this type of bird, which is also called a widowbird because the tail resembles a funeral veil (2) the Kingdom of Whydah (Ouidah), which was in modern day Benin, home to many of these birds (3) a slaveship named the Whydah Galley.

The slaveship was so-named because it sourced slaves from the Kingdom of Whydah. It later become the flagship of pirate Sam Bellamy after he captured the ship from Captain Lawrence Prince in the Bahamas in 1717. After the ship’s capture, some of the crew joined the pirates. The new crew was made up of freed African slaves, native Americans, English seamen on the run for one reason or another and other random fugitives. Two months after its capture, Sam Bellamy died along with most of the crew in a violent storm that capsized the ship off the coast of Cape Cod.

Why am I telling you all this? I don’t really know. Maybe you will appreciate this new knowledge or be inspired to go down a rabbithole of your own.

25. It looks like I have something called mast cell activation syndrome (MCAS). I am convinced it is related to number 38 in this post, but it could also be a result of COVID infections. Mast cells are immune cells and when they are “activated,” they undergo something called degranulation, which involves the release of inflammatory chemical mediators like histamine. It’s a lot of fun.

Each MCAS patient is different in terms of both their triggers and their body’s response. Some people break out in a fully body rash when they exercise or when they are exposed to extreme temperatures. In my case, if I eat foods that are high in histamine, my ears block up, my jaw feels like it is swelling and my sinuses start producing buckets of mucous.

26. Now that I am on a regimen of a half dozen different supplements and daily anti-histamines, I notice my MCAS less. I still need to watch what I eat and drink, but I am able to manage it. I owe an enormous debt to my friend Jodi. She has MCAS and has published this invaluable guide.

27. Jodi deserves her own bullet point. You may know her already. She wrote a brilliant travel blog. At a time when most travel blogs were a mix of boilerplate “things to do” articles and superficial narratives, Jodi’s was all about long-form exploration, often of food but with plenty of non-culinary adventures thrown in. A lumbar puncture gone wrong left her disabled, and she now writes more about chronic pain, grief and confronting a reality that is unimaginable for many of us. While it is not the writing she wants to be doing, her site is a lifeline for many people battling medical conditions that are neglected and overlooked. I am myself indebted to the writing she is doing now.

There have been incredible innovations in the field of medicine and there are plenty of fantastic doctors, but our healthcare systems are crude and often broken. Practices are adopted to address the most common scenarios and outcomes and many people end up falling through the cracks as they are either misdiagnosed or dismissed entirely (“it’s all in your head”).

In the wake of COVID, and with an increasing number of diseases expanding their geography thanks to climate change, something has to give. At the moment, a lot of sick people are self-diagnosing and self-treating after being shut out by the medical community. Jodi ended up doing most of the legwork herself, eventually finding a geneticist who shed light on a genetic condition that finally provided her with some answers.

If you feel like you are flying blind with an undiagnosed, misunderstood or overlooked health issue, I strongly recommend subscribing to Jodi’s newsletter and having a read through her site. Actually, you should subscribe and read her site regardless because she is a brilliant writer who is fascinated by sooo much while also having a knack for discovering the best things on the internet.

28. There is a good chance I discovered this article about Octopus from Jodi’s newsletter. Did you know that most octopus are semelparous:

Most octopus species are semelparous, meaning they reproduce only once in their lifetime and die shortly after. For the female, birth seems to trigger internal chemical changes that begin to degrade the tissue in her body, giving her just enough time to brood her eggs before dying. And she does so with an existential commitment, never leaving her den to feed herself. Instead, she focuses her attention on the eggs, protecting them from predators and passing water over them to keep them oxygenated. As time passes, her skin begins to lose colour and degrade, she loses weight, and her muscles become weaker. She dies about five months after giving birth, having rarely left her eggs, even to eat. The male has already died. His life ended only a few short weeks after mating.

And that is perhaps the least interesting paragraph from this meditation on octopus, time, space and death. Highly recommend.

29. My tune for 2023 has been “Rush” by Ayra Starr. The song is just wrapped up in so many good memories from this year for me. The song may be old news for you, but even if it is here is a nice stripped down live version:

Here is the original.

30. I’ve got a bet on with Bintou that I can top her follower count on tiktok in 30 days. I will surely lose (she has over 30,000 followers with her account that celebrates Dogon culture). But I had my first success here:

@wakelen5000 just another day in #bamako #mali #tiktokmali🇲🇱223 ♬ original sound – Wa Kelen

31. I turned 38 on July 9th. This blog turned 13 on June 17th. I’ve posted 256 times, which averages out to about 20 posts a year. I was most productive in the years 2010-2014. The most viewed item on the site is a post about having sex with snakes. It has been viewed over 40,000 times. It turns out, a lot of people are looking for information on this subject. The very first post on this site was a piece of art I was working on:

This thing is finally done and in its new home in Senegal.

32. If you like birds and/or adventures, I strongly recommend the book Kingbird Highway.

33. Coleman Donaldson has one of my favorite Youtube channels. It is a mix of cultural exchange and Manding language instruction. Coleman travels to West African cities, but also spends time in Paris where much of the Manding-speaking diaspora has settled. This episode focuses on the word/concept “Sababu,” which comes from the Arabic for “cause,” but often has a much more complex meaning as you will see from the video.

You can support Coleman’s work here.

34. My nearly three-year-old (!!!) daughter speaks a bit of three languages. She is most proficient in Bambara and French, but she has been twisting the throttle on the English lately. A recent daily routine of hers is to tear through the house on a pink tractor screaming her new favorite phrase, “WATCH OUT!”

35. The word “adjacent” is getting abused. Have you noticed?

36. This post is brought to you by Postcards from Timbuktu. Are you familiar with Boubacar Sadeck’s calligraphy? It is beautiful and comes in 3 formats. Boubacar is considered to be the last master calligrapher in Timbuktu. And he can make something just for you! And you can commission this one of a kind item without getting off your couch! You can click the image below to check out one of his offerings.

37. This post was also brought to you by Scoot West Africa. Our first scoot trips of the 2023-24 season start on November 5th. I will be leading a trip south from Dakar for 7 days. Matt will head north to Mauritania. Consider this another reminder that you may need a scooter trip in West Africa in your life. We have low key 7-day trips with minimal hardship. We also have longer trips that have a manageable amount of hardship with a disproportionately high amount of rewarding and unforgettable experiences that you will look back upon fondly for the rest of your life. In the second category it would be hard to top Bissau to the Highlands of Guinea leaving on January 7th.

38. July 9th was my birthday but the only anniversary that matters to me this year is July 13th. That date marked one year being off benzodiazepines. I have not talked about it here. The short version is this: I started taking valium (and later ativan) for sporadic panic attacks. Then I started having panic attacks more often. Then COVID happened.

Our COVID lockdown was unusual. We lived in what was more or less a small commune with our friends. We had lots of sunshine, a swimming pool and a well stocked bar. But daytime joy belied nighttime anxiety.

We had just relocated our business at great cost and now we were staring down an indefinite closure. The borders were also closed indefinitely. Everywhere. Our other source of income? A travel company. Yeah, things were bad. Bintou was also several months pregnant. And each day we got new and often conflicting information about COVID. I was freaking out. So I drank and took ativan (NOT MEDICAL ADVICE OR LIFE ADVICE OR ANYTHING ADVICE, PLEASE DO THE OPPOSITE).

Things turned out alright in the end. The lockdown ended. The borders opened. Bintou gave birth to a beautiful baby girl. Our business survived.

But I continued taking ativan. Now I couldn’t sleep without it. This continued until April 2022. I was fatigued, unmotivated and starting to notice some aspects of cognitive impairment and memory loss. I decided I would stop taking them.

I tapered my dosage, but didn’t take enough time to do so. When I finally jumped off, I had set myself up to get absolutely rocked by benzo withdrawal. I am not going to get into all of it here. It deserves it own post. And it is worth talking about, if only as a cautionary tale about benzos and a chance to connect with other people who have gone through the same.

Benzo withdrawal was/is without a doubt the most difficult thing I have ever gone through. There was a cascade of physical symptoms, but it was the continuous flirtation with madness that nearly destroyed me. Madness. Now, I understand what that word means.

After 9 months, I turned a corner. I haven’t had a depersonalization/derealization episode since then (what? Yeah. I will get into it in another post). And despite ripe circumstances, I haven’t had a panic attack since then either. After over a year of not having a benzo in my system, I can honestly say that I’m doing better now than I was before I started taking them.

Anyway, as I’ve said three times now, it warrants future writing. For now I will just say one more thing and this goes back to **#4. You can enjoy and be fulfilled with day to day life and still feel rudderless. You can be happy and confused. You can have panic attacks despite waking up and looking forward to each day. You can have an unmistakeable mission in life and still search for purpose. All of this is possible and ok and normal.

Yes, yes, Phil, there are religions and spiritual practices and therapy for this sort of thing. Yes, there are. And those things are important and meaningful. Anything that helps you find the answer — the answer or your answer. But also anything that helps you to be comfortable not knowing it. Uncertainty is an unnatural companion. For whatever reason, at 38, we’re good together.