Bangkok Blues
Most shocking thing I saw were dog carcasses roasting in the window of a butcher shop
Yesterday I published a Lay Psychiatrist piece which plagiarized my friend, Patrick Jones, a pilot, who is laid up in rural Colorado with a broken foot and can’t fly or do much of anything else. Here is his description of the injury.
“The end of the bone sheared off a whole bundle of nerves that left a portion of my leg/foot numb. Amazing what you take for granted. I shuffle about the house and inadvertently kick door frames in my sock feet or I trip when walking. Nerves regrow at the same rate as fingernails. Pretty fucking slow. So the docs are trying to figure out how long to reach my toes, then we figure out what is never coming back. We did feeling tests and I didn’t feel much. I can feel the pain and the joy of 57 years, just not my foot. Why didn’t life misery go numb as effectively and easily? Funny that….”
This is the text of the email from which I borrowed:
“I have such an insignificant level of experience with cities. I’ve been to quite a few but usually just passing thru. The city I regret not doing more with was Bangkok. We got there after a 16 hr flight, intentionally did not have an itinerary or hotel reservations just to season myself with the raw experience of arriving without any planned purpose. We stepped out on the street and decided to walk left. Rice fields bordered the runways and fences. Previously, I had looked at hotel prices online and they were in the hundreds of dollars which I knew was total bullshit based on the level of country Thailand fit into. We got a cab into the city which amounted to $8 and gave the guy an extra $5 if he knew of nice but modestly priced lodging. He dropped us at a 40 story hotel. I wasn’t optimistic that this would be economical. We arrived at an expansive desk of teak with backpacks remaining on our shoulders and inquired. “Would $30 a nite be okay?” they said quietly. Yup!!, I tried to act like I was thinking about it.
“Twenty second floor. Balcony. I took in the scenery and the smog. A rooster announced his intent to mate somewhere below. Not a combination of sounds that one would expect. We would nap for half an hour and hit the streets while it was still daylight. Well shit, we slept half an hour, plus thirteen and half more.
“What I liked about the room was that the shower head was in the middle of the bathroom ceiling. There was no stall. You showered and it just sprayed everything. Another aspect I liked was that you were given a single key and when you arrived in the room, you had to insert that key into a wall slot that turned the room on and the A/C. This was to keep you from leaving all the lights on and the cooling going full blast while you were out all day. Awesome idea and why don’t they do that on our energy wasting continent?
“This left us a single day to explore and it was woefully inadequate. Most shocking thing I saw were dog carcasses roasting in the window of a butcher shop. Dumbest thing I did was stand there trying to figure out what kinda animal I was looking at. An image that remains burned on my conscience. Least shocking and expected scene was the openness of the prostitution. We have it too, it’s just not so obvious.”
I think I had a similar experience in Bangkok.
The main attraction is dodging motor bikes. If you make it across the street you feel renewed, like when you are going to be shot in the morning but get a last minute reprieve. It’s a bracing thing to realize you were happy and did not know it until you faced imminent death. A tonic effect, reportedly used by Graham Greene, who was plagued by the black dog. He’d put one round in the chamber of a revolver and spin it. This makes it a game. One round in the chamber of an automatic is called suicide.
“I didn’t know you’d been to Thailand. What year and what was your favourite part? I really loved the north. It was the real Thailand. South was stupid tourist bullshit but the beaches were amazing, the water crystal. As for crossing the streets, if you think like an American, you’ll never get across. You just start walking and the bikes ooze and pour around you if you were to view the scene from above.
Graham greene? You mean ‘Kicking Bird’?”
No, I mean the English writer. I’ve never heard of the actor before now. Colin Wilson wrote about Greene in relation to his hypothesized “Faculty X,” which is energy raised to the vibratory level most people would describe (a la Maslow) as a peak experience. This experience, he wrote, was described by Greene when the firing pin hit the empty chamber, and by Dostoevsky when he was to be executed, but reprieved just before it was carried out. It is the sudden realization of how much we love life when we are not bogged down in negative emotions, obsessed with the parts, and unable to see the whole.