Estimated reading time: 11 minutes
I have now been to Marrakech, Morocco, and I have opinions.
Nobody asked for them.
I have never in my life allowed that to be a deterrent.
What follows is a rigorous comparative assessment of two civilizations: one ancient, layered, and so quietly confident it doesn’t require your validation or anyone else’s, and one that looked at a pickup truck, a vehicle historically designed to haul things, and thought: what if we made this cost $72,000 and called it The Intimidator?
I will try to be evenhanded. I want to be transparent upfront that I will fail, so we can all relax and enjoy what’s coming.
Let us begin with where America wins. There is one category.
Showers
Hot water. Meaningful pressure. A stall large enough that you are not forced to make urgent decisions about which body part to prioritize. In a country where water is a desert commodity rather than something people assume will just keep coming out of the wall forever because it always has, showers are an afterthought. I understand this. It does not make me feel better about the fact that showers is our entry in the ledger of human civilization. We had our moment and we contributed plumbing.
Moving on.
While standing in the desert contemplating our one achievement, I thought about “A Horse With No Name” by America, a band that named itself after a country and then wrote a song about a man who rode through the desert for nine days and never named the horse.
Nine days.
The partial list of what he could have called it: Puddles. Drizzle. Moist, which would have been medically accurate and personally upsetting to everyone, which feels right for a desert.
Perrier. Janet. The Horse, which is the naming equivalent of writing “stuff” on a grocery list but would have at least demonstrated a baseline awareness that an animal was involved.
He called it nothing.
Janet carried him nine days across the desert unnamed, and I think about her with a specific, unresolvable grief that I have never attempted to explain to a therapist because I already know how it ends and it does not end well for either of us.
The Part Where Marrakech Wins Everything Else, Which Is Most Things
Marrakech has something America has been attempting to achieve for its entire existence with absolutely no success: Judaism, Christianity, and Islam coexisting in the same city, in functional harmony, having apparently read one another’s sacred texts and found the experience interesting rather than a personal affront. Three major world religions. One city. No marketing budget. No bumper stickers.
That last part matters.
In Virginia, where I live, I have seen bumper stickers where one Christian church communicates, through font choice alone, that it is considerably more engaging than the Christian church down the road, that God is available in multiple formats and theirs has better parking and a more forgiving attitude toward brunch.
In Marrakech, the call to prayer floats out of the mosque towers five times a day over the entire medina. It is not recruiting. It is not suggesting you comparison shop. It is simply the sound of belief existing in a city, aimed upward rather than at the guy in the next lane. I stood in the medina at dawn listening to it and felt genuinely embarrassed on behalf of the bumper stickers, which cannot feel embarrassed for themselves.
The Entrepreneurial Spirit, Or: That Monkey Has A Business Model
Before I left, a number of well-meaning people expressed concern that I would be targeted for being American. That I would arrive and be immediately identified as a citizen of the United States of Assholes and treated accordingly. They genuinely believed the rest of the world was as focused on us as we are on ourselves, which is the most American assumption a person can make, and they were making it without any apparent awareness of that, which somehow makes it worse.
Here is what happened instead: nothing.
Not “tense nothing.”
Not “loaded nothing.”
Just life, continuing, in all directions, without any particular interest in where I was from or what my country was currently doing to embarrass itself. The medina did not pause. No one asked about the election, our foreign policy, our trucks, our president, or our general spiritual condition as a people. The souks were full. Mint tea appeared. A man sold me saffron I almost certainly overpaid for and we were both satisfied and went about our days. America did not come up once.
We are a country that has fully convinced itself the entire world is watching us, waiting anxiously for our next move. Marrakech was not waiting. Marrakech was having a completely sufficient Tuesday without us, and had been for about a thousand years.
I should note that upon my return, I was yelled at by American customs. So if anyone was monitoring me as a potential threat to the established order, it was my own government. This tracks.
A monkey, however, had opinions.
He was a small monkey employed by a man in Jemaa el-Fna, the great night market square at the heart of the medina, a UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage site where food stalls, snake charmers, and musicians all compete for your attention simultaneously and somehow nobody loses. His employer’s entire operation was: monkey, sunglasses, photographs available for a negotiated fee. Clean. Focused. When the monkey looked at me directly, and he did look at me directly, something passed between us. He had assessed my country of origin and arrived at a conclusion, and the conclusion was not flattering. He was wearing better sunglasses than I was, so I was in no position to argue. I paid the man. I moved on. The monkey watched me go with the quiet professional disappointment of someone who has seen this before, knows exactly how it ends, and stopped being surprised about it years ago.
Nobody else in Marrakech cared that I was American.
The monkey cared.
I have a recurring dream about this, nightly.
What Is Also Not There
There are no pickup trucks in Marrakech. There are things that need transporting and things that transport them, matched appropriately to the task, without anyone deciding the vehicle should also communicate something about the driver’s relationship to freedom. Marrakech never developed the specific civilizational anxiety that makes the luxury pickup truck necessary. They looked at the concept and skipped it the way a well-adjusted person skips an argument they know they can’t win.
There are also no buildings named after Donald Trump. No hotels, towers, plazas, or fountains. I looked with some dedication. Not one structure in the ancient medina, the new city, the boulevards, the markets, or the gardens has been named after a New York real estate developer. The people of Marrakech, when faced with the question of what to call a place, apparently considered a range of options and landed elsewhere every single time.
Not even for the donkey sanctuary.
I cannot fully explain why the donkey sanctuary is the detail that lands this for me. But it is, and there it is, and I’m leaving it alone.
The City That Has Not Checked The Time In A Thousand Years
Marrakech operates on a different relationship with time than America does, and by different I mean correct.
Dinner does not begin at seven because you have a reservation and a babysitter until ten. Dinner begins when it begins, which might be nine, or might be later, and the food arrives when it is ready, which is not a function of the kitchen being slow but of the food requiring the time it requires. A tagine cooked in two hours tastes like two hours. A tagine cooked in twenty-five minutes because you have somewhere to be tastes like a decision you made in a hurry, and everyone at the table knows it, and nobody says anything, and that is somehow worse.
The night market in Jemaa el-Fna does not hit its stride until late evening. Not because Moroccans are night owls in the American sense, where staying up late is a personality trait you mention to seem interesting. But because the day has its own arc and the night has its own arc and both of them get to finish. Nobody is cutting the evening short to beat traffic. There is no actual traffic to beat. There is just the evening, which continues until it doesn’t.
America, by contrast, is a country in a permanent sprint toward a destination it cannot name. We eat at our desks. We describe ourselves as busy the way other cultures describe themselves as well. We have optimized the joy out of waiting for anything, and in doing so have made the things themselves slightly worse, and we do not talk about this because we are too busy to notice.
I sat in Marrakech and ate food that took two hours and it was the best meal I have had in years. Then I came home and ordered a pizza on my phone and it was there in twenty-two minutes and I ate it standing over the sink and I am only now, writing this, realizing what that says about me.
Religion, Pork, and a Conversation I Need To Have With My Pig
The food in Marrakech is extraordinary in a way that reframes every meal you have previously eaten as a rough draft you should have been embarrassed to turn in. Tagines. Couscous. Pastilla. Fresh bread arriving from somewhere, constantly. Spices deployed in quantities suggesting the people doing the cooking are showing off, which they are, and they have absolutely earned it.
There is, however, no pork.
This is consistent with Islamic dietary law and I respect it without reservation. What I cannot move past is the mathematical reality that two of the three religions currently sharing a city in functional harmony are technically on the same side of this issue. Judaism and Islam have both looked at the pig and said: no.
Christianity looked at the pig and said: actually, and also please bring more. I am not a religious man in any meaningful sense, but I sided with Christianity here with every cell in my body and several cells that weren’t paying attention.
I left Marrakech craving bacon. A pork chop. Pork belly slow-cooked until it stops pretending to be anything other than what it is. The pig in every format science and cuisine have thus far developed.
This is complicated by the fact that I have a pig. As you may already know, her name is Trouble McFussbucket. She lives on our farm outside Charlottesville and she is a member of the family, which I say with complete sincerity and also the following disclosure: I once dropped a piece of bacon on the kitchen floor and she ate it before I could process what was happening. She looked, while eating it, entirely at peace with herself. No conflict. No hesitation. Bacon, floor, yes.
Hey. Trouble. What if that was your Mom?
She did not answer. She looked for more bacon. She has never once seemed troubled by any of this, and I find that both admirable and deeply unsettling. I thought about her more on the flight home than I thought about any other subject, including whether I had repacked my toiletries correctly, which I had not, and which cost me seventeen dollars at the airport.
Indiana Jones, Briefly, Armed With A Phone At Fourteen Percent
On my first morning in the medina, before I had developed any working theory of where I was or how anything functioned, someone put me in the sidecar of a 1930s motorcycle and drove me directly into the souks.
I did not ask clarifying questions.
This is consistent with how I make most decisions.
The medina is a medieval labyrinth of alleyways roughly the width of a firmly held opinion, packed with vendors, donkeys, scooters, and tourists making the same face I was making. Navigating it by motorcycle sidecar made no logistical sense. It would have been faster and safer to park and walk, in the same way that it would be faster to park at the mall and walk than to drive a motorcycle sidecar through the food court past the Auntie Anne’s. I understood this immediately, made brief eye contact with my own judgment, and got in anyway.
The bike was from the 1930s. I was in a sidecar. I was in an ancient North African city on my first morning before I had earned any of it. For ninety minutes, I was Indiana Jones. I did not have a whip. I did not have a fedora. My only available weapon was an iPhone at fourteen percent battery, which would not have deterred anyone, and which I was also using to take photographs, further reducing its potential as a defensive tool. But I felt it. The feeling. I am keeping it. It is not subject to revision.
You cannot have it.
I have been to Marrakech.
I ate beautifully for days and spent the flight home in quiet negotiation with my conscience about a pig.
I was launched into a medieval city by sidecar before I had unpacked.
I watched three religions share a city without a single bumper sticker between them.
I was assessed and dismissed by an entire civilization and it was the most clarifying experience of my adult life, which is either inspiring or depressing depending on what you think of my adult life.
And…
The donkey sanctuary had no fancy name.
But it should have.
That felt like the whole point.
More from the trip:
- Pictures from the trip, tucked into my Instagram account.
- A song about riding in the sidecar by my “band” is below:
See my Amazon author page and buy my books.
His first manuscript was composed entirely of punctuation marks and confused sketches. He's since published "Not Bukowski" (poems that don't rhyme) and "Slop and Swell from a Festering Mind" (essays so concerning that bookstores check on his well-being). He once spent three hours photographing a rare bird that turned out to be a plastic bag, and he's the only person banned from church bake sales for "weaponized brownies." Inheriting absurdism from Vonnegut and Adams, sprawling narratives from Irving, and weaponized failure from Moore, he writes about conflicted everymen struggling through supernatural chaos.
He has two new, offbeat novels waiting for an agent or a publisher: "Truth Tastes Like Pennies" and "Elliot Nessie."
He remains unconvinced that birds aren't surveillance drones.
More biographic lies...err...info.
- Marrakech v. America - May 5, 2026
- They Parachuted the Beaver - May 5, 2026
- Red Eye Has Nothing to Fear - May 2, 2026
