traveling

TRAVELLING

This is a very curious thing:  a blog.  It's personal, but it's not.  It's shared, but only with people who want to read in. 

For most people reading this blog, I think, most everyone knows that in my life, right now, life's in a transition of sorts.   I'm living in a place that's very "foreign" to me, even though I'm in a country where I've been coming all my adult life.  I'm watching, observing, but I'm also a participant.  It's not a "place" where I've ever been before.  

I spend a lot of time these days trying to figure out life.  Where I am, from one perspective, might appear somewhat simple, certainly bucolic, and for sake of better words, peaceful and quiet.  But here for me as a foreigner, it's never peaceful and quiet, and definitely not simple. 

A few weeks back I had a revelation in my quest in figuring out life.

"What am I doing?" I asked myself (the perennial question). 

"I'm travelling," I suddenly answered back.  "You know, travelling."

I (the one asking the question, and the one answering) devised a theory about "travel" a few years back.  "Good travel" is travel that one learns from, travel that impacts one's life (almost in that way of a significant drug experience).  And good travel is generally when one makes one's self vulnerable, where one engages to such an extent to where things can really go wrong. 

"I'm travelling," I said to myself.  And that revelation helped.  And the people immediately around me are also travelling. 

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dancing

DANCING

Hmm?  This one's tough.  Dancing?  I think I'm an addict.  Right now I'm in Bangkok and basically I'm going to sleep at five a.m. and waking up at five p.m. (I blame it on English...).   I dance at a place called Tawan Daeng, out on Petchaburi Road, about Soi 60.  There are three Tawan Daeng in Bangkok that I know about, but this is my favourite.  The music is morlam/luktung, music from northeast Thailand and Laos.  This particular Tawan Daeng is unique, at least for me (I've been to many all across the country...).   It's intensely urban, is how I would describe it.  The music is a live band, and there are singers and dancers always on stage.  On any given night I would guess that there are about sixty performers.  In some ways it's burlesque.  In some ways it's the Rocky Horror Picture Show.  Many of the best singers and dancers are transexual; they are extremely good at what they do.   

At this point I'm a bit of a regular.  I get a table at the front, and in between songs the performers come and sit with me (in a room of three hundred people, I'm usually the only foreigner, so I am visible...).  I order a bottle of rum (not that I can drink it), and they come, sit down, have a quick shot and go back to work. 

I dance.  I have no idea what any of the lyrics of any of the songs mean, but the songs are now implanted in my head like childhood memories.  Everyone dances, a sort of dancing hysteria.  It took me a while to realize that I could go by myself (I usually go with the Yindichatis), but now I know that I can simply show up.  There is no dance floor; everyone just dances by their chair.  But people migrate around, dancing from table to table.  By midnight things start to heat up, and then the next three hours are bliss.

Sexuality, as far as I can tell, really doesn't matter.  It's the most sexually ambiguous place that I have ever been.  What's far more important is performance, almost like karaoke.  Singing dancing singing dancing.  And incredible good will.

 

 

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Fw: mister joe

MISTER JOE

I'm always, speaking to myself, speaking bad about cities. I like the country, but right now I like Bangkok, too. A very nice person stays at the Opera, same as me. His name is Joe, but we call him Mister Joe. Mister Joe has had two strokes at a young age; I think he is same as me, mid fifties. He calls them his "strokes of luck" because he survived, and now he gets a tiny disability that allows him to not work. He is one of the kindest men I have ever known. He has very little money but all of it, every day, goes to people here at the hotel, or to the people at the convenience store just down the street where he goes to buy beer. We sit drinking beer and telling stories, and Joe says hello to everyone in a completely earnest way. I think he is just happy to be alive, and happy to be here in Bangkok where people don't think twice about befriending a very nice man who has had two strokes. We joke a lot about the young women who work in the convenience store (walking is hard for Joe, so the convenience store is within close reach). I love Nang Ning, he loves Tip. But they all really love Joe. He buys them a pizza, or gives them a dollar. They know a nice man when they meet one.

Mister Joe has somehow slowed life down, appreciating everything. He has a friend, a long time friend, named Mee. She comes most every day. Mee has a friend, a woman, named Boo, who Mee refers to as "the Boo". One day The Boo was here and headed to the beauty salon, wanting to look like "a potato."

Joe cries a lot, and it's infectious. My father cried a lot too, in that same loving life sense.

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apologies

bangkok 21 january.
apologies about not posting. my computer broke and right now i am here in bangkok, getting a new computer going.
so anyway....