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Sparks

Year - 0

We all, no matter the person, find ourselves at a point. The moment I started writing this - a point. The moment I finish - a point. The moment you start reading this - a point. The moment you finish - you get the idea. And a myriad of events but moreso decisions lead us to these variad points. Our decisions but, again, moreso other people's decisions brought us to this crossroads. A crossroads unlike any we've seen before and, with apologies for being obtuse, unlike any we'll see again. And this laboured point springs to my mind as I walk outside everyday, as I walk out onto the streets of Bangkok and look across to the Khao San Road. It forces me to question my own imagination, I read 'The Beach', I dreamed of the viscerality of this place, I dreamed of the real world no matter how fake it actually was. In a previous life I dreamed of another thing, a world that lay beyond my own that I promised myself I would see, that I would drown in, in the utter bliss of something else. And so I suppose that explains the mild lance of electricity that passes through me everyday as I walk barefoot into the chaotic vivance that greets me. How the tamest inclination shapes our weaving path, malleable beings are we not? If I have learned anything, it is one thing. There is no freedom in location. Our prisons follow in persistent troop behind us. We can choose to look only forwards and that may work but more likely a fool's paradise is sought, a white beach with blue seas and coconut heaved palms absent of any ill but, more pertinently, absent of ourselves. For we are a troubled generation, corrupted by ease and blighted by want. There exists a wonderfully pertinent line that has America being the only country that went from barbarity to decadence without civilisation in between. What a microcosm this generation is. And so we spread across the globe in search of something the homeland couldn't provide, of a future our parents granted us but for innumerate reasons chose not themselves. But nonetheless I have outdone myself, I think a little of my delight in standing each day in Bangkok's stifling heat is the realisation that somehow through poor velocity and great fortune I am in the place that I desired to be. Damn my incapacity to roll around on the floor kicking my heels and whoop! Though we must return to freedom. What freedom I have now, a terrifying freedom, a license to ill, an absence of reason not to make myself happy. Who else can we blame now? If I may speak for the general population I'd say the blanket of discontent is a reasonably warm and comfortable one. It is a patchwork of obligation and imperative. How does this lost generation find itself? In the anarchy of Khao San or in the peace of a Buddhist temple? I fear we know too much and know too little. We have the world at our feet and we trample it in selfish search for fulfillment. The noblest of aims drives our parents to give us this gift and yet it is simplest of evolution's gifts that we have it. We all play this zero sum game, the environment varies but the rules endure. You can't help but laugh at life's unblinking stare.

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Location: Trok Kasap, Chana Songkhram, Phra Nakhon, Bangkok 10200, Thailand

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