the cities of the future

Here I am, in the cities of the future. I live in the next Paris, in the next London, in the ghost cities that Anais Nin and George Orwell made famous, in the dream cities still reaching out to the future, waiting to be born.

My building is all big walls of glass. There is a woman whose entire job is to open and close the big door all day long for people, 12 hours a day, and at night another woman comes and does it all night. The day woman hates me, she looks with envy at all the stuff I buy and bring home, not knowing it’s mostly food and toilet paper, she looks at me with envy, wondering why I don’t leave and come back from work, why I’m always there, shopping for food in the daytime. She hates me in the way many Thais hate foreigners, wondering why were are rich and they are not.

This woman hates me and does not know. She doesn’t know that I ascend to the top floor, to my apartment in the corner, where all of Bangkok is spread out before me in its glittering might, to all my life and its ease that she dreams of. She does not know that I shut the door behind me and weap for hours, all alone in my room, in the life that she dreams of.

She does not know that I am alone and sick in a foreign country, that I am not rich but poor, that all day long I bear people’s hatred for this underserved wealth they imagine to be mine, that foreign men hate me for being rich and not poor, that Thai women hate and envy me for being rich and not poor, and that Thai men, as always, remain a mystery.

ter

When you do not love me, i am a prisoner, when i cry out in the voice of my heart, and there is no one that returns my call, when loneliness makes it as remote as the voices of loons in the autumn evening on lakes that shine like mirrors and stars, i am a prisoner. the world is empty for me, and there is no one to love.

the conversation, and after, that i would continue to exist in that instant without you, and then another instant, and then another, forever and forever going on into a future that was the same, the same atoms held together and the same hair and the same body, the emptiness of it stretching far into forever and ever. that i would take one breath, and then another, as numberless as Tokyo, as stretching out into forever, except that in Tokyo there would be people and in this moment, there would be not you.

Don’t go. You are my entire universe of love.

bitterness

“if you can eat bitter, you can withstand a bitter life” , you told me in the computer science club the Chinese have this saying.

now simon, 10 years later, the city all around like jewels on the dark velvet of the night

the taste of that sublime moo manao, the work of an uassuming street-side genius, a delicate blend of bitter gourd, chinese brocoli, raw garlic, chili, cabbage

tonight i eat my bitterness.

even if you are gone, gone into my memories, gone into forever without you, how can I lose someone who is as close to me as my own skin, as my own eyes, that is my own flesh?

the fair down the road, underneath, sounds and lights coming up so high to my window, a ferris wheel

felt university

felt waterloo, the beigeness of it, the endless fluorescent lights and the endless math assignments until 5 am with endless nerds, ambition, it’s relentless grinding wheel, achievement

felt Simon’s ancestors, the kind of determination it takes to leave all in China and make a new life in a land that would be as foreign to them as Thailand is to me, not for a time, but forever, to change the citizenship, to take another world, another name, another face.

In the future, all art will be immigrant art. Immigration, to be foreign, to make a bridge between two worlds will become the most influential human experience.

secret

In every way, I failed to prosper. Bangkok broke all my hearts, one after one. In the end I hated everything and everyone about this place, like one can only hate where one once loved.

Thai men failed to open their arms to me, and when I tried to befriends with Thai people, they only saw a big cash register. Farmers mocked me for not speaking better than them, glad at this chance.

Fuck you and your shithole, I thought. I want to embrace you, I wanted to be loved, and all this time I was just a monkey for your entertainment. I never touched your secret heart. I was oil floating on the surface of the ocean, forever rubbing against each other, forever separate. Perched in my apartment like a little own in a nest, high above the city, the princess in her tower, with the last of my money.

fuck nong khai

wow, it’s so obvious from reading my past posts that this nong khai thing has really not worked out. clearly, rural thailand is NOT FOR ME. maybe even thailand is not for me.

friend: goeast, what the fuck are you doing in the third world? you’re not even just from a rich country, you’re from a G-8 country, you can have the best quality of life in the entire world, why are you wasting time in that shithole?

Hmm.

art or bust

Today I feel like i have to start making some kind of art or just go crazy and die.

I hate this place. i feel like it’s just another place i thought would make me happy, just another plan i’ve totally failed at, and most of all i’ve just failed at being happy. the salt-of-the-earth locals i came here to get to know? what possessed me to think i would like a bunch of ignorant THAI rednecks, when i so clearly hated the uneducted french-canadians rednecks i grew up amongst, what made me think i would be no less alienated, here at the end of the world.

No, I hate their loud quacky voices, their laziness and alcoholism and greed and gambling, they walk with their feet splayed, their crappy outfits, their shitty stores and their drunk driving, their women worn out like brood mares at 40 with giant breasts and rough brown skin, their tiny wizened men. i hate their fear of confrontation, i hate how their little girls in pretty dresses with bows are groomed to marry fat ill foreigners to bring satellite tv to the whole family, I hate their stupidity and their greed.

That’s the part Western guilt always forgets. We think that the poor are virtuous, and we feel sad and guilty for all these innocent, indigeneous cultures crushed under Western supremacy. Surely our Western blood-thirstyness crushes some innocent and peace-loving cultures, but no one ever admits that some of the cultures we fuck over were just as greedy and horrible as us, only stupider.

People feel sorry for Thai people, but I don’t. If you saw how they throw Burmese refugees into the ocean on a boat with no fuel to die of hunger, or how they require bribes to let refugees into refugee camps built by outside NGOs, how they exploit the hilltribe people, or the Laos people, or the Cambodians. If you saw how the lowest of the low Issan truck driver can’t wait for payday so he can go to a country brothel and buy the body of a Laos or a Burmese girl sold into slavery — you’d think — fuck feeling sorry for Thai people.

It’s a society where nothing stands in the way of taking advantage of someone else for any reason. If you can, you should. That to me, more than anything else, is what makes Thailand a third world country no matter how many Gucci stores and BMWs they have.

blast from the past

My one and only Thai ex-boyfriend called me yesterday. He wanted to tell me that he had been really ill and had almost died. He had some weird kind of disease where you can’t take a shit and your body gets poisoned by not being able to get rid of your own waste (I always thought he was full of shit, ha ha ha).

I had a fleeting moment of sympathy for him, but all I could remember was him laughing at me as I tried to stand, almost passing out, dizzy and ill after my surgery and not tolerating the terminal-cancer-strenght painkillers the young physician put me on. Not only didn’t he help me, he LAUGHED AT ME. That was a never go back moment in our relationship, and after that, you might not have died dude, but after pulling that shit, you’re DEAD TO ME.

His birthday is coming up, and I think he called me because he wanted to invite me. He seemed to be fishing for some kind of sympathy or friendship from me. I wasn’t mean enough to say “Remember when laughed at me when I just had surgery? Why should I give a shit about your health?” but I also was nothing more than polite. After a while, he was like “Well, ok, nice to talk to you”, sounding disappointed.

In other news, our common friend B is living in Pattaya with a new bf, and it is apparently not going well, as you could expect such things to go.

wisdom, purity, compassion

Today is Visakha Bucha Day

Visakha Bucha Day is one of the most important days in Buddhism because of three important incidents in the life of The Buddha, i.e. the birth, the enlightenment and the passing away, miraculously fall on the same month and date, the Vesak full moon day. .So each year, Buddhists throughout the world gather together to perform the worship to recollect the wisdom, purity and compassion of the Buddha.

I celebrated this holy day, and my own Buddha-nature, by nearly getting into a fist fight with a drunken Norwegian sex tourist at my hotel. “He was like a Viking”, said the manager of this hotel, but that’s only because he’s a pussy. Even Vikings will be injured falling down the stairs, and that’s what would have happened to this guy if it had come to it — when one is not strong, one has to be vicious.

Buffalo woke me up at 2 am arriving home drunk with not one but two Thai hookers. After being warned by the manager, he woke me up again at 2:30, 3, and pretty much another ten times, screaming at the hookers, the hookers screaming at him, loud banging. Manager threated to kick him out, but wimped out in the end, Thai-style.

When this guy woke me up AGAIN, at 6am, and the manager urged me not to make a big deal out of it because the guy would check out in the morning, after not sleeping all night, I was like “OH YOU BETTER BET I’M GOING TO MAKE A BIG DEAL OUT OF THIS, you fucking innefective wanker!” so I run upstairs and pound on this guy’s door, completely furious. The whole thing gets ugly pretty fast (note this guy is TWO ROOMS DOWN FROM ME, that’s how loud he was), and then his sex tourist friend comes over and stand 2 cms from my face, and tells me to take off my glasses because he’s going to hit me. “Oh, I don’t fucking this so, you fucking loser!” I yell and by then everyone is out, even the hookers.

So even when this fucking sex tourist THREATENED ME, the manager DIDN’T EVEN CALL THE POLICE, even though I told him to. What a fucking pussy. Because he said they wouldn’t do anything — the hell they wouldn’t — if a Thai calls the police on a farang, who is the police going to believe? If there was ever a time to take advantage of police brutality and corruption in Thailand, here it is.

Finally, one of the losers tells me he’s going to check out now. Perfect! I say, don’t let the door hit you on the way out. One of the hookers even came out and apologized to me, clearly umcomfortable about the situation, and looking like she wanted the floor to swallow her up — when a fucking prostitute behaves better than you do — it’s not a sign your life is going well.

“Go back to Pattaya where you belong”, I yelled as he left. “Yeah, where you work”, he said, which puzzled me long enough to miss my chance to say “um, WHERE YOU LIVE, loser” — where else does slime like that ooze out of the mud if not Pattaya?

All of this would have never happened if the manager would have done his job and just called the cops and kicked them out. After 15 minutes of this crap in Canada, that sex tourist would be spending the night in the drunk tank.

Somehow I’ve had 5 million times more problems in this small rural town than I’ve ever had in corrupted, polluted, overcrowded Bangkok. Why is this country a garbage can for every piece of Western trash in existence?

If you don’t take out the trash, then your house is filled with crap!

bitches

“Oh! I’m so glad that you’re doing *my idea*”, I said, giving them my most poisonous smile.

I found that the bar where I was supposed to be working (but quit) took my great idea for a party, told everyone it was theirs, and didn’t even invite me to it. This is after I made them a ton of money at the last party we had together. Apparently it was the most money they made that month, and this is how they treat me? Signs you should never help someone ever again.

Well, with their musical taste, let’s see them pull it off. If you’ve ever wanted to dance to the Indigo girls, I suppose here’s your chance. I’ll bet you 10$ they’ll play “Zombie”, too.

teaching english

Today I was buying som tam when a customer approached me in a panic:

HELP ME! she said, pointing to some English homework.

Just for two minutes, I said, I’m starving and going to eat soon, but ok.

She shows me this workbook exercise with an article about a Thai philatelist (wtf? what english beginner needs to use that word ever? Think about it, have you EVER need to use the word philatelist? Maybe if you’re a member of the Decemberists.) and you had to pick which statement was false.

Ok, what part don’t you understand I asked.
What’s the answer?, she said.
Do you understand what they are asking, I asked?
I just want to know the answer, she repeated
Do you know what a stamp is?. I said.
No, she said.
I drew a stamp and explained what it was, but she didn’t seem interested.
Ok, what do you think the answer is?, I asked again.
I don’t know! Help me!

It became clear that she had no idea 1) what the question was, at all 2) what the exercise was about 3) what any of the multiple choice answers were, never mind the right one — who gave the woman this book?

I tried to explain that I could give her the answer but that wouldn’t really help her — I didn’t need to learn English, she did. She kind of seemed pissed off at this, and finally I just told her a), since her case was hopeless anyways, and then she tried to corner me into doing more exercises for her. I mean, wtf. One of them was “read this long article and write the main points in your own words” but all I wanted was som tam and her attitude was so lazy and entitled (“lets get this stupid foreigner to answer all this for me”) I was like “ok, good luck, whatever” and left.