Day 34 - Bangkok
Packing my bag again I bid farewell to the old capital and head again for the new one. It's been restorative. After an ice coffee at the train station I wander over to check on my iminent train. A mere hour late. It doesn't matter and I feel equanimity at the wait. This is the flip side to my complaints about constant planning. Compared to a holiday where every delay and inconvenience feels like a robbery of time and experience I am shackled to no particular schedule. I need not squeeze every moment for all it's worth and can just be. The things I've written so far are riddled with contradictions like that. One day saying that being in the moment is impossible, the next day that the moment is precisely where I find myself. But that is reflective of my feelings, contradictory, inconsistent, sometimes black, often grey, occasionally white. To write down these feelings helps to make sense of them, even when they veer and drunkenly swerve between the extremes.
Having left Ayutthaya's slow, timeless content the great urban hell is upon me again. The train tracks run in the shadows of enormous concrete highways.
Their seamless sides evoking the future as much as the broken surfaces of the stupas I have just left behind evoke the past. The two stop journey on the MRT to my hotel costs more than the two hour train journey. The women in the hotel reception seem baffled by my request to check in and I find myself doubting it's a reception at all as it better resembles a kitchen/nail salon/creche/flop house. But I manage to get keys to a room that is spacious and fine and cheap with a 'fuck you' lizard in the ceiling panels for company. The street it is on is pure tourist fodder - Irish bars, sports bars, Irish sports bars. And hookers. Lots of hookers. It's in the Nana area which is, as I later discover, a big red light district. They regularly grab my arm as I walk past and offer a good time for a good price. Sadly none offer to 'love me long time', which is really what I'm after.
Have you ever listened to the lyrics of the Avril Lavigne song Sk8ter Boi? She is such a smug bitch in that song, it should have been called 'Schadenfreude Grrl'. We all make mistakes at high school, investing in the bad people, ignoring the good. Peer pressure is a huge societal factor in the way we act and to rise above it as Avril suggests we should is a feat few immature minds manage. Is she claiming she never allowed the opinions of her friends to alter her behavior? Piffle. And what's wrong with doing ballet? It's a neglected artform that suffers greatly these days from funding cuts and dwindling audiences. Have you seen Swan Lake Avril? Probably not, the clothes wouldn't be baggy enough for you. It's also very demanding on the body, far more so than waiting backstage after the show. You brag about helping your 'superstar' boyfriend write lyrics for a song about your rival (which sounds awfully like a hit-piece against someone who has no platform to respond). You didn't even write most of the lyrics to the song I am discussing here though so how much help are you really going to be? Single-parenting must be incredibly difficult for the adult and potentially damaging to a child so why revel in the fact that your rival finds herself in that situation Avril? Perhaps your womb will be as cold and barren as your sense of charity. You're a hanger-on, a glorified groupie and your boyfriend is going to dump you when he realises this. Fuck you Avril.
I wake up around 3AM consumed with a manic loathing for Bangkok. Sleep becomes impossible as my mind burns with a passionate desire not to be here. I hadn't entirely warmed to the place before but this was something else. The concrete was the warning sign that I initially observed with passing distate. But I should have known as those massive pillars rose above me holding roads, and pillars above them holding more roads and as-yet unfinished pillars above them...because it's no use Mr. James it's flyovers all the way down. Unable to calm my thoughts, I write
Packing my bag again I bid farewell to the old capital and head again for the new one. It's been restorative. After an ice coffee at the train station I wander over to check on my iminent train. A mere hour late. It doesn't matter and I feel equanimity at the wait. This is the flip side to my complaints about constant planning. Compared to a holiday where every delay and inconvenience feels like a robbery of time and experience I am shackled to no particular schedule. I need not squeeze every moment for all it's worth and can just be. The things I've written so far are riddled with contradictions like that. One day saying that being in the moment is impossible, the next day that the moment is precisely where I find myself. But that is reflective of my feelings, contradictory, inconsistent, sometimes black, often grey, occasionally white. To write down these feelings helps to make sense of them, even when they veer and drunkenly swerve between the extremes.
Having left Ayutthaya's slow, timeless content the great urban hell is upon me again. The train tracks run in the shadows of enormous concrete highways.
Have you ever listened to the lyrics of the Avril Lavigne song Sk8ter Boi? She is such a smug bitch in that song, it should have been called 'Schadenfreude Grrl'. We all make mistakes at high school, investing in the bad people, ignoring the good. Peer pressure is a huge societal factor in the way we act and to rise above it as Avril suggests we should is a feat few immature minds manage. Is she claiming she never allowed the opinions of her friends to alter her behavior? Piffle. And what's wrong with doing ballet? It's a neglected artform that suffers greatly these days from funding cuts and dwindling audiences. Have you seen Swan Lake Avril? Probably not, the clothes wouldn't be baggy enough for you. It's also very demanding on the body, far more so than waiting backstage after the show. You brag about helping your 'superstar' boyfriend write lyrics for a song about your rival (which sounds awfully like a hit-piece against someone who has no platform to respond). You didn't even write most of the lyrics to the song I am discussing here though so how much help are you really going to be? Single-parenting must be incredibly difficult for the adult and potentially damaging to a child so why revel in the fact that your rival finds herself in that situation Avril? Perhaps your womb will be as cold and barren as your sense of charity. You're a hanger-on, a glorified groupie and your boyfriend is going to dump you when he realises this. Fuck you Avril.
I wake up around 3AM consumed with a manic loathing for Bangkok. Sleep becomes impossible as my mind burns with a passionate desire not to be here. I hadn't entirely warmed to the place before but this was something else. The concrete was the warning sign that I initially observed with passing distate. But I should have known as those massive pillars rose above me holding roads, and pillars above them holding more roads and as-yet unfinished pillars above them...because it's no use Mr. James it's flyovers all the way down. Unable to calm my thoughts, I write
Hideous snakes the colour of lovelessness and unhope, cynical, bending.
Surfaces so smooth, polished, unreflecting.
Irresisted as they glide through outskirts and penetrate the city like fungus, growing, growing.
They don't stop to fight the field or the shack, their purpose too grand, haughty, unhalting.
Crissing, crossing, granting a deathly shade from the light, wilting, wilting.
We cower, we shrink, they see the horizon, clear, unblinking.
They'll watch us all die and sit silent, unending.
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