Do Buy (Dubai)

Leah exhales a long, wispy cloud of cigarette smoke from her lungs.  “I can’t believe how much I love this lifestyle,” she sighs.  “It’s so not like me.  Back home I was such a hippie.” 

This is not Leah’s home, however, and right now she looks anything but hippie.  Her high heels are peeking out from under her black dress, and she’s got them propped up against the balcony railing at the top of this high-rise apartment building in Dubai. All things considered – she looks about as concerned with love and nature as Enron was.  I can easily imagine her thumping under a pulsating strobe light in a nightclub, but I can’t very well conjure up a mental image of her, clad in a flowery dress, swaying back and forth in an open field to the sounds of Phish or String Cheese Incident. 

She looks more Dubai Brothel than Doobie Brothers. 

“…Such a hippie.” She repeats with an emphasis on the word such, and then she carries on.  “Seriously, before I came here I loved being out in the country and wasn’t a fan of the city and I didn’t care about money…and I sure as shit didn’t care about shopping.” She waves her cigarette-free hand over her new dress.

Obviously, she’s not exactly cheerful about her transformation from communal earth lover to capitalist city slicker.  Suddenly she looks uncomfortable on this balcony in the sky.

We are both in Dubai to spend a night out “hitting up a club” with mutual friends - something Leah says she can’t imagine herself doing back home, and frankly I can’t imagine myself doing it back home either.  Just hearing someone say that they were hitting up a club used to be verification enough for me that the speaker and I had nothing in common.

I tell Leah I don’t really blame her for shirking her beatnik ethos here though.  The city of Dubai is like a siren from Greek mythology luring in consumers from around the world with its seductive song.   It’s lush with Prada, Gucci, Chanel, Rolex, and a slew of other two-syllable brand names that I recognize from Kanye West lyrics.  A hippie philosophy wouldn’t make sense here.  You can’t ignore money here, and how could anyone possibly feel connected to nature in a place like this?

Right now, we’re both looking out over an urban dreamland.  The twinkling lights from towering white buildings in the distance are winking suggestively at me.  Crystal waters course through man-made inlets and canals below, glimmering as they meander about the city.  Million dollar Ferraris and Porches, glossy with fresh coats of wax, zip around 25 stories beneath us on absurdly spacious highways that wind artfully around electromagnetic metro train cars.  How is a stretch of timber in the middle of a field supposed to compete with this, I ask my ex-hippie friend?

After only a few months in the UAE, I am starting to acknowledge similar changes in myself.  I was never a hippie back home, but I certainly tried to avoid materialism and mindless consumerism in my old life. I tried to focus on creating and building rather than buying. I chose to use my time and energy to write music and stories, push my body to its limits on the wakeboard or in a race, or mentor a student. 

But not here.  Here, I’m noticing something – it’s a subtle paradigm shift with a lifestyle change hanging on its coattails.  The abundant money and affluent way of life in the UAE are making a sneak attack on my philosophy - flanking my transcendentalist values from the backside.    

I tell Leah, “Maybe being a hippie was just a coping mechanism to help you deal with being poor and living in a lousy town.”  She looks at me sideways. I try to clarify.

“What I mean is, maybe your affinity for the outdoors and cheap living was born from necessity.  You knew you were stuck being poor and living in a janky town, so you just convinced yourself that you liked that kind of stuff. Now you have plenty of money to spend and you live in the greatest city on earth, so you don’t have to lie to yourself anymore.”

“Maybe,” she concedes reluctantly while she grinds her cashed cigarette into an ashtray and stands up. 

“Is it time to leave?” I ask.  I look down at my watch and immediately regret that I didn’t snatch up the pricey designer watch I tried on at the Dubai mall today.  My arm is incomplete without it.  Maybe I should go back and pick that up tomorrow, I catch myself thinking – mindless consumerism flanking my old philosophy from the backside. 

The thought alone is atypical of me.  But couple it with the fact that I just bought an overpriced watch here a month ago, and until then I’d never owned a watch at all - let alone two watches, and you’ve got yourself a classic case of materialism - the likes of which a younger version of me would have scoffed at.

We shut the balcony door and leave the warm, breezy Dubai air outside.  In the kitchen now, Leah pours a roller glass full of expensive whiskey and hands it to me. 

I leave the kitchen and stroll over to the window to take one more look out over the skyline before we leave.  On the windowsill I notice that, even on the 21^st floor of a soundly constructed high rise, there are a few little piles of sand.  The desert dust in the UAE is relentless.  It invades everything - from your hair to your car’s interior to the upper floors of a high-rise building in the middle of Dubai.  Sand everywhere.

“I think I know exactly what you mean,” I tell her, looking back and forth from the diamond in my watch to the deposits on the windowsill.  “It’s hard to stay grounded here.” 

I take a sip from my whiskey roller and then balance it on the small mound of sand in the windowsill. Just a few weeks back, I experienced my first sandstorm here in the UAE, and even though I was indoors when it happened I could hear it and see it. 

The sky darkened and the wind gusted furiously from all directions. It blew for thirty minutes, and after it passed I started noticing little piles of the chalky yellow stuff inside.  Sand had seeped into my car and into my flat, apparently through the small openings around the windows.  In each room there were tiny little hills of sand on the windowsills. In my car, a miniature sand dune had formed on my dashboard. 

Regardless of how tightly each window was sealed, some of that stuff still managed to creep in, and it was a nightmare to try and clean it out.  My attempts to clean the sand piles mostly just spread them around.

Standing at the window looking out at nighttime Dubai, I realize that materialism is just a sandstorm in your brain.  You spend most of your life scraping by financially and thinking poorly of those people hovering in the upper crust who spend money so flippantly – those greed mongers who talk about buying stuff all day long. Don’t those people have anything better to do than contemplate what to buy next? 

Then, when you finally get some spending money yourself - it doesn’t matter how tightly you’ve fastened your cerebral windows - some of that buyer mentality slips in through the cracks. Sure, you want your life to be about more than just purchasing things, but when you finally have the opportunity to spend more freely, the consumer ethos starts to creep in and leave little piles of materialistic sand that, try as you might, you can’t get rid of. 


Leah and I both thought we had our windows sealed tight enough. We thought we were immune to mindless consumerism. But we're noticing little deposits of it building up.  We live in the richest country in the world and get paid well for it.  The sand it is creeping in. We thought we didn't care about money, but maybe both of us were just telling ourselves that as a coping mechanism to help us deal with the fact that we had no extra money.  

I check my watch again.  The long hand glides over the sparkling little diamond that rests where the 6 should be.  10:30 p.m. - its go time.  I briefly consider wiping off the sand on the windowsill, but then decide to let it be. Some things just aren’t worth fighting.  Sand in the desert. Materialism in Dubai.  I trail behind the click click of Leah’s new high heels and follow her out the door – all set to “hit up the club.”