Asia, & Other Stuff

Sometimes you can’t get a story off the ground, your thoughts are flat and you don't seem to have the piss and vinegar to get started.

Beer works, I’ll suck a few down. 

Haruki Murakami is a Japanese author who doesn’t need beer to write. I love his work, he’s everything David Foster Wallace isn't. Wallace's work is impossibly wordy, causing you to wonder where he's going with the heap, what's going on and why bother?

Wallace writes cryptically and no one gets the drift so they assume the freak must be a genius. 

 

Haruki’s work travels through a tunnel to another world, then returns to earth. In his own words,

I go somewhere else. I open the door, enter that place, and see what’s happening there. I don’t know, or I don’t care, if it’s a realistic world or an unrealistic one. I go deeper and deeper, as I concentrate on writing, into a kind of underground. 

Haruki is akin to the Colombian writer Gabriel Garcia Marquez but Marquez taps Magical Realism much more than Murakami.

There’s a scene in Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Cholera where Mauricio Babilonia is constantly followed by yellow butterflies wherever he goes— a symbol of love and hope. 

In The Green Mile by Steven King, — John Coffey cures Old Paul Edgecomb’s kidney stones by exhaling hordes of flies onto him. 

Stephan King surely didn’t lift the insect cure from Marquez, but the notion crossed my mind. Perhaps both garnered the insect visualization from the Bible that says flies follow you when you’re sad.

Thais are golden people, Thailand is the land of smiles. The Western world could learn a lot from them, they know how to toe the line. They’re like bamboo, sturdy, but able to sway with the wind. 

Then there’s the Asian squat—a triple-flex movement done by bending at the hips, knees, and ankles, folding everything up underneath you.

Thais can squat like this for hours, eating in the position on a straw mat. A family of four consuming a plate only from a US-sized Christmas dinner portion.

I couldn't do the Asian squat if someone put a gun to my head.

Thai women are considered to be some of the most beautiful women in the world. When they travel to America they're forthwith gobbled up by local men but watch out, they're quick on the take when it comes to the almighty buck, out to marry a old guy for money.

I can’t speak Thai— it’s a linguistic screwball for me— every syllable is pronounced in one of five tones, low, mid, high, falling, or rising. The tone must be spoken correctly for the intended meaning of a word to be understood.

I know a masseuse who works in Pattaya, I need her company, we're attached somehow, but, because of philosophic or language disparities, we have never had a deep conversation. We talk about rudimentary things, what did you eat, or it's raining or hot out.

In Thailand, non-Thais are known as foreigners. I have lived here for a gazillion years and will always be considered a foreigner or outsider. 

It’s against the law for foreigners to run for public office. Not that I care, I’m not wearing a suit and tie or cutting my hair for anybody. Besides, I'm corrupt.

 

Also, it’s against the law for foreigners to own land— if foreigners could buy land the Chinese would own Thailand.

Foreigners must report to immigration every ninety days, which isn’t so bad, there’s a drive-thru, and the immigration officer in the window is a hoot, or if you work at it you can register online. 

Thailand is by no means a police state, like Laos or Myanmar, It's free here, but terribly conservative, like most of Asia.

     

My girlfriend Tea knows I write, she sees me typing day after day on my laptop in bed. Early in our relationship, she said— 

I don’t care about your writing. 

The comment came outta nowhere, we weren’t talking about writing— she could have said, 

fuck your writing.

I forgot exactly, it’s not important because I will write if I want to.

If you don’t have a girlfriend who likes your writing, invent a character in your stories. 

If you have read my stories, you know Henry is married to a Cuban woman, Lucia Varga. They met in Havana while he was editing an English language ex-pat rag, The Gringo Times. 

Like my real-life girlfriend, my character Lucia  isn’t crazy about my work, Spanish is her first language. But, Lucia and I can communicate on the deepest level, I write the dialogue, so I control where it goes. 

Walking Pattaya City, the disparity between the down in the mouth, and those with too much is heartbreaking. 

I see a sparrow, pecking at dirt, looking for seed, or a homeless person sleeping on a mat on the sidewalk. A street dog with mange drinking water dripping from an air-conditioner pipe. A four-year-old beggar holding a toddler, shaking a plastic cup in front of a 7-11. 

People doing awful work, pushing heavy carts with fried fish on them, others cleaning the street. I sewage truck operator holding a hose sucking human waste out of a septic tank into a small tanker, the stench is awful. People working for pennies, animals, and, people living in loathsome conditions. 

I watch a Mercedes Benz drive by, I shrink, there's an aura of

arrogance surrounding the car— the suffering of street rabble means fuck all to the flush passengers. 

Nothing is written in stone for the rich, they’re consumed with calculating stock options, or making real estate acquisitions, things that blind them to the real world, feeding their haughtiness.

Socrates wasn’t an admirer of the rich saying,

what a lot of things a man can do without.