Friday, September 30, 2011

Parting in Lampang

In Lampang, a white fan turns in a slow circle around the ceiling, fluttering the saffron curtains of my room. The walls, a shade of brown so dark they're almost black, so shiny they look plastic, let in skinny slants of light that cut across the floor and lay there isolated against the uneven wooden boards. Outside the door, a coil of incense, used to keep mosquitos out, uncoils in a line of bone white smoke which hovers in the air, pale clouds in the corners of the hallway. I am lying on my bed. Through the curtains, the day outside becomes the day inside, an orange and gentle glow. Thailand. Down on the deck, my companions are drinking instant coffee and eating breakfast. From there, they can see the river, a thick and fluid murk the color of bruised fruit which has swallowed nearly everything. On a different day, in a different part of the year, the men, women, and children of Lampang would be sitting on the other side across from us, transfixed by water on the broken concrete steps that lead steeply down the banks and to the shore. I like to imagine they'd be fishing, pulling snakeheads from the filthy deep, but they’re not. Today, at the end of the rainy season with water pouring steady from the north and more to come, the shore is hardly even visible. Every now and then a tree branch, green with leaves, floats by on the dirty surface and turns into a tiny spot downstream. The river is alone.

For the most part, the beginning of the trip is over. In a day, Kelli and I fly back to Bangkok, Riley hops a bus to Chiang Rai, Josh and Daow drive east to Isaan. The last few weeks have happened fast, a blur of days and nights and mornings. The four of us, for better and for worse, have lived, eaten, stayed up, slept in, talked, and drank together in various bars, beaches, restaurants, and guest houses littered from the south of Thailand to the north. Recently, though, we’ve all been slowing down. In anticipation of the months to come, each of us, in our own ways, are preparing to be alone. Riley’s showers have gotten longer, though he still sings in there, and he’s been smoking more, a habit which brings him out onto the sidewalks where he likes to stand with a bottle of Coke beneath the awnings and look around. The last few days I’ve gotten up as early as I can, hoping for an hour to myself in which to read, drink coffee, write, though it isn’t easy to leave the comfort of an air conditioned guesthouse in this humidity. And Kelli, Kelli’s been pretty quiet lately, though I’m not sure why. She may be getting sick.

Yesterday on Josh’s houseboat we floated for a long time down a narrow lake where he hopes someday to open a resort. We stopped at the abandoned caves of former forest dwellers where we sent Kelli squealing through the bat infested dark, a game we dubbed "Squigs goes first," which she didn’t like. Also, big limestone cliffs which lined the shore where Riley jumped off into the water. We sat out on the deck a lot, in the sun and in the shade. We took turns taking naps, eating BBQ fish, chicken wings, and pork ribs, drinking vodka tonics, Singha on the rocks. On the big stereo at the back of the boat, we listened to the Weeknd, Bob Marley, Dengue Fever, and Sade. In a lot of ways, it was a typical day for us, slow and steady and a little drunk, but it was also our last day, which made it a little sad.

When it started getting late, Kelli and I sat out at the front of the boat together and let out feet hang down into the water. Soon it would be dark out, the whole boat lit by lantern light, and it would get hard to tell the jungle and the mountains from the sky.

“Look,” she said, pointing to a space in the clouds.
“I know,” I said, “finally.”  

Strangely, for the last three weeks, perhaps because the rain's been so persistent, the night sky has remained entirely and stubbornly full of clouds, starless, but last night they really came alive up there, thousands of them, little silver pins, and for as far as the mountains would let me see, they shimmered tiny in the distance. Around my feet, the water of the lake was black and warm, barley moving. Every now and then a twig would stick between my toes and I’d have to reach down and take it out. I'm not sure how we ever made it home, but we did. I remember we turned a bend in the lake, slowly--it is hard to know where one is truly going--and then we turned another.


Tuesday, September 27, 2011

Zombie Hooker Nightmare

The streets are dark enough to harbor monsters and/or ghosts. At two in the morning, the storefronts, gated shut, look deceptively the same, which is a problem. Actually, it’s a huge problem. Kelli went to bed about an hour ago, Josh and Riley are busy “playing ping-pong” with a couple bar girls at place called Ying Yang Bar in Hua Hin, which leaves me to myself. So here I am, wandering the pitch black streets and alleys trying and failing to find our guesthouse. Every now and then, a human in a tight dress and three inch heels steps out from the shadows of an awning, asks where I’m going. In the day, it’s hard enough to tell the sex of sex workers, but at night it’s practically impossible. Normally, Kelli would be with me, her presence a greatly appreciated protective bubble against the men and women of the night, but tonight I’m on my own. 

“Mai aow, Mai aow,” I say, hoping the boy/girl understands me well enough to let me be. I don’t want a blowjob, I want my guesthouse. Where the fuck is my guesthouse? I turn left, right. Nothing. I turn right again. Nothing. Where am I? I decide to backtrack, which proves to be the wrong decision. I have forgotten the path I came here by, which unlit ally I turned down first, which street connected to the street I thought I walked just fifteen minutes back. Christ.

The last time I was this lost and this afraid was in the mountains of Northern California, hiking the PCT with my friend Bill. There it was only cougars and the darkness they infested, the shadows of the trees and the opening between them where I imagined all kinds of angry animals, lurking there with their teeth and claws and hunger. But here in Hua Hin, having walked past the same frail prostitute for the third or fourth time, I’m afraid for a reason real enough to have a body, an actual face, and she/he is now aware that I am lost, which means that I am helpless, prey, which also means I am being followed. I quicken my pace, try to walk with more authority. Why the hell did I leave my phone in Kelli’s purse? Finally I find a street down which I can see the lights of the part of town where there are bars. That’s where Josh and Riley are playing ping pong. I need to find them, start over, try again, which is what I do.

At the Ying Yang Bar, a very drunk version of my friend Josh is being beaten badly in ping pong by a busty Thai girl in a low cut shirt. Ning has yet to loose, which obligates him to continue drinking, trying, failing. I’ve been gone an hour, looking for a place roughly four minutes from here. He looks at me, he shakes his head.

“Really?” he asks.
“Really,” I respond.

Riley gives me directions and I set off again, meandering past the girly bars where the heavy thumping of the clubs blends together with the holler of the girls in dresses lined up on the sidewalks. A half hour later, I’m back at Ying Yang.

“Really, again?” he asks.

There is nothing I can say for myself. I sit down on the linoleum floor of the Ying Yang Bar and sulk. I am very very tired. Also, given that Josh and Riley and Ning and Nook are “playing Jenga,” I’m absolutely in the way. Drunk-Josh knocks the tower over. A cockroach scrambles across my foot, disappears into a crack.

For some reason, my sense of direction is totally retarded. It has always been like this, but here in Hua Hin it matters more than it does, say, in any other place I’ve ever lived or visited. Given the nature of these shadows, the specific hunger of the animals which inhabit them, more is immediately at stake. Thankfully, Riley has pity in his heart and we steal off into the night, the two of us. My hooker friend is exactly where I left her, but now I’m not alone. Everything is going to be ok.

In Thailand, one of my guilty pleasures is girls in heels on scooters. With them, I don’t stand a chance. They get me every time, their legs gripped tight around the small machine and zipping past me. When one of them passes us, I always look. This time, the girl in the scooter stops ahead of us. Slowly, very very slowly, she gets off. She turns around. Good god, what the hell is that! Riley stops dead in his tracks. He looks at me, and I at him. This time, the question is not of sex, but species. Can a human being look like that and still be human? The face is sunken in and I can hardly see her eyes. The way her shoulders cripple forward at awkward angles make her chest cave in like someone dropped a heavy rock on top of her and crushed it. Her neck is long and crooked. This is either AIDS or meth or both. Now she, whatever she is, is hiking down her skirt and walking towards us making noises. We cross the street immediately.

Back at the guesthouse I’m leaning my head against the door, saying Kelli’s name until it opens. She’s half asleep.

“Where’d you go?” she asks.
“Don’t ever leave me,” I say, “ever.”
“Sorry,” she says, “I’m sorry I had your phone.”

Safe in my room and behind locked doors, I close my eyes. Next to me, my friend is making sleep noises. It is nice this way, in bed and not in the alleys of Hua Hin being chased by zombies on scooters wearing tiny skirts. If I were to look out the window, right now I’d see Riley zigging and zagging back and forth in the street below me, the zombie with her arms outstretched in slow pursuit. If my ears were better I’d hear the gurgle coming from her throat like something died in there, some kind of plague infest rat, and Riley’s frantic “Mai ao! Mai ao krap!” ringing out in the empty city night. Now, at the edge of a shadow cast across the street, the zombie woman’s arms are wrapped around him, which he doesn't like. The dead thing in her throat lets out a groan and so Riley, in the darkest dark, is running, fast as he can, following the lights of distant bars where he and Josh will last until the sun comes up above ocean. It’ll be two whole days before I see them. Sometimes these things happen, things I can’t repeat. And so it comes, and so, at least in Hua Hin, it also seems to go.

 

Monday, September 26, 2011

Making Alms for Abbots

It’s six a.m., Chiang Mai in a thin and early light. Beside the occasional lone monk moving down the street with a plastic bowel in search of alms, the city is an empty shell. None of the tourists of last night’s frantic market bargaining for trinkets, no song-thaews cruising through the damp and filthy alleys. At this hour, there are hardly even dogs. Thais, apparently, are not a morning people, or at least today they’re not. Normally, I’d be fine with this, but this specific morning the four of us are up early in order to make breakfast. Also, Daow, Josh’s girlfriend from Khon Kaen, has joined us. We’re sitting groggy eyed and yawning in the lobby of our hotel, drinking Nescafe and waiting for Riley. We’re always waiting for Riley. As far as Americans go, he’s slow. As far as Thais go, he’s right on schedule, a delay so perpetually reliable that after all these years Josh and I have no choice but to appreciate it at Riley’s expense.

“How much you wanna bet right now he’s lying in bed, making noises, and thinking of B-ing his T’s,” Josh says, referring to one of Riley’s many short-hand expressions for things he likes to do, one of which is taking way too long to brush his teeth. 

“Twenty Baht says he’s taking a shower first, then B-ing his T’s, then taking another shower,” I say.

Kelli laughs at this, but Daow doesn’t get it.

“Does he have problem,” she asks in a brand of English so broken it’s cute enough to make you want to hug her.

“Yes,” I say.

“Farang," Josh says, "on Thai-time.” T0 this, Daow nods her head, smiles, and then starts soaking her arms and legs in bug repellent, a mist which smells suspiciously like sugar water mixed with powder flavored teenage body spray for girls. A mosquito lands on her thigh and bites her. Eyes half shut, Riley approaches down the hall, wanting coffee in order to want a cigarette. He’s wearing blue jeans, a t-shirt, a blue polyester shirt, socks, and black sneakers. Six a.m. and he’s already mostly sweat. Josh is mostly  laughs and head shakes.

The fact that we’re a half hour late to Co Co.Ok, the restaurant where we’ll spend the next five hours cooking breakfast for twenty five monks at a local temple, doesn’t seem to matter. Josh’s dad is waiting patiently in the parking lot and the owners greet us grinning. They bring us coffee, Oreo Cookies. They bring us water. We eat and drink and talk for about an hour. Sayan, a French ex-patriot living in Chiang Mai, is partners, business and otherwise, with Yupapan, the owner and head cook. Also, he speaks English and is incredibly enthusiastic to have us here. There are pictures of the farm where the food we’ll make was grown, a video he shot of the river which runs through it, dark water moving quickly over mossy rocks and through the jungle.

In the kitchen, Yupapan, her sister, and a girl with braces who I’m not sure of wrap us tightly up in aprons, give us tasks. Kelli and Riley are pulling shit strings out from the backs of shrimp in a glistening, gigantic shrimp pile. Josh is hacking at an ugly lump of liver. Daow is cutting lemongrass. Me, I’ve got a big bright knife and I’m turning a vegetable, some sort of half-soft tuber I’ve never seen before, into big white cubes. Yupapan takes the knife away from me. Apparently, my cubes are wrong.

“Like this,” she says.
“Like this?” I say.

She nods and I continue cutting. Outside a dog barks back at another dog. It’s hot as hell in here. Our knives go thud thud thud against the wooden cutting-boards.

Hours later, our menu looks something close to this:



Main Courses

Shrimp and Cashew Stir-fry (shrimp, cashews, peppers, onions, garlic, chilies, sugar, fish sauce, oyster sauce, etc.)

Laab (liver, pork fat, pork skin, pork, lime juice, cilantro, chilies, chili paste, sugar, toasted rice powder, fish sauce, etc.)

Tom Ka Gai (coconut milk, galangal, lemon grass, weird white tube vegetables, cabbage, tomato, chicken, garlic, tamarind paste, sugar, etc.)

Chicken Wings (coriander, sugar, deep fried lemon grass, peanuts)

Dessert

Mango with sticky rice
Coconut soup with salted egg and boiled pumpkin




We’re proud as hell, especially Riley, who has managed half his life to feed himself by having girlfriends, and Kelli also. She's the kind of girl who keeps an endless schedule of friends to go to dinner with back home so as to keep herself from starving. We pack everything up in the back of a pickup truck and drive in the hot sun to a temple at the edge of town. There, the monks are waiting for us. They’re not allowed to eat after one pm, which gives them about an hour to fill their bellies. We watch them eat, which is hard because I’ve been up since dawn and I’ve only had an Oreo. When they’re full, we take what’s left and put it in our faces, which is a lot.

Here's something, a ceremony which I don’t understand. During it, I walk up slowly to the front of the room where a big fat golden Buddha is frozen serenely in a lotus pose. I light a candle. I use the candle to light some more candles, then some incense, then some more incense which I hold in my hands while kneeling at the altar. I pray for a while, to what and for what I’m not exactly sure, but I’m going through the motions anyway. I put the incense in a pot of sand. My friends all do the same. And now we’re pouring water. We’re supposed to pray a second time while pouring and so I say “I love you, I love you, I love you.” I say this over and over to myself in the direction of a girl I care about who's far away until the water’s gone, and I’m hoping that it counts. By this point, however, given the heat and time at which our day began, I can tell that Kelli is at the end of things, “hitting the wall” as we have come to call it. Usually, Riley hits the wall, but today it’s Kelli in her purple dress and black sweater, entire rivers pouring down her face which is kind of sagging downward from exhaustion. I can tell her eyes are tired because she keeps taking her fingers and stretching them back from the corners, a habit of hers which makes it look like she’s slightly racist, pretending to be Asian. One of her eyes is bad, so the other one works too hard. Usually it takes all day before she starts to pull her eyes back, but today, at two in the afternoon, my friend has nothing left.

And here's another thing. We’re sitting cross-legged in a half circle around the Abbot, a man whose name I can’t pronounce but which translates loosely into Full Heart. Draped in a deep brown robe, he is lotused at the front of the room. Behind him, an arrangement of flowers and realistic, life-sized plastic statues of monks are sitting eerily and still. I know I’ve seen their faces before in posters and in pictures hanging on the walls of houses, but their names and reputations are alien to me. There being here gives the appearance we’re in a wax museum, and now one of the wax replicas is moving his hands about, talking to us in a language we don’t get, and now, pointing at me, he’s laughing. In fact, he’s almost always laughing. I ask him questions and he responds, through a translator, with long, circular narratives, stories about his life and the lives of others. Usually there is suffering, death, poverty, and starvation in there. Ultimately, laughter.

From what I can gather, which isn’t much, the Abbot decided to become a monk in his early twenties, a decision sprung from reverence, culture, and a lack of real alternatives. All Thai men are required to spend part of their lives, even if it's only seven days, in saffron. The King, I think, did fifteen days, which doesn’t seem like a lot, but sitting with my legs crossed beside my friends in a half circle around the Abbot, even for only a couple hours, makes me hesitant to take my turn at the temple should I finally gather courage to. Riley and Josh have agreed to join me in a monastery at some point in the ten months I’m here, but to see them now, Josh perpetually shifting and re-shifting, Riley making little noises now and then that mean he’s suffering, glad to be given an audience, but suffering nonetheless, makes me worry. And then there’s Kelli. Right now, Kelli is a puddle in a black and purple dress, pulling back her eyes.

“What do monks do for fun,” I ask, which is a mistake. The Abbot with the full heart asks me what the nature of fun is and I come up empty, dumb. Unsurprisingly, he tells a story and I struggle vainly to trace it back to what I asked him.  In it, a man from Chiang Mai walks for a long time over great distances. He has neither food nor money. Eventually, a woman gives him noodles, which he likes. In fact, these are the best noodles he has ever eaten, will ever eat. When he dies, he will remember those noodles, their greatness.

“Death is every day,” the Abbot laughs, “like if one day you try to speak, and then another day you stop trying, you’re dead already!” He pauses and his eyes light up, a brighter shade of brightness spilling out from his face onto my face. I look at Josh. His face is red with brightness also, though of a different nature, and his knees are cramped up tight against the marble floor. I can tell that he agrees, which makes me glad we're here, the four of us, deep friends. I look outside. It’s raining. Rain, too, is every day. Death and rain. Rain and death. And sweat. Sweat is every day as well. Riley trying hard to listen, Kelli staring at the ground.



Friday, September 23, 2011

Water and/or Fall

Right now the three of us are yelling at Kelli to stand still and pointing at her butt. It’s hot out, probably in the humid upper eighties, which is fine. The pool beneath the waterfall is a cool and piercing green, like someone melted down an emerald, cooled and kept it cool,  and then they put some fish in there. We’re waiting for a butterfly to get its picture taken, but Kelli keeps wiggling around, shaking it off herself and back into the air. Erawan Falls is filled with butterflies, of all colors, but this one, the one we want a picture of, is a blue I’ve never seen before, half electric, half middle of the ocean. The butterflies flock to Kelli because her swimsuit looks like the biggest flower they’ve ever tried to get at, one that shakes about and speaks and takes their picture when they land. Down at the water’s edge a group of ugly Russians jump into the pool. One of them, a fat man in a small, black speedo starts to squeal when the fish begin to nibble at his legs. He does this like he’s much smaller than he is, and younger, and from somewhere other than from Russia. The fish are gathering in schools around him, sleek black shadows in the clear water, and the butterflies are gathering around the four of us, hovering in the light. His girlfriend laughs and takes his picture.

Six years ago, our friend Jacy almost died in these same pools trying to keep his girlfriend from dying. They had come here with Josh hoping to climb the limestone mountain where Erawan, in seven stages, sends its water down in picturesque cascades. They made it to the second falls, started swimming, and, since Jane couldn’t swim, started drowning. When Jacy tells the story, its mostly to bitch about how Josh didn’t try to help them. When Josh tells it, it’s mostly to laugh in the way that good friends do when someone they know and care about is in a real predicament. Part of the reason we’re here is to recreate the drowning, get it on camera, and send it to Jacy as a joke, something along the lines of, “Look, here’s us making fun of how you almost died in Thailand that one time.” Or at least it's something close to that. Since I’m brown, I play the part of Jane. Riley, because he has dark hair and a scruffy face, plays Jacy. Josh, of course, is Josh. We jump in. I start flailing about and pushing Riley’s head beneath the water. He’s supposed to come up for air and make his face turn red, bulge his eyes out white and wide, but it’s hard to do. He isn’t really drowning, so mostly it looks like we’re two boys splashing at each other in the water, which is what we are. After a while Josh half-assedly throws a tire in our direction. It falls short by about twenty feet and we cut the scene. The fish are biting at our bodies and we don’t like it. I scurry up the rocks and laugh as Riley slips and slides back down into the pool. Apparently, among other things, friends falling down on rocks is funny.

Erawan is the first place on the trip we’ve really come together as a group. The jet lag nearly killed us, kept us up at different hours of the day and night, kept us sleeping when we didn’t want to be. But here, finally, we’re all in time. Riley probably took it hardest, but today, in front of me, he’s scurrying up the path like a chubby monkey with his handheld video camera pointed at the jungle, then at the limestone cliffs, and then the falls themselves. Every now and then he hands the camera to me. In the frame of the camera I can see him in the distance climbing up the rocks. He’s about half way up. Above him, green water comes pouring down the mountain. Below him, a green pool collects the water, holding it in place. He’s a real live kid up there, pulling himself upward with a jungle vine. He gets to the top and sets his ass down in the rushing water. He gives me a thumbs up sign and lets himself go. He goes sliding down the rock face, splashes in the water, disappears and reappears. This time, climbing out, he doesn’t slip. We gather up our things. Soon the Russians will be here in their shitty speedos and yellow thongs. We don’t want that. What we do want are the butterflies in bright circles around our heads, spinning like however many multicolored stars. And they appease us. Together we follow Kelli up the emerald mountain. There are four more falls to go. 

Sunday, September 18, 2011

More on Monkeys, Temples, Time

The problem is the monkeys all have ugly faces and I hate them. I am walking up the stairs to a temple on the coast of the Gulf of Thailand, and they are coming down, hundreds of small and furry creatures. Their eyes are beady, lightless stones and their puckered assholes look like they are bleeding from a life of eating garbage. Behind me, I hear Kelli squeal and yelp and giggle. She is hopping from foot to foot and trying to take photographs. The ocean is below us, as are Josh and Riley, a couple flights down, as is Prachuap Khiri Khan, the lazy fishing town where we’ve been staying. Two flights above us, a monk in saffron walks effortlessly among the ugly beasts. The monkeys part before him, a filthy, living sea. It is hard to see his feet between their bodies. This gives the appearance he is floating. Maybe he is floating. From here, the sunlight on the walls of the temple, the gray and blue-gray clouds.

“Ewww,” I say, pointing. There is shit on the stairs, loose brown coils, as well as ravished plastic bottles punctured with tiny teeth marks. It is hot and I am very very tired. The monkeys all keep food in a pouch in their necks so it looks like testicles dangle back and forth when they scurry forward down the stairs, a pair of furry balls swinging from their throats. Every now and then a camera behind me clicks. My thighs are burning and sweat makes huge dark circles on my shirt. I feel like I’m on drugs, though I’m not.  

“I bet these monkey’s all have aids,” I say.
“And rabies,” Kelli says.
“Raidies,” I say.

The idea of “radies” makes us laugh. At the top of the stairs, where the temple is, we stop and wait for Josh and Riley. “Raidies” makes them laugh also.

In fact, a lot of Thailand makes us laugh. We’ve been driving in Josh’s car for about a week now. Starting in Bangkok, the four of us have slowly wound our way south on Highway 4 which follows the eastern shore of the Thai peninsula and ends in islands, a thousand kinds of paradise and aging white people, mostly ugly Europeans, on vacation. We are taking three weeks to see the country before parting in October. This translates mostly into stopping in random towns, climbing cool shit, drinking beer, eating a lot of food, and taking naps. The best nap I had was yesterday in which I had a dream I was dating one girl, and then another, both of whom I had crushes on at one point or another and who, in real life, would never date me. Thailand is like that, somewhere other than what is actually the world, or at least for now it feels that way, completely alien, strange. Part of the plan, I think, is to get past this feeling, to quiet the America in me enough to see the Thai in me, the country happening on its own terms, in its own words, around me and regardless of my intentions, though I am doubtful I can do that in just ten months, foreign as I am.

From the top of the mountain, the ocean, surprisingly, doesn’t look any smaller, though the shrimp boats which dot the blue horizon look incredibly much more so, pale white dots which float on the far off water and begin to disappear. The four of us are looking out, caught between the graying heavens and the graying earth, and we are sweating our asses off. For now, all but one of the monkeys has descended to the base of the mountain where they are pelted with bananas by tourists in khaki cargo shorts, bright sarongs. They like to rip the fruit apart. Too human after all, they like to fight and shit and fuck each other, right in front of everyone. The monkey on the temple though, he simply follows us around, perches on on the railing and looks out as we do at the ocean, the sky which meets the ocean, the big rocks jutting up from waves which break apart around them. The monk in saffron is sweeping now, moving leaves across the concrete temple floor. He does this slowly, a single motion at a time, like he’s always done this, like he will continue doing so for as long as it takes to make the surface clean again, though the wind will always be here, the leaves will always fall. 

An hour later, we are back on the ground again, walking to our car. A policeman approaches us holding a shard of mirror in his hands. "Monkey," he says, pointing at our car, "monkey." Minus a mirror, our car is as we left it, baking in the sun. We laugh, and Josh tries to put the mirror back. "Mother fucker," he says, looking closer. We laugh again, harder. The monkeys have pissed on the car as well. Their urine dries in a dark pool in the sand at our feet, as it should. The sun is close to going down. I'm hungry, but first I need a nap. Josh gets the mirror back in place. We begin again to drive.

Friday, September 16, 2011

A Week in and Little Left to Say


Have been at it for just over a week now, traveling. A friend from High School, Josh, who has been living in Thailand for the last six years or so, picked us up from Bangkok in his car, and we've been driving ever since. Right now we're at the ocean, a relatively slow and lazy fishing town called Prachuap Khiri Khan, located on the coast of the Gulf of Thailand. It's ten in the morning. Josh and Riley are still asleep. The cars across the street, flash after flash of wave crest off the ocean, a cat. Kelli is doing crossword puzzles, like she does, and I am drinking coffee, like I do. My legs are sore from climbing the stairs of a temple a top a mountain at the edge of town where monkeys congregate in ugly packs. From there, we sat and stared at the point in the distance where the mountains became the sea. A thousand shades of clouds in the sky. The sky in the waves. The waves upon each other. No one said much. Lately, its been like that, looking and not saying. Which is good enough, I think, and honest enough as well.


Saturday, September 10, 2011

The Happy City

Also known as the city of angels, the great city, the eternal jewel city, the impregnable city of God Indra, the grand capital of the world endowed with nine precious gems, the happy city abounding in an enormous Royal Palace that resembles the heavenly abode where reigns the reincarnated god, a city given by Indra and built by Vishnukarma, Bangkok is unlike anywhere I’ve ever been. Here, the wind is made of rain and dank pollution. Red cab after green cab after pink cab. Dodging drips of water off the awnings, I walk with Kelli down a side street following the crack and pop of oil meeting chicken meat that spits from off the food carts, fills the air. Back at the hotel, Riley is trying and failing miserably to rest. We haven’t slept in days, but Kelli and I are hungry. Also, we are curious. Before arriving here, I had thought the city would confuse me. Its complicated labyrinth of streets and little alleys would, I imagined, wholly overwhelm me, but they don’t. My friend is with me and she is pointing to a puddle of deep sludge she stepped in while distracted by a white flower sprouting from a gaping crack in the sidewalk. “Look out,” she says. I look. The flower, singular and beautiful, is under lit by the neon lights reflecting off the puddle surface. The sludge is garbage juice and rain.

About every other block or so, girls on the stoops of Seven- Elevens remind me of my age. I continue past them wounded. Would that I was young enough. That, or I could speak the language right. Undecipherable, the wind is made of voices. We stop at a cart, any cart, and point. Kelli to one pot bubbling with chicken feet and fish balls, I, to another. The middle-aged woman with her hair pulled loosely back says something fast in Thai and the both of us agree. Bending low above a plastic table, for the first time, we eat, though we’re not sure exactly what. Kelli pulls a lime leaf from her teeth and spits it on the sidewalk. 


However foreign, this, I think, will quickly become a familiar occurrence. That, and the lights of the traffic flowing past in consistent, rhythmic undulations, coming and going, while the sidewalk also undulates. The burn of curry on the tongue like being bitten there, and the air which carries it in our direction as though the wind had pulled it from a patch of dirt where flowers grow. Above all, however, the persistent dampness of our bodies will remain, this damn humidity, the abundant dirty rain. And it goes on like this, the city, and in all directions, and for as far as one can see, the three of us inside it, here, wherever we are, whatever this place is, however many names. 



Tuesday, September 6, 2011

Last Day in Seattle / in these United States, the Sky that is the Ocean

A day before I leave the country. Finally. In Seattle on 15th, the sun is out. In the wrong places, in the right ones. Cars moving quickly down the street, like they know exactly where they're going, where they've been. I believe them only maybe. The wind in the trees says "summer," and then it stops. For reasons that seem to happen at the end of seasons, and in cities one is leaving, I find myself in need of Oppen, very much so. This, at the moment, means I also need the internet. Victrolas, a coffee shop like almost every other coffee shop, is full of little noises. Klink  after klink of dishes in the sink, the grind of some machine that cuts the coffee into bits. And there are people here as well, a small cacophony of voices which swirl around the room, young and pretty people, better dressed than I am, and they are doing things, talking amongst themselves and/or staring at their computers. I too am staring at my computer, where Oppen is... 


Of This All Things

There are the feminine aspects,
The mode in which one lives
As tho the color of the air
Indoors
And not indoors

Only—. What distinction
I have is that I have lived
My adult life
With a beautiful woman, I have turned on the light
Sometimes, to see her

Sleeping—The girl who walked
Indian style—straight-toed—
With her blond hair
thru the forests

Of Oregon
Has changed the aspect
Of things, everything is pierced
By her presence tho we have wanted
Not comforts

But vision
Whatever terrors
May have made us
Companion
To the earth, whatever terrors—




I need his work because for him, the self is only almost singular, which feels true at times, more so than it’s not true. Distinction, it seems, and even solitude, is made possible by other people. In this poem in particular, I like very much that there is another person there, or at least the promise of a person, the memory of Oregon and of forests where the woman walks, or used to, and the space that opens up and closes between two people. Though I wish she wasn’t blonde. 


____________





In Victrolas, the voices that wrap around themselves are the voices of a city I doubt I'll soon come back to. We are walking in the wake of things, all of us together, all of us apart. When I take off tomorrow, I want to watch from the window of my plane the city of Seattle as she slowly and finally disappears. I want to see the ocean, and the sky as it becomes the ocean, adjacent shades of blue becoming singular, becoming nothing. I am trying to remember, trying to forget. How long will it take before I am incapable of seeing anything but clouds? The plane will feel like every plane. I'll close my eyes. My friends will be with me. And there, for a long long time, sleeping.



Friday, September 2, 2011

Portland, OR / of Clocks and Cities / a Drawing


At the moment I’m in the empty kitchen of my friend Heather and her husband Theo. The walls are covered in pictures Theo made, strange drawings of little creatures, ornate and complicated worlds. Five years ago, in Montana, the two of us set up a makeshift screen printing studio in the basement of my house. He was making art-books then, animated narratives, and I was making poems. We shake our heads a little when we realize it’s been as long as it has. Somehow these things happen. If this trip to Thailand hadn’t fallen in my lap the way it did, suddenly and from nowhere, I don’t know how long it would’ve carried on like this, not seeing them. But here I am. Its five years later and we are drinking beer and talking. They are married and about to have a baby. Somehow these things happen too. 

Having left Seattle on a slow train south to Portland, yesterday I spent the afternoon staring out the window, pretending the evergreens of central Washington were something else. For three and half hours, the river to my left was a stretch of distant water winding south through India; the forest, a jungle made of elephants and big cats. I, too, I was something else, a different person in a vastly different place, free of being known and, therefore, able to be anyone. Every now and then, in long bright slants the sun cut through the heavy trees and lasted, turned the river into something almost glass.

Perhaps predictably, given the place in which I find myself, I have been thinking lately, as well as talking quite a bit with Riley and Kelli, about how and why it’s like this, what the reason is for the little clock in us that won’t be quiet. Buried somewhere in the stomach, it’s ticking around in there; and we can heart it; and it’s telling us to run. A prevailing train of thought says the desire to travel is as much a need to experience new things as it is a desire to reinvent the old. Another train of thought argues that we leave our homes because they’re broken and they don’t fit right anymore. That, or we are.

I was with Riley at a party in the Cities earlier this summer. A little tired and a little drunk, we were sitting on a flight of stairs that led to a loft above the room in which the people below us moved about and talked above the music.

“I can’t live here anymore,” he said.
“I never could,” I said.

In Minneapolis, and in the Middle-West in general, the people who matter most to me, whose lives I want in my life, are not enough to keep me stationary, rooted as I am in a place I love and understand. Maybe someday I'll come back here. Who knows. When Kelli talks about Eau Claire, it’s usually late at night and we'll be sitting on a bench. She says how much she loves it, that she's happy in Wisconsin, and yet she wants to get away. There is guilt in her voice and sometimes she gets sad and excited all at once. I'm not sure that any of us really know exactly what the feeling is except to say that it is there. And yet, we understand it. At this point I can’t speak for anyone except myself, but I tell myself over and over that I believe in it. I like the way it keeps me moving, helps me love. I trust the feeling very very much.

In one of the pictures on the wall in the kitchen, a toy train on a toy train-track is leaving the open mouth of a creature best described as a woodland astronaut with tiny wings and antlers. On the train, a tiny version of the creature leaves  the interior of the larger creature when it speaks. Now the train drops down across the creature’s chest and enters a city through a tunnel. The city is alive with hundreds of little doors and windows. Also, the city is a clock. It waves its hands in the air and a bird escapes the city because it’s time. As the creature approaches the city, then enters it, and then comes out the other side, it changes. Coming and going, it is no longer simply a smaller version of itself. It is something else entirely, more bird like, more at home in air then in the ocean. 


In Thailand, I imagine Bangkok too is a living mechanism, the tiny version of myself I am right now approaching one of many doors. I am trying to remember the places that I've been, the people who defined them. I bend down low and look through all the keyholes. In one room, Riley is smoking by an open window. There are birds in the sky, clouds, and in the space between the clouds, the half-dead reds and dirty yellows of a low sun lasting in the night's pollution. The birds are soundless. Kelli on the grass.


Now, in the picture, the new creature enters a heart shaped opening in the chest of another larger one. The larger creature has a forest on its head, evergreens. An animal, a small brown wolf, is leaping out from the top of the forest, and it is speaking in a language at once familiar and strange. The creature with the forest in its head is connected to the astronaut because the train, and the tracks the train is on, and the little creatures going through a thousand transformations make it possible. They understand each other. The city connects them and contains them, makes them slightly altered versions of each other. When the wolf in the forest on the head of the creature speaks, the fact of having traveled from one place to another makes it’s speaking audible, somewhere in the stomach, buried there and wanting to let out.