from the Solomon Islands) is the huge blue water-window that gives on to the Atlantis’s famous Lost Chambers aquarium and promises the experience of “exploring the mysterious ruins of Atlantis.” My companion asked if the curtains might be left open overnight. Sure, I said. I got into bed and switched off the lights. The incandescence of the aquarium flooded the room, which now was subsumed by the thalassic realm and, so it felt to me, teemed with silent pelagic beings. “This so cool,” my companion said. I smiled at her and hid my face under the bedclothes. Eventually I peeked out and, in the hope of overcoming my terror, forced myself to watch the approach of eels, sharks, and other fishes. A small ray scooted up the window with its white underside against the glass—charming little spook, from one point of view, monster of otherness from another. I was in the latter camp. For hours I lay in an insomniacal agony of submersion that ended onlywhen a pair of frogmen, each in a cloud of fish, swam toward us and began to wipe the glass.
The speedboat operator gave us tea. “I say we head back,” Ollie said. “This isn’t working out.”
Dibba was hot, hot, hot. It was July, easily over forty degrees Celsius. Waiting around for the other divers was not an option. Later we heard that Trevor Winters, who was far from being a bad guy and not long afterward was himself the subject of one of those Dubai evaporations, thanked everyone for their efforts and distributed commemorative T-shirts bearing the words TED WILSON POSSE .
By the time I got back to The Situation, I was wiped out. I took a cold (i.e., lukewarm) shower, dressed to my underclothes, and watched a jet skier fooling around in the lagoon. Then I climbed into my Pasha Royale X400™ massage chair and programmed a twenty-minute Full Body Integrated Shiatsu Massage, Intense mode. I selected Ambient Classics (the Pasha has built-in speakers) and pressed Start Bodywork. The chair and I began to tremble.
THE PASHA REMAINS MY GO-TO COMFORTER. I’m not sure how I would cope without it. Arguably this reveals something inadequate about me, but what is a private dwelling if not a redoubt against the tyranny of adequacy? And what’s wrong with having a favorite chair? What difference does it make if its components include motors and rollers and air bags? Are these to be distinguished, analytically, from casters and springs and cushions? So what if one’s chair produces physically pleasant vibrations and frictions? Or is an uncomfortable chair better than a comfortable one? Bottom line: the Pasha hurts nobody. It’s not as if it’s stuffed with minuscule underlings coerced into massaging me.
About nine minutes and fifteen seconds into a twenty-minute Full Body Shiatsu, the Pasha’s heavy-duty twin rollers—Cagneyand Lacey, I call them—get serious and rumble up the S-track and start the Deep Tissue Knead action on the muscles that surround my upper spine. Here, I invariably open my eyes and look out the windows. It is soothing to look out the windows in combination with a Pasha massage, especially if there’s an active construction site in view. I have become an aficionado of this species of vista. Admittedly, this has a compulsory aspect: I have yet to live in a Dubai apartment that does not give on to a scene of buildings being built. There has never been a time, in fact, when the stupendous and beautiful Burj Dubai/Khalifa itself has not been in sight from one window or another. The slow theater of its years-long rising, its growing little by little taller and more slender until finally it achieved its last sheen and height, so that a person in almost any populated part of the emirate now has the option of looking up and contemplating nothing less than a wonder of the world—this excitement has been and continues to be a must-see part of the Dubai experience, a great theme of which has been the turning inside out of the optical fictions for which the
The speedboat operator gave us tea. “I say we head back,” Ollie said. “This isn’t working out.”
Dibba was hot, hot, hot. It was July, easily over forty degrees Celsius. Waiting around for the other divers was not an option. Later we heard that Trevor Winters, who was far from being a bad guy and not long afterward was himself the subject of one of those Dubai evaporations, thanked everyone for their efforts and distributed commemorative T-shirts bearing the words TED WILSON POSSE .
By the time I got back to The Situation, I was wiped out. I took a cold (i.e., lukewarm) shower, dressed to my underclothes, and watched a jet skier fooling around in the lagoon. Then I climbed into my Pasha Royale X400™ massage chair and programmed a twenty-minute Full Body Integrated Shiatsu Massage, Intense mode. I selected Ambient Classics (the Pasha has built-in speakers) and pressed Start Bodywork. The chair and I began to tremble.
THE PASHA REMAINS MY GO-TO COMFORTER. I’m not sure how I would cope without it. Arguably this reveals something inadequate about me, but what is a private dwelling if not a redoubt against the tyranny of adequacy? And what’s wrong with having a favorite chair? What difference does it make if its components include motors and rollers and air bags? Are these to be distinguished, analytically, from casters and springs and cushions? So what if one’s chair produces physically pleasant vibrations and frictions? Or is an uncomfortable chair better than a comfortable one? Bottom line: the Pasha hurts nobody. It’s not as if it’s stuffed with minuscule underlings coerced into massaging me.
About nine minutes and fifteen seconds into a twenty-minute Full Body Shiatsu, the Pasha’s heavy-duty twin rollers—Cagneyand Lacey, I call them—get serious and rumble up the S-track and start the Deep Tissue Knead action on the muscles that surround my upper spine. Here, I invariably open my eyes and look out the windows. It is soothing to look out the windows in combination with a Pasha massage, especially if there’s an active construction site in view. I have become an aficionado of this species of vista. Admittedly, this has a compulsory aspect: I have yet to live in a Dubai apartment that does not give on to a scene of buildings being built. There has never been a time, in fact, when the stupendous and beautiful Burj Dubai/Khalifa itself has not been in sight from one window or another. The slow theater of its years-long rising, its growing little by little taller and more slender until finally it achieved its last sheen and height, so that a person in almost any populated part of the emirate now has the option of looking up and contemplating nothing less than a wonder of the world—this excitement has been and continues to be a must-see part of the Dubai experience, a great theme of which has been the turning inside out of the optical fictions for which the
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