the city of bangkok

Bangkok is a city with many gifts. It is very cluttered, with very cluttered people, and the city reaches into the sky so deeply that one forgets to look up. It’s almost as though there is so much on the ground that the miracle of the heavens is overlooked. When the eyes are cast upward, however, there is a certain moment of anti-climax. It is at once beautiful and blue, and tinged with smoggy clouds. Then once again the gaze is drawn toward terra firma, packed with cement structures and glass hotels and interspersed with exotic parks and trees and streets lined with garbage and dirty stray dogs and rats and garland vendors and men with bandaged amputations begging for change. This city is alternately filthy and serene; chaotic and quiet. Cars and trucks and busses and motorscooters weave around each other with terrifying closeness, yet there is a grace to the flow of traffic. Horns are beeped to alert guards of oncoming cars, not to show anger or frustration. Saffron-robed monks walk barefoot among children on bicycles and sizzling meat frying on street carts. Yesterday I had to duck an elephant being led down Suhkumvit on my way to the train station.

On our way to a meeting Sunday night, my Colleague directed us down a road unmarked by our map, looking for a shortcut. Where we ended up seemed straight out of the beginning of Blade Runner: noodle vendors lined along streetsides, fresh fruit peeled and chopped before your eyes, drugstore wares piled in stacks to the ceiling beneath corrugated metal roofs. Scooters beep along, children ride tricycles, we cleared a cement bridge and found ourselves in the car park of the church we sought.

Yesterday I felt overwhelmed with the idea of being in Thailand by myself for weeks. Today I feel better about it. What I have seen of the city and Thai people, I feel neither intimidated nor barred. There is a comfort in being a stranger in a strange land, I feel secure in anonymity, but there is also a pull toward the familiar. I ate McDonald’s for dinner last night. It was hot and nasty and I felt terribly guilty afterwards, but I was too hungry to chance a foreign meal. That is a small piece of familiar I seek. Speaking with the Westerners at the meeting last night put me right at ease, as did getting email addresses and promises of seeing each other in the future.



dinner tuesday night.



and pad pong, the market district, where you can buy a fabulous knock off chloe bag or watch a woman eat a banana or shoot ping pong balls out of her pussy. i did neither.

thaidayone

i woke up in Bangkok this morning, which is about the most unusual place yet. i realize i still have to get an electrical adapter, and my hunt for the puma store was in vain as well, although my shoes are displayed on park benches and signs around the city.

getting here was really no problem. once we landed in Bangkok, the first thing i heard was Kansas on the airplane pa system. the heat hit like a joke stepping off the plane; i kept waiting for it to stop, but it kept rolling on. a 30 minute ride to the hotel, zombie-like in my exhaustion, i went down a little after midnight.

my Colleague rang me three or four times this morning before i could muster the strength to get out of bed. 11:00 found me with a cup of instant Nescafe and a clif bar in the hotel lobby, trying to shake cvs brand sleep aid from my head. 60 baht for a cup of coffee, and i still didn’t know the conversion rate. on a mission to cash a traveller’s checque, we walked through the lobby, perfumed heavily with lemongrass oil, and out into the street. hot and muggy, god yes, but not unbearable. the stench of garbage and frying meat hangs in the air, streetside vendors hound us to buy suitcases, dresses, blouses, suits, crippled men cling to the corners of buildings, begging for change. after returning to the hotel for my passport to cash a checque, 1 USD to 37.58 Baht,  we took a train to the siam center. it teemed with shoppers, lacoste stores, booming dj voices over the pa system, and nary a puma store in sight. hot, gritty, and starting to get hungry, we made our way back toward the hotel and stopped at a luncheon counter for dejeuner. i sat next to a brit eating a club sandwich and a cup of coffee, enjoying my own green curry and iced coffee, feeling a little easier about being in Bangkok.

i stopped into a spa and massage parlor across the street from our hotel after getting a good recommendation from the Colleague. being that i am in the land of the Hand Job, i have no desire to pay some poor girl to put her hands down my pants. i just want to work a 24 hour plane trip out of my back. an hour and an expensive 600 baht (less than 20 USD), i picked my way back to the hotel. so here i sit. writing with arms and hands like jelly from an hour-long royal thai massage. in Thailand.

flying into tomorrow

so, you know, just hanging out in narita/Tokyo airport, off of a surprisingly smooth 12 hour flight from Chicago. it’s 3:27 am indy time, 4:27 pm Tokyo time.

connecting to the internet…excellent. what’s the exchange rate for yen? 500 yen = ? USD?

i really appreciated having 12 hours to not have to make conversation with anyone. to sit and think and watch bad movies and fly into tomorrow and remark that –59 degrees Fahrenheit is –51 degrees Celsius.

and did you know mainland China is the People’s Republic of China? the Republic of China is Taiwan, China’s sworn enemy.

things you learn on an international flight. i wonder if this qualifies as going around the world. not yet, really.

this is about as good as it gets, currently.

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this weather is phenomenal. it makes me want to sit outside and read. go hiking. sit by a campfire. just be and absorb it. the air here is so fresh and cool and green. it feels like the ocean, sometimes. the pine trees reach tall and straight, the coffee is rich and mellow, the school cafeteria serves organic food, there are big smiles all day long.

i heard a man today say, in about 3 minutes, the summary of exactly how i feel about people in general, and the current human condition specifically. as he was talking, i felt a physical pull inside of me, a visceral response to what i feel is my truth and beliefs. it was really a unique feeling. it was unsettling at the same time, because there is no one way to tackle the ingrained dependence we as a society have on fast everything, television and robbery and everything without integrity and fix me, i deserve it without the work, etc. the speaker slightly resembled willem dafoe, also.

i ran into an old friend of mine in broad ripple over the weekend, and i am concerned for him. the words of the speaker i mentioned reminded me, and i want nothing more than to pray for my friend’s wellbeing and dreamchasing and livingbig.

i'll see your hour and raise you a pacific time zone

my internal clock is destroyed. kaput. first i lose an hour two weeks ago for the first time in 30 years, and now i’ve gained like 4. or is it 18? anyway, at 11 pm my time, i was watching the sun set in Seattle. I feel hit.

i have been turned on to lonely planet publications for my upcoming travels. big ups to recovery dog for that one.

a bowl of tofu pho and i am dying to go to bed. i have a pretty extensive ocd list of things to accomplish before i leave for Thailand next week, but it will have to wait. it includes things like finding a good driving route to los angeles, as i thing my brother and i are going to meander west, purchasing a ticket to bonnaroo, and giving notice of my absence to area. someone remind me of these things, will ya? gawd, i’m going to crash. too many late shmoopy nights for me lately. peace out.

ps today was the second time in two days that people have assumed i am from california. a sign of things to come? AND i got a new set of golf clubs yesterday. i plan to spend my next week home at the range. ooh yea.

"home"

Being away from home so much gives me frequent occasions to reflect on the nature of “home” and my ever-present desire to live elsewhere than where I do. I have lived in Indianapolis for a little over 8 years, and only recently have I found that I miss it when I’m not there. There is a certain feeling I have when the plane is approaching, or I see the signage for local highways, and I feel a sense of relief. I still feel, and I fear I may have this with everyplace I go, that it’s not “me.” That I’ll know where I am meant to be when I get there. I have several favorites, Los Angeles, Bloomington, and others, but what would it be like to live there? Have human beings always been dissatisfied with their surroundings, or have we only recently begun to dislocate ourselves?

I have had a few “homes” throughout the years, but I believe myself incapable at this point of having the willingness to settle down. I think I’ll know when it’s time, though. Right now, there is too much wanderlust coursing through my veins, too much excitement and adventure to let up. And why not live like this for now? Go big and then go home, right? Greatness often comes in packages as ephemeral as they are breathtaking. I think of ideas, structures, celebrity, love, lust, fashion, politics, heroism. Are we creatures meant to stay in one spot, be with one person, have one goal? I certainly don’t feel that way right now.

Alternatively, I do have faith, or maybe the socially acceptable norm has got me in its clutches, that when I “grow up,” I will “settle down.” Get a real job, get married and have kids and fade away. Bullocks. I want to be big, change things on a bigger scale. Yes, I want the love and the kids and a nice home, but it all goes back to my original thought in writing this: what is home? What dictates where we go?

I think I will let more to come with this thought…


and this is a portrait of mao on the side of an abandoned building in downtown tampa.

untitled

two orange butterflies dancing in the air brought it all back to me—the sand on the sidewalk working its way into my flip-flop, the sharp illumination of tree leaves in spring light, the heat, coarse grass, low ceiling of a sky, and instantly I was 15 years old, high, terrified, walking down another nameless street in florida. these feelings turn inside my gut like a shame-soaked blade, a needle i swallowed years ago that pierces my gut every time i visit florida. it comes with the dry pine smell, carried on a warm gust: so gentle, but so mocking it feels like a slap in the face. low morning sun, teasing through blue-grey cloud cover is just menacing enough to bring me to my knees, to suffer the 6 inch drop and rebound of my heart. the sweet, delicious hint of chlorine on the cool breeze seduces like a diseased lover. eyes droop shut, acquiescing to the battle axe noonday sun, skin glistening with sweat and sunscreen, baking.

the word of the day is orifices

that thar’s what we call a SEA COW

**

Tampa’s awesome. So awesome, in fact, that I can’t get any writing done! Damn!

OK. So. It’s 80 degrees and sunny, muggy enough so that my hair curls well, but not so that you can’t breathe in the mid-afternoon.

School is close enough to walk to, but far enough that after a walk to in the morning, from for lunch, a stop at the Jerk Hut for fried plantains and rice and beans, whilst watching the demolition of the building across the street, and another jaunt back to school, my feet were just swollen enough that I had to kick the shoes off last period. But Daver got the car so I didn’t have to hobble back.

Our Marriot is just downtown enough that we can walk to anything we want, like the coffeeshop in the Hyatt, or the Tampa Museum of Art, where I will be going tomorrow to take in the Maurice Sendak exhibit and the Keith Haring exhibit. After a short foot tour of the Seaport and some of downtown, we hit the pool and sauna and ate Boca burgers poolside before Vermont and I caught a meeting. Now, mapquest said this meeting was .3 miles away. My feet are currently telling me that it was much, much farther away than that, but we got to it on S. Hyde Park, 8:15 pm, and 100 people were there. It was a good meeting, rife with hotties and perverts and tweekers and crackheads, and I realize that if I had gotten sober in AA, i’d probably be an entirely different person, less vulgar and probably less punchy. I love Narcotics Anonymous.

I am going to Thailand in a few weeks, and I am going to take a few more weeks there to careen around southeast Asia, a la Mala in A Trip to the Stars. Helloo Geza, here I come.

I have some other, non-published writing to do, so good night, dream of ways to help the world. Peace Out.

tidbits

today i was told that i’d make a good wife. i feel really slighted by that remark, like it’s my responsibility to “make” someone a “good” wife. bullocks.

i saw a man who had fallen on the escalator in the airport. he was at the bottom, and no one moved. a woman was yelling “dammit, steve!” while another one finally came over and pulled him up. from my vantage, all i saw was an arm reaching helplessly upward, a walker several feet away where it had rolled off the escalator. after he had been thrust toward the walker, he checked his elbow and looked ashamed.

i have seen more louis vuitton luggage today alone than i have all school year. there must be a convention.