No, phone, no tv, no internet, no worries.

Hello there,

“I am he bringing help for the sick as they pant on their backs,
And for strong upright men I bring yet more needed help.”
Hemingway is great the first time you discover him, but I always find myself crying out for some adjectives when I read him. I think if all men were impotent, the world would be a better place.
All is well in my little slice of paradise, I forget when I last spoke to you so I’ll give you a synopsis, the TEFL course was good, it kinda gave me a crash course in getting up in front of a class and actually going about the basics of speaking for an hour, trying to relay information to a group of people who have no idea what i’m saying, which is what I needed. I intended to stay in Phuket before I came because it’s westernised and has lots of jobs, but in truth, it’s a bad place to live, it’s (comparatively) expensive, really bloody humid and full of German sex tourists seeking twelve year old boys, the beaches are nice, but it gets old after a week. So I headed north with a former Hells Angel and was living in a bamboo hut for a few weeks in a small town in the mountains surrounded by hilltribes, I intended to stay for a weekend before moving on to find a job, but got caught up in the hippie/dope/all night party scene, I also got addicted to joy riding scooters at high speeds through the forest at night while drunk with no helmet. So after about three weeks there I ended up in Chiang Mai, the Galway of Thailand, a really great little city that’s just tourist friendly enough but is still ‘real’, it’s got English language menus, great bookshops, but still has monasteries and chickens roaming in the streets and markets where they sell raw meat from a table covered in flies in the baking hot sun. So I got in with a crowd of fellow TEFL job seekers there and began half heartedly looking for a job, I was offered a few kindergarten jobs, but was determined to stick out for something involving adults. I really, really like Chaing Mai and plan to retire there as soon as possible. But I was starting to run out of money and all the websites where I was looking for jobs had hundreds in Bangkok but only one or two in Chiang Mai, so I got on a train and went 1000km south, to the capital.

I have very mixed memories and feelings about Bangkok, it can be a nice place, depending on who you’re with and how much money you have in your pocket. I didn’t know anyone there, but I got caught up in the 24 hour party lifestyle and the madness, just going from club to club with groups of random Europeans and Americans. After a particularly heavy session on the whiskey and Thai rum and an Estonian girl (quite possibly Finnish or Latvian now that I think of it) wanting to make the most of her last nights in Asia, whose name is forever lost to the sands of time, I woke up with a hangover and an empty wallet in an empty room of the Bangkok Hilton (the hotel, not the prison), I went to the ATM and it simply said Zero Baht. I had burned through all my savings quicker than I’d realised and now owed a 2000 baht hostel bill and had 50 baht in my pocket, nowhere to go and nobody to stay with.
I’m not going to lie, the next few days were pretty rough, I managed to sell nearly everything I had that was of any value except for the clothes on my back, my laptop and clothes for teaching interviews. I spent a couple of nights on the street and didn’t eat for a few days, I was hustling here and there for pennies. I’d spot a  Thai street vendor selling English books for way less than what they were worth because he didn’t know what they were, then I’d sell them on to second hand bookshops for double what I paid for them after I’d stayed up all night reading them.

I interviewed for maybe ten jobs without any luck, it’s hard without experience to get anything decent. I emailed my parents to ask for the lend of a few quid, I didn’t let on how badly off I was, that I hadn;t eaten in a couple of days, they would have freaked out. Luckily, I got a job the very next day with an agency and they were like “I’m sorry, we’ve nothing in Bangkok, but there’s a place in a school in a town near Chaing Mai.” I nearly kissed the guy, but if I did, he would have spotted that I hadn’t showered in a few days. They gave me a tenner to get a train 1,000 miles, I got the cheapest, lowest class peasant ticket you can get and spent ten hours on a bus with chickens and goats and things, but that means I had eight euro left to buy food and get a haircut before starting in school. I was glad to leave Bangkok, it’s way way too big and busy, there is such extreme poverty there that is even more shocking when compared to the extreme wealth that’s right beside it, gutters and skyscrapers. It’s not like any other mega-city I’ve been in like London or New York, those places have personalities and different areas and change with the seasons. Bangkok is just this crazy, giant single organism that is pure steel and concrete that bubbles in the heat and will chew you up with a moment’s notice. I’ve been back there since though, when I had money in my pocket and treated myself to the sights and spots I didn’t get to see last time, and it does have some good points, but only for a visit.
My wages are comparatively decent at the minute, about the same as a bank manager over here. I’m living like a poor king. What little I save though will be worth fuck-all once I try converting it back to euro when I return. I’ve got a little apartment in the only apartment building in town, beside a very nice park with a pond and outdoor yoga on the weekends, and very near my school.

The town i’m living in now is called Lampang (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lampang).It’s like some town in Mayo that nobody’s ever heard of, tourists go there by mistake on the way to Castlebar. There is nothing to do here (which works out fine, I behave myself during the week), the best thing about it is that it’s about an hour away from Chiang Mai so i go there most weekends and cut loose (a bit too loose sometimes, I’m actually off the drink until new years at the moment after an incident where I woke up with two naked thai girls whose names I didn’t know, a sprained and bloody nose, no passport and three hours to get to school for my first class on monday, that was a couple of months ago, I switched to soda water the next day and there’s been hardly any stupidity since, although I did fall off the sobriety wagon at the weekend and it saw me in a nightclub/brothel until ten in the morning, we had to leave after the Finnish girl I went there with passed out in one of the bedrooms, I had to kick down the door to rescue her, there was talk of arrests until I paid off the staff and carried the Finn out of there, so that’s spurred me on in my quest for sobriety.
There’ve been no hookers or ladyboys, but at the same time, taking advantage of Thai strippers who want to be your boyfriend or cruising eastern european/american girls who are sleeping their way around asia and working off their daddy issues is hardly that different than paying for it, but I’m done with that.

The teaching itself is pretty hard core, the school I’m at is one of the highest rated in the country, it’s a very strict Christian Brothers school (Thai Christian brothers, not Irish, so there’s only lip service paid to Catholicism, 99 percent of the staff and students are Buddhist, the students are sent here because it’s a good private school). It’s a combined primary/secondary school, years 1-12, six year olds to 18 year olds, mixed gender, 4,000 students in all I think, each year has a gifted class of about 30 students, they’re the classes that get the foreign teachers. I’m the homeroom teacher for the lowest grade (like Irish first class in primary school, not high infants), the kids are about 7/8 years old. I have them four times a day for an hour of English, one of maths, science and social studies, I have two assistants, a computer, projector, air-con, all that. Then for an hour a day, I teach one of the non-gifted classes. These are classes of about 50-60 students in a metal shed with no air-con or white boards, just a black wall and coloured chalk and no teaching assistant, those classes can be pretty hellish.
Dealing with the kids was the biggest learning curve, but they’ve grown to like me now so it’s a lot easier, and can be a lot of fun sometimes. The hours are long though, and I’m usually in bed by ten every night, my day starts around 6:30a.m, I have to be in school for the flag raising ceremony/king’s anthem at seven thirty and don’t leave school until four p.m. We have to really behave ourselves, the staff are quite strict here, I have a uniform to wear and if it’s not up to scratch, I’ll be hearing about it in a meeting. I’m extra busy at the moment, I’m helping direct the school play of the Sound of Music, my calss are singing My favourite things, I’ve heard the song over a thousand times by now and if someone says any sentence to me involving raindrops or roses, I’m liable to punch them square in the jaw.

The time is flying by, it’s almost Christmas already, and after that I’ll be planning my return home in March when the semester ends, preparing for my next adventure, whatever that is. I probably won’t come back to Thailand to work, the novelty has worn off and the visa restrictions are far too severe, besides, the country may not be here this time next year, with the tensions down south, up north, in the capital and both the Cambodian and Burmese borders, not to mention the King’s imminent death (seriously, don’t mention it, they’ll arrest me). I’m going to see what the scene is like in Galway in March, if it’s as bleak as they say, if so, then I may TEFL again, probably in europe (Paris/Prague maybe), or perhaps North Africa, Middle east, who knows. For now though, I seem to have found the little sweet spot in Thaland where nothing at all happens, when the headlines tell of floods in Bangkok, and I haven’t seen rain in a month or more, and the TV tells of guerilla warfare a hundred miles away, when I haven’t even heard so much as a raised voice since I got here.
Aside from that, I’m really glad I came, it was kind of a knee jerk reaction to get as far away from my childhood bed and the dole office as possible, overall I think it’s been really positive and Thailand is a really great place. The food is really overrated though, I’d kill everyone in the town just for a decent burger. I’ve been to Laos a couple of times, that’s the nearest place with anything resembling decent bread. I always find Laos makes a lot more sense than here, probably because they were colonised, they have queues there, I don’t think I’ll ever figure out how they do things here, the place is a total mystery, but everyone is lazy and happy, so I’m sure i’ll survive. It makes no sense that Thai people have visited Laos, tasted bread and didn’t go “Wow, this stuff isn’t bad, we should try making some, maybe eat it in the mornings so we don;t have to eat rice with every meal. While we’re at it, let’s bring back some of those flush toilets.” I can’t ever fully integrate into a country that has totally embraced the chilli but still has reservations about moving from the squat toilet to a cistern and flush.

I’m getting a lot of reading done, working my way through a giant reading list with the help of this list: http://thisrecording.com/today/2009/8/3/in-which-these-are-the-100-greatest-writers-of-all-time.html, still a bit slow when it comes to the writing, as always, my brain is so drained in the evenings that all i wanna do is stick in a pirate DVD and switch my brain off. Speaking of which, I’m about to do that now.

Send word of the motherland soon,
Kevin

I was young and stupid and had read far, far, far too much Hunter Thompson for my own, or anyone else’s good. But this is the type of thing you do at the end of your teenage years and want to kick down the door of the student paper and freak a few people out. The article was the first time I was threatened with a lawsuit,and they were certainly serious about it, but as I would learn in later years when I had a few more libel threats against me, they all calm down after a few days and the lawyers rarely get bothered. I have some great memories in Cuba* Nightclub in Galway, it was actually the first ‘real’ nightclub I ever went to and for a few years, it was the only one in Galway I wanted to go to, the music was better than all the clubs and the girls were less stuck up. Wednesday nights upstairs they played rock and old blues, the girls didn’t wear fake tan and the Strokes and The White Stripes were just becoming big. While Fifty Cent or whatever Europop shite was clogging up the soundsystems of the other nightclubs, I was taking BZP pills and mushrooms back when they were legal and jumping around to Rage Against the Machine.

The Cellar nightclub is where I saw a lot of my friends play gigs, downstairs in the brilliantly sweaty basement, I drank many a naggin of Jack Daniels hidden under a table and jmped around like a fool and then at the end of the night, we’d put all our change on the table and count it all up, hoping we had enough for a pitcher of white russians and a bag of Taytos.

Total Coverage

“Here” my editor said as he gave me free tickets to the Fresher’s Ball a few hours before the event “Bring a photographer. I’m counting on you, I want total coverage.”Not exactly a tough assignment, turn up, take a few pictures of the first years before they get too drunk, get a feel for the atmosphere and get out before it gets messy. And there was no doubt it would turn messy, most of them would not be used to heavy drinking and nothing beats experience when it comes to this type of wild affair. The problem was to find the right accomplice, someone who could keep it together, someone who was reliable and wouldn’t drink too much. But I couldn’t find anybody like that, so I took a friend of mine I met in a lecture earlier that day. The ticket said eight thirty so we figured we’d get there at nine; everyone would be nicely toasted and friendly, with the lights bright enough for decent pictures. A packed centre-city nightclub on a Thursday night isn’t exactly my scene, for the life of me, I can’t figure out whose scene it is, but never the less, I was told to get total coverage and that’s where the story was. We arrived late, but the place was deserted. Perhaps I had underestimated these first years, they knew some tricks after all, like drinking at home and then coming to the club late. My photographer and I headed for the off-licence; we would have to resort to first year tactics. Total coverage means getting inside the mind of your subject, coming at it from their angle and then every other angle in between. It started to rain in biblical proportions as I waited outside the off-licence.”What did you get?” I asked my photographer as he came out of the off-licence.”A bottle of Jack Daniels. I have four joints I got earlier in the head shop too.”I wasn’t worried about anything from the head shop, I had never gotten anything that worked in there, but the amount of alcohol worried me, I needed to maintain my composure, total coverage.We found shelter and sipped the whiskey slowly; it warmed us up and made us forget about the water that crept over our skin and the puddles in our shoes.Later, most of the drink was gone and we had smoked the pungent herbs from the head shop. As we walked up the hill towards the club, the rain eased off and the spices and herbs that I had earlier cursed as useless started to take effect. Our legs wobbled and minds wavered, but we made it to the club eventually, with a few detours. I had stopped drinking an hour ago, but my photographer was still going strong, he gulped down the rest of his whiskey, and the rest of mine.It was eleven o’ clock when we eventually made it up the stairs of the club and checked our coats in. I gave the camera to my photographer and he looked at it with wide, red eyes, like he had never seen one before. I cursed whatever lunatic shaman had grown the herbs, this wasn’t good, he was turning wild, but that would help him blend in with the freshers. I took the camera from him and left him to lean against the wall of the club in a drunken stupor. “I’ll be back in a minute.” I said, pointing to the camera. Total coverage requires you to move and flow unnoticed, be like a cat in the night, only observing, remembering details and uncovering all aspects of any situation. I tried to keep this in mind as I stumbled around the club, randomly snapping pictures.”Hello, I’m with the paper, say cheese.” Some got really excited and would screech and cheer when I asked, others shied away and even more got abusive. The crowd was like an organism, one giant beast, melting and flowing through the darkness of the club. Everybody melded into each other. The throngs of people on the dance floor heaved and swelled together, and even more glided upstairs. I followed them, total coverage at all times. Upstairs, the true ugliness of the beast became clear, broken glass and sugary alcohol formed a sticky, crunchy carpet all over the floor. The noise drew the crowd to one end of the room. The bands were very good, normally I would have loved to stay and watch, but these were strange times, I was here on the first years’ terms. The crowd were savages, like animals in the wilderness. The testosterone and adrenaline were oozing out of their pores, it hung in the air like a cloud and settled on the walls and ceiling in huge puddles before dripping into the bottles of WKD and Red bull and vodkas, refuelling the hungry mob. Strangers mauled each other in the corners, along the walls, in the middle of the floor, among the broken glass, groping and licking each other, fingers probing and searching. I saw one couple having rampant sex in the corner; beside them were a crowd of girls drinking Bacardi breezers, a well dressed guy came up to them and opened a bag of white pills, giving them all one, he smiled and left them alone, staring at the white dot in the middle of their palms, then at each other. One of them took it; the rest of them laughed and threw theirs on the floor, the pills dissolved into the sticky puddle. Later, I went to the bathroom and met my photographer coming out, he seemed better now; he had fallen asleep in a toilet cubicle. The urinals were filled with broken pint glasses and empty naggin bottles, a young guy lay in a puddle on the floor in a stupor, his penis still in his hand, his friend standing over him shouting random insults at him. A young guy burst through the door and announced to everyone he had cocaine. He didn’t offer anybody any; he just thought we should know. The last thing you need while on hallucinogens is confidence, not that I would have taken it, I had enough problems. It was time to leave; the club would be closing soon.We headed for the mecca that is Supermacs in Eyre square, the neon temple that acts as a beacon for every drunken maniac in the city. Inside, throngs of people were lined up twelve rows deep at the counter. Bouncers the size of grizzlies struggled to maintain order. We got caught up in the crowd and I got separated from my photographer, I could see him up ahead. “Remember details!” I shouted after him, “we need total coverage!” He didn’t hear me. I couldn’t hear myself. Total coverage would have to be put on hold for another time, on my own terms, not constrained by the animalistic demands of the first years. Hopefully, they’ll soon be tamed.

20,000 more words like this nonsense can be found here, if you’re into that sort of thing:

http://diaryofpaddygarcia.wordpress.com/

“There is a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can’t take part. And you’ve got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you’ve got to make it stop! And you’ve got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it — that unless you’re free, the machine will be prevented from working at all.”
Mario Savio‘s words ran through my mind when I first heard about the events in Dublin two weeks ago, when a march by 25,000 students turned violent. I’m sure some version of these sentiments were also running through the minds of the 30 or so protesters who attempted to occupy the Dept of Finance or those who took part in the sit-down protest outside, until the Gardai deemed it necessary to employ tactics that would be more at home in Burma or China.
The second thought that ran through my mind was “It’s about time.”
Two years ago, when I graduated, I had spent the previous four years training for a career that suddenly didn’t exist any more, my friends and I were faced with the choice of either wasting away on the dole, or take whatever you could scrimp together from the social welfare and buy a plane ticket to somewhere, anywhere, possibly never to return. I took the only choice I had and left, first for the south of France and now to rural Thailand. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not unhappy; I haven’t seen rain in over a month, right now I’m in an outdoor café where I can buy a beer for under a Euro and nobody is talking about Christmas shopping (one of the perks of a Buddhist country), but I’d rather travel for pleasure than for work.
The vast majority of my friends have had to make similar choices; taking their chances on the dole, working for free in internships and fighting for jobs tat won’t exist in six months, or escaped to Canada, America, Japan, London, West Africa, Barcelona, Paris, Pakistan, Bahrain, Sweden and so on and so on, the list is endless. These people were the best and brightest that Ireland had to offer and now they’re giving away their talents to whoever will take them in.
Anyone who read Morgan Kelly’s article last week in The Times knows how truly fucked we are: “Every cent of income tax that you pay for the next two to three years will go to repay Anglo’s losses, every cent for the following two years will go on AIB, and every cent for the next year and a half on the others. The Irish State is insolvent: its liabilities far exceed any realistic means of repaying them. For a country, insolvency is the equivalent of death for a person, and is usually swiftly followed by bankruptcy, the equivalent of a funeral.”
Now the mortgage defaults are landing on the hallway mats, people are having to make hard choices and those choices will affect you most of all, the young people of Ireland, and it’s up to you to make sure that you have a say in some of the choices that are made. Young people are among the least represented people in our society and yet will have to endure the worst of the hardships.
The increase in education fees is just the beginning of it, next month’s budget will determine your future; whether or not the dole is enough to live on, whether or not you’ll have to move back home, whether your local shop can afford to take you on part time, whether or not your parents will have to sell their house…whether or not they can still afford to send you to college. You can’t rely on the opposition government, you can’t rely on the Green party to suddenly grow a spine, you can’t rely on the left to suddenly get their act together and provide a realistic and sustained alternative, you can’t rely on USI in its current form to ever be more than an ineffective mouthpiece who are just happy that they even have a seat at the table. A 90 minute march around the capital is all well and good, but that’s been done before, all it did was delay the inevitable. 25,000 people is a loud voice, revolutions have been won with far fewer. I’m not suggesting violent action like we saw two weeks ago, if we want to live in a peaceful democracy we have to accept that the state has the monopoly on violence, beating up Gardai isn’t the answer, there are alternatives. What if you all registered in Galway and voted for the same person? What if those 25,000 people simply sat down in the street instead of marching? What about 50,000? They couldn’t arrest you all, their horses and dogs would tire sooner than you, their batons would break before you, their voices would go hoarse before yours and their will would bend before yours. What if you left Ireland? What if you had to?
I started with Mario Savio, so I’ll give him the last word: “You can’t disobey the rules every time you disapprove. However, when you’re considering something that constitutes an extreme abridgement of your rights, conscience is the court of last resort.”

[Article published in this week's Sin Newspaper]

1.

I was sitting outside a small café in the second best city in the world, reading the International Herald Tribune, stirring a strong black coffee, a pastime which has brought me back to civilisation for many years after long periods in places without either coffee or printed English text. I sat, watching the people from behind my sunglasses as they passed, putting them into categories; sex tourist, militant hippie, gap year student, fake hippie, English teacher, Spaniard, opium seeker. My train of thought was interrupted by the sound of a bell in the distance and the gentle yell of a street trader that expects no reply.

“Medicine!”

*ding, ding*

“Medecine for sale!”

*ding, ding*

An old Thai man of about 68 years old, give or take a decade was pulling a home-made wooden cart with a plastic basket on it down the street and ringing a bell on the side of his knee with each step, he was dressed in rags; grey pants that were another colour once upon a time and a shirt that looked far too heavy for the interminable midday heat. I’ve seen these men selling many things, usually fruit slices or god-awful smelling flattened squid or ice, but I’d never heard of one selling medicine of any kind, either he was the most down-on-his-luck doctor ever or the most brazen drug dealer alive. I made eye contact and nodded once, the international signal for street commerce. He came over, looked around suspiciously and opened his pink basket on my table. “Medicine” he said again, matter of factly. He put two bundles of plastic pill containers in front of me, one of them was unmistakably viagra, diamond shaped blue pills in sealed plastic trays of four, with 500 written on it in marker (about €12). I picked up the other and read the label, Cialis. The name rang some vague bells in the back of my mind from an article in Time or some passing reference in Esquire or Men’s Health.
“What does this do?” I asked him.
“This is for the younger man…make biiiiiig love, looooong time.” he said as he motioned in front of his hips with both fists clenched, as if testing the weight of an invisible wheelbarrow.
“Oh” I answered, dumbly, feeling stupid for calling him over in the first place, and tried to counteract the pitch that I knew was coming in the most polite way possible “No, thank you.”
“They are very expensive in Pharmacy, two thousand bhat, I give you good price.”
I shook my head and smiled.
“Ok, I see you again.” he said, smiling as he went on his way down the path, ringing as he went, his yells growing more faint. I smiled as I watched him, contemplating that he was performing a role that seems so normal here, selling something in the street from a cart, whether it be DVDs, pharmaceuticals, fruit or rice. A job that is as old as human civilisation itself and that would long outlive the technology of today, past the next ice age or nuclear holocaust, and yet it would seem so alien at home. The man would be thought some sort of loon and would no doubt have the full force of the law brought down upon him had he tried that on the main street in Dublin or Galway.
I turned my attention back to my newspaper, I had a flashback to a moment about three years ago, four a.m on a rain-slicked street in Amsterdam, a seven foot tall black man appeared from the shadows and whispered in my ear, “Cocaine, ecstasy…viagra, make your pee-pee go whee-hee.”
At that time I had thought it one of the most seedy things I had ever experienced, and I suppose it was, but at the same time, it was probably the setting that clouded my judgement, not to mention the class-A drugs, but here it seems like the most normal thing in the world.

2.

I passed the same café on my way home from a night out a few days later, I had left my friends at a 24 hour bar as soon as I began to sober up from too much dancing, it was past dawn, probably five a.m, I was quite drunk, but not debilitated, I was a bit lost and trying to find my lodgings, I knew I was homing in on where I needed to be when I saw my little café and the news-stand outside it, getting ready to open up, my little outpost of civilisation. I heard someone call me from a park bench across the street, not my name, just kind of a general “Hey you.”
I turned to see two prostitutes, the fact that they were prostitutes registered in my brain so quickly that it made me feel dizzy. They began to cross the street towards me, I was about to turn to leave and simply wave them off, but I have to admit, I was curious to see what their opening sales pitch was going to be, how does one go about selling themselves to a drunken foreigner?
“You like? You want massage?”
It took me a moment to realise it, I’ll readily admit it, but I figured out they were men, it was subtle, they were excellent transvestites, as the scale of these things go, they could have easily passed for women in any street in the world, had it not been for the alarm in my head that all men must be hard-wired with when a transvestite propositions you.
“No thank you, I need to sleep.” I said, looking at my watch, as if I were late for a business meeting.
6:13 a.m
“Holy Jesus,”my Irish brogue only coming to the fore in times of extreme drunkeness or danger or when wit requires it, “it’s six o’clock in the goddamned morning, ladies.” I said, emphasising the last word for comic effect. They smiled, one of them returned to the bench, knowing I wasn’t interested, but the other had the steely look of determination in their eyes that she wasn’t going to let the sale go.
“You think I am man.” she said.
“Well, yeah.” I said, looking her up and down again, rechecking my checklist; hands, adams apple, bad make-up, strong jaw, fake breasts. Her breasts were definitely fake and she had a prominent jawline but it was the make-up that was the clincher, men just don’t have the instinct or training to apply make-up properly, no matter how much they want to. Regarding her in the cold light of the early dawn, I was 100% sure she was a man. She was thirty or so, big brown eyes and bad skin that wasn’t hidden by the heavy rouge make-up or dark lipstick, it would have been a lie to call her pretty, not even for a transvestite.
“Yes.” I said, resolutely.
She grabbed my hand, pulled up her short skirt and put my hand down her knickers. I actually yelped. I made a noise I imagine a Japanese schoolgirl would make if you killed her pet rabbit in front of her.
The shock of it. I pulled back my hand immediately, but there was no doubt, I had touched labia and the course hair of shaved pubis. No penis. My internal systems were thrown into total chaos, different parts of my brain were screaming different things at me at the same time. 1. I had just touched the genitals of a prostitute, I need to wash immediately and repeatedly. 2. She is certainly a man. 3. But no penis. 4. You’re in way over your head and need to leave, this isn’t funny any more.
As sales pitches go, that’s certainly pretty desperate and up front, it’s like giving away free samples of crack cocaine in breakfast cereal.
I laughed a nervous laugh. “No.” I said again, turning to go.
“I give you good price, boom-boom, 200bhat.”
I stopped dead, I wanted to cry, I wanted to hug her. 200 bhat is about five euro, I’d spend twice that on a drink in bars back home. ‘This poor ladyboy’ I thought to myself. The mechanics of her sex change or the gross-out teen comedy of the situation disappeared from my mind at that point. I should have kept on walking, but I wanted to help her, but at the same time I didn’t want to get involved. There was a 24 hour McDonalds on the corner, they piped out classical music into their outdoor seating area, it was faint, but the lack of traffic meant we could hear it clearly. It wasn’t a classical piece I recognised, I don’t really know, it sounded like generic elevator musak.
“How about a dance?” I asked, grabbing her hand as she had done to me, but placing it on my shoulder and grabbing her other hand, leading her in a twirling of some kind. She seemed confused at first, but started to laugh and dance along, her friend across the street started to cheer, I dipped her and did a final twirl in time with the music and then let her go after about 30 seconds all in all. I bowed in the direction of the confused staff behind the counter in the McDonalds. I put my hand in my pocket and gave her 300 bhat, which was more than I intended but that’s what came out of my pocket. I gave it to her and said goodnight and told her to go home.
“You no want boom-boom?” she asked.
“No.” I said, with my back already to her as I walked away.
I woke up with a massive hangover the next day, I gradually remembered what happened and took a shower for a solid half hour, repeatedly washing the hand that had touched the genitals of a five dollar hooker.

3.

I had been in Bangkok a week and a half, tired out by the 24 hour party scene and looking for something new. I was with a girl, she was beautiful and crazy  and crazy beautiful. I had met her a day earlier and she was leaving the next day, she wanted to make the most of her last night in Bangkok.

“Let’s do something really wild.” she said at the start of the night as we sat in a seedy bar on the outskirts of the tourist district.

“Sure” I replied, “I’m up for anything.”

As we left the bar a tuk-tuk driver approached us, pointing to his three wheeled motorised cart behind him and handing me a laminated card that just said ‘ping pong’.

“Ping pong show?” he asked.

I knew she would say yes before she even knew. I knew what the shows were, everyone who spends more than an hour on the street in Bangkok is propositioned by a tuk tuk driver to come to a ping pong show, where girls perform tricks involving their vaginas and table tennis balls. I had heard very mixed reports about them and wasn’t all that interested in confirming what I’d heard. But curiosity got the better of me and I didn’t protest too much when my date pulled me into the tuk tuk. We sped off as it started to rain heavily, we zig zagged in and out of traffic in a way that would have terrified me when I first arrived in Bangkok but seemed perfectly normal now, after three months in Thailand.

We arrived to an industrial estate on the edge of town, there were no bars or any sort of public venues anywhere to be seen. I prepared myself mentally for a fight, I was sure that we were about to be jumped by whatever friends the taxi driver had waiting for us in the shadows. The driver drove his machine at top speed though a narrow opening in a wall with mere inches to spare on either side and then came to a halt outside one of the warehouses. The carpark was dimly lit and there was a dying halogen bulb flashing on and off above a narrow metal door. There were perhaps thirty Thai men all sitting outside the door on folding plastic chairs under a plastic awning. Just sitting there, smoking, not talking to each other. I figured they were the other tuk tuk drivers from the clients already inside. Either that or I was about to be beaten to death for the cash in my wallet, but probably not before watching my date be gangraped by 3o men, or be gangraped myself. The metal door opened as we drew nearer, I did all the talking. I knew the practice was illegal, the sex trade in Thailand is tolerated, but it is strictly illegal to advertise or promote it in any way, strip clubs are legal but those where the genitals are shown are prosecuted without mercy. I tried not to think about that as we squeezed into the ‘reception area’, a small room with a big screen TV that was showing the A-team movie, a movie which would not even come out in cinemas here until two weeks later. Liam Neeson snarled at me from the glowing screen as I walked up to the other side of the room, passed more tuk tuk drivers who were fixated on the movie.

“600 bhat each” the doorman said.

Absolute extortion, I imagined the price fluctuated depending on how much they thought you were carrying, I gritted my teeth, I was hardly going to argue.

“No pictures.” he said as he opened the second door.

“What time does the show start?” I asked.

“24 hour show” he said. I gathered that the show was the same ten or twelve acts over and over again on a revolving basis and you can leave when you like.

The first thing that hit us when we walked in was the terrible music, eighties electro pop at its very worst. It was pitch black except for a dimly lit stage, I couldn’t even see my hand in front of my face. A nude woman approached me with a torch and showed us to our seats, right next to the stage. As a drew nearer I realised that there were two people fucking on the stage. He came just as I sat down, they got up from the floor of the stage and left quietly. There was a subdued round of applause. As my eyes got used to the light I could see that there were maybe fifty other audience members, all seated on plastic chairs around a square stage in the middle of a plain warehouse with a low ceiling. The stage was about four feet off the ground and had four  stripper poles at each corner.

The room went dark and there was a brief interlude before the next show started, some people got up and left, a large group of a dozen retirement age Pakistani men were replaced by loud, drunken English boys in their late teens. The crowd was 90% male and of mixed nationality and race.

The girl who showed us to our seats returned with two plastic cups of warm beer that we hadn’t asked for, she plopped them down in front of us and disappeared again into the darkness.

It would be unfair at this point to say that I regretted coming here, I must say that I was extremely curious as to what would happen on that stage over the next hour or so, but the second feeling I was having, almost as strong as my curiosity, was bemusement. The whole thing was just so shoddily put together. The music was terrible, the lighting was terrible, the nude waitresses were unfriendly and unattractive. I really don’t know what we were all doing there. I felt like a child at the circus, not knowing what was going to come out from behind the curtain next, and of course, in reality that’s what this was, an adult circus. I knew this from the start, but I expected it to be a bit more ‘Vegas’, a bit more production value.

The music started again and the stage was lit with disco lights. A girl was helped up onto the stage, I say girl, but she must have been about 30. She was wearing a bra and panties that had seen better days. She put one hand on one of the stripper poles and began to dance from side to side, not really energetically and she certainly wasn’t enjoying herself. She was unsmiling and bored. She took off her bra without any lead-up or titillation. There was a polite cheer from the crowd, who were determined to enjoy themselves. Next she took her panties off one leg and tied them off to the thigh of the other, like a garter, a ritual all the performers would repeat, I guess it’s one of the things they show you in stripper school, how to take off your panties without losing them.

She then proceeded to take three ping pong balls out of her vagina. The crowd clapped. A bowl of water and another, empty glass bowl were put onto the stage by a naked waitress. The performer placed one bowl at either end of the stage, she placed the three balls in the water. She took one out and put it inside herself, facing one of the four audiences (so her back was to the other three sides of the room), she plopped it out (there isn’t really another word for it) into her hand and proceeded to do the same on the other three sides of the stage, as if to show all audience members that it was a real ping pong ball, or a real vagina.

She placed it back in the water and the music began to up-tempo a bit, she took out one of the balls and put that one inside herself, she grabbed two of the stripper poles and thrust her hips forward, the ball plopped out again, this time with a bit more force, but hardly ‘fast’ and it bounced twice across the stage in the direction of the empty bowl, it bounced off the rim and came out again, falling into the lap of a girl in the front row who screamed and ran out of the place, the crowd applauded heartily and kept cheering as the performer placed another ball inside herself, took aim again and thrust forward. She missed again, a naked waitress retrieved the balls and handed them off to someone else who placed them back in the water bowl at he performer’s feet. After about three more attempts the performer managed to get one in, the crowd went absolutely wild. It had grown into a slight farce at that point, everyone willing her merely to get one in rather than being wowed by the performance, it was like watching the half time show at a football match where they let the kid mascots take penalties on the sub goalkeeper. The performer then exited the stage to a  round of applause, while a naked waitress got a towel and wiped down the stage where some splashing had occurred.

The next girl, a bit younger this time, took to the stage and did the same bored striptease until she was nude and the music became faster again. The performer proceeded to take a whistle, a small, metal whistle like a referee would have, out of her vagina. She faced one side of the crowd and placed the whistle in her vagina. She thrust her hips forward three times and each time a loud ‘tweeeeet’ could be heard. The crowd, including myself laughed and applauded wholeheartedly until she had performed for all four sides and exited the stage.

The next performer did the same dance, and then pulled a limp balloon out of herself, then another, then another, she blew them up (using her mouth) and tied them off. She was handed a tube by a waitress and three darts, she threw the balloons one by one over the heads of the audience, and placing the blowgun in her vagina, popped the three balloons with darts one after another. I was wholeheartedly impressed by this, even if she had used her mouth instead of her vagina, I don’t think it would have been an easy feat, especially aiming from waist height.

I won’t bore you with a list of all the acts, this is starting to turn into ‘Samuel Peyps goes to Bangkok’, they were all rather similar, one blew out candles with her vagina, one took out a bunch of flowers, another a set of christmas lights that were battery powered, it looked as if her vagina was producing electricity, she hung them around the stage, all wired together with the end of it still in her vagina. Another pulled out a glow-in-the-dark rope while the lights were turned out, so it looked as if the rope was coming from nowhere, appearing instantly on stage, another lit a cigarette in her mouth and then smoked it down to the filter in one pull using her vagina, the smoke simply escaping in a thin stream as she left the stage. The most impressive act, in my mind, was a young girl of about 20 who walked on stage like all the rest and proceeded to pull out a long, thin string, tied to the string at intervals of one foot were razorblades, there must have been about twenty of them. She handed them to the crowd and allowed them to test them on paper, they were indeed real razor blades and cut the paper to shreds with ease.

All of the acts were a variation on two themes; blowing air out of one’s vagina or storing a seemingly improbable amount of something in your vagina, in fact after about seven acts of increasing ridiculousness, nothing would have surprised me, not even if a girl had pulled out a little fold-up bicycle from her vagina and proceeded to ride around on the stage on it. That didn’t happen, unfortunately.

The finalé of the show was the same guy who was on earlier, probably the tallest Thai person I’ve seen before or since, well over six feet and a small Thai girl in her early twenties, both nude, he had his hand over his crotch until the music started and then revealed a massive penis with a neon green condom. They went through the Karma Sutra and proceeded to take up ever increasingly acrobatic positions until the point of ridiculousness, simply thrusting once or twice before moving on to the next position, facing different parts of the audience each time. There was, at no time, even the most remote hint of eroticism from the moment he entered her until coming ten minutes later, accompanied by a polite round of applause. I wished we had left before that.

Apart from the final act, the whole thing was comical, in good and bad ways, it was pure theatre, utter farce mixed with schoolyard comedy. It reminded me of a bunch of boys in a primary school peeking into the girls toilets or a couple of five year olds playing ‘doctors and nurses’….my date wanted to stay for the whole thing again, I nearly had to drag her away from it and when we got into the carpark, I looked at the faces of the other men who were leaving, they were wide-eyed and smiling, like kids coming out of a circus.

British Library- WWII

There’s an article pasted below from a 2004 copy of Harper’s about the importance of Idleness and other related topics, read it, cherish it, show it to others. It isn’t easy to find online, so I’ve reproduced it here, it really struck a chord with me.

I recently started a nine-to-five job, teaching 7 year olds. It’s not technically  a nine to five, since I work 7-4 and have to get up at 6:30am, which is even worse. Granted, it’s in an exotic location, I walk to work surrounded by palm trees and on weekends I could take a trip to an opium field or elephant farm or a thousand year old temple in the mountains…but never the less, it is still a nine-to-five, I have to wear a tie and clock in and out like everyone else. The work itself isn’t especially hard, and can sometimes be rewarding, but I’ll get into that another time in another post. I’ve hard harder jobs; I’ve worked graveyard shifts in factories, hauled boxes in warehouse, carried bricks on building sites, stacked shelves in supermarkets, pulled my hair out over office deadlines and bulging inboxes, they’ve all ended in the same sense of ennui and a desperation to leave as soon as possible.

I think I’ll always be this way, I don’t think I could ever in good conscience sell my time to anyone for so little. I’ll do this job for now, do what I’m told and show up when they tell me, but in all seriousness, there has to be an alternative. Perhaps at heart I’m just a starving artist (and I would starve if I were to rely on my art) but I don’t think it’s possible to go on working for a wage once you’ve seen the man behind the curtain. Of course it would be different if I had kids or other responsibilities, obviously I’m coming at this from a very comfortable perspective, but if the recent ‘global economic downturn’ will bring any good, hopefully it’ll make a few people realise that perhaps they’re better off without their jobs and get on with the real business at hand, the business of living.

Read the below article for a better understanding of idleness, for further reading see Bertrand Russel’s In praise of Idleness

Quitting the Paint Factory

Mark Slouka- Harper’s Magazine, November 2004 issue

Love yields to business. If you seek a way out of love, be busy; you’ll be safe, then. -Ovid, Remedia Amoris

I distrust the perpetually busy; always have. The frenetic ones spinning in tight little circles like poisoned rats. The slower ones, grinding away their fourscore and ten in righteousness and pain. They are the soul-eaters. When I was young, my parents read me Aesop’s fable of “The Ant and the Grasshopper,” wherein, as everyone knows, the grasshopper spends the sum­mer making music in the sun while the ant toils with his fellow formicidae. Inevitably, winter comes, as winters will, and the grasshopper, who hasn’t planned ahead and who doesn’t know what a 401K is, has run out of luck. When he shows up at the ants’ door, carrying his fiddle, the ant asks him what he was doing all year: “I was singing, if you please,” the grasshopper replies, or something to that effect. “You were singing?” says the ant. “Well, then, go and sing.” And perhaps because I sensed, even then, that fate would someday find me holding a violin or a manuscript at the door of the ants, my antennae frozen and my bills overdue, I confounded both Aesop and my well-meaning parents, and bore away the wrong moral. That summer, many a wind­blown grasshopper was saved from the pond, and many an anthill inundat­ed under the golden rain of my pee. I was right. In the lifetime that has passed since Calvin Coolidge gave his speech to the American Society of Newspaper Editors in which he famously pro­claimed that “the chief business of the American people is business,” the do­minion of the ants has grown enormously. Look about: The business of busi­ness is everywhere and inescapable; the song of the buyers and the sellers never stops; the term “workaholic” has been folded up and put away. We have no time for our friends or our families, no time to think or to make a meal. We’re moving product, while the soul drowns like a cat in a well. ["I think that there is far too much work done in the world," Bertrand Russell observed in his famous 1932 essay "In Praise of Idleness," adding that he hoped to "start a cam­paign to induce good young men to do nothing." He failed. A year later, National So­cialism, with its cult of work (think of all those bronzed young men in Leni Riefenstahl's Triumph of the Will throwing cordwood to each other in the sun), flared in Germany.] A resuscitated orthodoxy, so pervasive as to be nearly invisible, rules the land. Like any religion worth its salt, it shapes our world in its image, de­monizing if necessary, absorbing when possible. Thus has the great sovereign territory of what Nabokov called “unreal estate,” the continent of invisible possessions from time to talent to contentment, been either infantilized, ren­dered unclean, or translated into the grammar of dollars and cents. Thus has the great wilderness of the inner life been compressed into a median strip by the demands of the “real world,” which of course is anything but. Thus have we succeeded in transforming even ourselves into bipedal products, paying richly for seminars that teach us how to market the self so it may be sold to the highest bidder. Or perhaps “down the river” is the phrase. Ah, but here’s the rub: Idleness is not just a psychological necessity, req­uisite to the construction of a complete human being; it constitutes as well a kind of political space, a space as necessary to the workings of an actual democracy as, say, a free press. How does it do this? By allowing us time to figure out who we are, and what we believe; by allowing us time to consider what is unjust, and what we might do about it. By giving the inner life (in whose precincts we are most ourselves) its due. Which is precisely what makes idle­ness dangerous. All manner of things can grow out of that fallow soil. Not for nothing did our mothers grow suspicious when we had “too much time on our hands.” They knew we might be up to something. And not for nothing did we whisper to each other, when we were up to something, “Quick, look busy.” Mother knew instinctively what the keepers of the castles have always known: that trouble – the kind that might threaten the symmetry of a well-ordered garden – needs time to take root. Take away the time, therefore, and you choke off the problem before it begins. Obedience reigns, the plow stays in the furrow; things proceed as they must. Which raises an uncomfortable question: Could the Church of Work – which today has Americans aspir­ing to sleep deprivation the way they once aspired to a personal knowledge of God – be, at base, an anti-democratic force? Well, yes. James Russell Lowell, that nineteenth-century workhorse, summed it all up quite neatly: “There is no better ballast for keeping the mind steady on its keel, and sav­ing it from all risk of crankiness, than business.” Quite so. The mind, however, particularly the mind of a citizen in a de­mocratic society, is not a boat. Ballast is not what it needs, and steadiness, alas, can be a synonym for stupidity, as our current administration has so am­ply demonstrated. No, what the democratic mind requires, above all, is time; time to consider its options. Time to develop the democratic virtues of independence, orneriness, objectivity, and fairness. Time, perhaps (to sail along with Lowell’s leaky metaphor for a moment), to ponder the course our unelected captains have so generously set for us, and to consider mutiny when the iceberg looms. Which is precisely why we need to be kept busy. If we have no time to think, to mull, if we have no time to piece together the sudden associations and unexpected, mid-shower insights that are the stuff of independent opinion, then we are less citizens than cursors, easily manipulated, vulnerable to the currents of power. But I have to be careful here. Having worked all of my adult life, I recognize that work of one sort or another is as essential to survival as protein, and that much of it, in today’s highly bureaucratized, economically diversified societies, will of necessity be neither pleasant nor challenging nor particularly meaningful. I have compassion for those making the most of their commute and their cubicle; I just wish they could be a little less cheerful about it. In short, this isn’t about us so much as it is about the Zeitgeist we live and labor in, which, like a cuckoo taking over a thrush’s nest, has systematically shoved all the other eggs of our life, one by one, onto the pavement. It’s about illuminating the losses. We’re enthralled. I want to disenchant us a bit; draw a mustache on the boss. INFINITE BUSTLE I’m a student of the narrowing margins. And their victim, to some extent, though my capacity for sloth, my belief in it, may yet save me, like some stub­born heretic in fifth-century Rome, still offering gifts to the spirit of the fields even as the priests sniff about the temple for sin, I daily sacrifice my bit of time. The pagan gods may yet return. Constantine and Theodosius may die. But the prospects are bad. In Riverside Park in New York City, where I walk these days, the legions of “weekend nannies” are growing, setting up a play date for a ten-year-old requires a feat of near-Olympic coordination, and the few, vestigial, late-afternoon parents one sees, dragging their wailing progeny by the hand or frantically kicking a soccer ball in the fad­ing light, have a gleam in their eyes I find frightening. No out­stretched legs crossed at the ankles, no arms draped over the back of the bench. No lovers. No be-hatted old men, arguing. Between the slide and the sandbox, a very fit young man in his early thir­ties is talking on his cell phone while a two-year-old with a trail of snot running from his nose tugs on the seam of his corduroy pants. “There’s no way I can pick it up. Because we’re still at the park. Because we just got here, that’s why.” It’s been one hundred and forty years since Thoreau, who itched a full century before everyone else began to scratch, complained that the world was increasingly just “a place of business. What an infi­nite bustle!” he groused. “I am awaked almost every night by the panting of the locomotive. It interrupts my dreams. There is no Sab­bath. It would be glorious to see mankind at leisure for once. It is nothing but work, work, work.” Little did he know. Today the roads of commerce, paved and smoothed, reach into every nook and cranny of the republic; there is no place apart, no place where we would be shut of the drone of that damnable traffic. Today we, quite literally, live to work. And it hardly matters what kind of work we do; the process justifies the ends. Indeed, at times it seems there is hardly an occupation, however useless or humiliating or down­right despicable, that cannot at least in part be redeemed by our obsessive dedication to it: “Yes, Ted sold shoulder-held Stingers to folks with no surname, but he worked so hard!” Not long ago, at the kind of dinner party I rarely attend, I made the mis­take of admitting that I not only liked to sleep but liked to get at least eight hours a night whenever possible, and that nine would be better still. The reaction – a complex Pinot Noir of nervous laughter displaced by expres­sions of disbelief and condescension – suggested that my transgression had been, on some level, a political one. I was reminded of the time I’d confessed to Roger Angell that I did not much care for baseball. My comment was immediately rebutted by testimonials to sleeplessness: two of the nine guests confessed to being insomniacs; a member of the Academy of Arts and Letters claimed indignantly that she couldn’t re­member when she had ever gotten eight hours of sleep; two other guests de­clared themselves grateful for five or six. It mattered little that I’d arranged my life differently, and accepted the sacrifices that arrangement entailed. Eight hours! There was something willful about it. Arrogant, even. Suitably chastened, I held my tongue, and escaped alone to tell Thee. Increasingly, it seems to me, our world is dividing into two kinds of things: those that aid work, or at least represent a path to it, and those that don’t. Things in the first category are good and noble; things in the second aren’t. Thus, for example, education is good (as long as we don’t have to listen to any of that “end in itself” nonsense) because it will pre­sumably lead to work. Thus playing the piano or swimming the 100-yard backstroke are good things for a fifteen-year-old to do not because they might give her some pleasure but because rumor has it that Princeton is interested in students who can play Chopin or swim quickly on their backs (and a degree from Princeton, as any fool knows, can be readily converted to work). Point the beam anywhere, and there’s the God of Work, busily trampling out the vintage. Blizzards are bemoaned because they keep us from getting to work. Hobbies are seen as either ridiculous or self-indulgent because they interfere with work. Longer school days are all the rage (even as our children grow demonstrably stupider), not because they make educational or psychological or any other kind of sense but because keeping kids in school longer makes it easier for us to work. Meanwhile, the time grows short, the margin narrows; the white spaces on our calendars have been inked in for months. We’re angry about this, upset about that, but who has the time to do anything anymore? There are those reports to re­port on, memos to remember, emails to deflect or delete. They bury us like snow. The alarm rings and we’re off, running so hard that by the time we stop we’re too tired to do much of anything except nod in front of the TV, which, like virtually all the other voices in our culture, endorses our exhaustion, fetishizes and romanticizes it and, by daily adding its little trowelful of lies and omissions, helps cement the conviction that not only is this how our three score and ten must be spent but that the transaction is both noble and necessary. KA-CHINK! Time may be money (though I’ve always resisted that loath­some platitude, the alchemy by which the very gold of our lives is transformed into the base lead of commerce), but one thing seems certain: Money eats time. Forget the visions of sanctioned leisure: the view from the deck in St. Moritz, the wafer-thin TV. Consider the price. Sometimes, I want to say, money costs too much. And at the beginning of the millennium, in this country, the cost of money is well on the way to bankrupting us. We’re impoverishing ourselves, our families, our communities – and yet we can’t stop our­selves. Worse, we don’t want to. Seen from the right vantage point, there’s something wonderfully animistic about it. The god must be fed; he’s hungry for our hours, craves our days and years. And we oblige. Every morning (unlike the good citizens of Tenochti­tlan, who at least had the good sense to sacrifice others on the slab) we rush up the steps of the ziggurat to lay ourselves down. It’s not a pretty sight. Then again, we’ve been well trained. And the training never stops. In a recent ad in The New York Times Magazine, paid for by an outfit named Wealth and Tax Advisory Services, Inc., an attractive young woman in a dark business suit is shown working at her desk. (She may be at home, though these days the distinction is moot.) On the desk is a cup, a cell phone, and an adding machine. Above her right shoulder, just over the blurred sofa and the blurred landscape on the wall, are the words, “Suc­cessful entrepreneurs work continuously.” The text below explains: “The challenge to building wealth is that your finances grow in complexity as your time demands increase.” The ad is worth disarticulating, it seems to me, if only because some ver­sion of it is beamed into our cerebral cortex a thousand times a day. What’s interesting about it is not only what it says but what it so blithely assumes. What it says, crudely enough, is that in order to be successful, we must not only work but work continuously; what it assumes is that time is inversely pro­portional to wealth: our time demands will increase the harder we work and the more successful we become. It’s an organic thing; a law, almost. Fish got­ta swim and birds gotta fly, you gotta work like a dog ’til you die. Am I suggesting then that Wealth and Tax Advisory Services, Inc. spend $60,000 for a full-page ad in The New York Times Magazine to show us a young woman at her desk writing poetry? Or playing with her kids? Or sharing a glass of wine with a friend, attractively thumbing her nose at the acquisition of wealth? No. For one thing, the folks at Wealth and Tax, etc. are simply doing what’s in their best interest. For another, it would hardly matter if they did show the woman writing poetry, or laugh­ing with her children, because these things, by virtue of their placement in the ad, would immediately take on the color of their host; they would simply be the rewards of working almost continuously. What I am suggesting is that just as the marketplace has co-opted rebel­lion by subordinating politics to fashion, by making anger chic, so it has qui­etly underwritten the idea of leisure, in part by separating it from idleness. Open almost any magazine in America today and there they are: The ubiq­uitous tanned-and-toned twenty-somethings driving the $70,000 fruits of their labor; the moneyed-looking men and women in their healthy sixties (to give the young something to aspire to) tossing Frisbees to Irish setters or ty­ing on flies in midstream or watching sunsets from their Adirondack chairs. Leisure is permissible, we understand, because it costs money; idleness is not, because it doesn’t. Leisure is focused; whatever thinking it requires is absorbed by a certain task: sinking that putt, making that cast, watching that flat-screen TV. Idleness is unconstrained, anarchic. Leisure – particularly if it involves some kind of high-priced technology – is as American as a Fourth of July barbecue. Idleness, on the other hand, has a bad attitude. It doesn’t shave; it’s not a member of the team; it doesn’t play well with others. It thinks too much, as my high school coach used to say. So it has to be ostracized. [Or put to good use. The wilderness of association we enter when we read, for example, is one of the world's great domains of imaginative diversity: a seedbed of individualism. What better reason to pave it then, to make it an accessory, like a personal organizer, a sure-fire way of raising your SAT score, or improving your communication skills for that next interview. You say you like to read? Then don't waste your time; put it to work. Order Shakespeare in Charge: The Bard's Guide to Leading and Succeeding on the Business Stage, with its picture of the bard in a business suit on the cover.] With idleness safely on the reservation, the notion that leisure is neces­sarily a function of money is free to grow into a truism. “Money isn’t the goal. Your goals, that’s the goal,” reads a recent ad for Citibank. At first glance, there’s something appealingly subversive about it. Apply a little skepticism though, and the implicit message floats to the surface: And how else are you going to reach those goals than by investing wisely with us? Which suggests that, um, money is the goal, after all. THE CHURCH OF WORK There’s something un-American about singing the virtues of idleness. It is a form of blasphemy, a secular sin. More precisely, it is a kind of latter-­day antinomianism, as much a threat to the orthodoxy of our day as Anne Hutchinson’s desire 350 years ago to circumvent the Puritan ministers and dial God direct. Hutchinson, we recall, got into trouble because she accused the Puritan elders of backsliding from the rigors of their theology and giving in to a Covenant of Works, whereby the individual could earn his all-expenses-paid trip to the pearly gates through the labor of his hands rather than solely through the grace of God. Think of it as a kind of frequent-flier plan for the soul. The analogy to today is instructive. Like the New England clergy, the Religion of Business – literalized, painfully, in books like Jesus, C.E.O. – holds a monopoly on interpretation; it sets the terms, dictates value. [In this new lexicon, for example, "work" is defined as the means to wealth; "success," as a synonym for it.] Although to­day’s version of the Covenant of Works has substituted a host of secular pleasures for the idea of heaven, it too seeks to corner the market on what we most desire, to suggest that the work of our hands will save us. And we be­lieve. We believe across all the boundaries of class and race and ethnicity that normally divide us; we believe in numbers that dwarf those of the more con­ventionally faithful. We repeat the daily catechism, we sing in the choir. And we tithe, and keep on tithing, until we are spent. It is this willingness to hand over our lives that fascinates and appalls me. There’s such a lovely perversity to it; it’s so wonderfully counterintuitive, so very Christian: You must empty your pockets, turn them inside out, and spill out your wife and your son, the pets you hardly knew, and the days you sim­ply missed altogether watching the sunlight fade on the bricks across the way. You must hand over the rainy afternoons, the light on the grass, the moments of play and of simply being. You must give it up, all of it, and by your example teach your children to do the same, and then – because even this is not enough – you must train yourself to believe that this outsourcing of your life is both natural and good. But even so, your soul will not be saved. The young, for a time, know better. They balk at the harness. They do not go easy. For a time they are able to see the utter sadness of subordinating all that matters to all that doesn’t. Eventually, of course, sitting in their cubi­cle lined with New Yorker cartoons, selling whatever it is they’ve been asked to sell, most come to see the advantage of enthusiasm. They join the choir and are duly forgiven for their illusions. It’s a rite of passage we are all familiar with. The generations before us clear the path; Augustine stands to the left, Freud to the right. We are born into death, and die into life, they mur­mur; civilization will have its discontents. The sign in front of the Church of Our Lady of Perpetual Work confirms it. And we believe. All of which leaves only the task of explaining away those few miscreants who out of some inner weakness or perversity either refuse to convert or who go along and then, in their thirty-sixth year in the choir, say, abruptly abandon the faith. Those in the first category are relatively easy to contend with; they are simply losers. Those in the second are a bit more difficult; their apostasy requires something more… dramatic. They are considered mad. In one of my favorite anecdotes from American literary history (which my children know by heart, and which in turn bodes poorly for their fu­tures as captains of industry), the writer Sherwood Anderson found himself, at the age of thirty-six, the chief owner and general manager of a paint factory in Elyria, Ohio. Having made something of a reputation for himself as a copywriter in a Chicago advertising agency, he’d moved up a rung. He was on his way, as they say, a businessman in the making, per­haps even a tycoon in embryo. There was only one problem: he couldn’t seem to shake the notion that the work he was doing (writing circulars extolling the virtues of his line of paints) was patently absurd, undignified; that it amounted to a kind of prison sentence. Lacking the rationalizing gene, incapable of numbing himself sufficiently to make the days and the years pass without pain, he suffered and flailed. Eventually he snapped. It was a scene he would revisit time and again in his memoirs and fic­tion. On November 27, 1912, in the middle of dictating a letter to his secretary (“The goods about which you have inquired are the best of their kind made in the…”), he simply stopped. According to the story, the two supposedly stared at each other for a long time, after which Anderson said: “I have been wading in a long river and my feet are wet,” and walked out. Outside the building he turned east toward Cleveland and kept going. Four days later he was recognized and taken to a hospital suffering from exhaustion. Anderson claimed afterward that he had encouraged the impression that he might be cracking up in order to facilitate his exit, to make it compre­hensible. “The thought occurred to me that if men thought me a little in­sane they would forgive me if I lit out,” he wrote, and though we will nev­er know for sure if he suffered a nervous breakdown that day or only pretended to one (his biographers have concluded that he did), the point of the anec­dote is elsewhere: Real or imagined, nothing short of madness would do for an excuse. Anderson himself, of course, was smart enough to recognize the absurdity in all this, and to use it for his own ends; over the years that fol­lowed, he worked his escape from the paint factory into a kind of parable of liberation, an exemplar for the young men of his age. It became the cornerstone of his critique of the emerging business culture: To stay was to suffocate, slowly; to escape was to take a stab at “aliveness.” What America needed, Anderson argued, was a new class of individuals who “at any physical cost to themselves and others” would “agree to quit working, to loaf, to refuse to be hurried or try to get on in the world.” “To refuse to be hurried or try to get on in the world.” It sounds quite mad. What would we do if we followed that advice? And who would we be? No, better to pull down the blinds, finish that sentence. We’re all in the paint factory now. CLEARING BRUSH At times you can almost see it, this flypaper we’re attached to, this mechanism we labor in, this delusion we inhabit. A thing of such magnitude can be hard to make out, of course, but you can rough out its shape and mark its progress, like Lon Chaney’s Invisible Man, by its effects: by the things it renders quaint or obsolete, by the trail of discarded notions it leaves be­hind. What we’re leaving behind today, at record pace, is what­ever belief we might once have had in the value of unstructured time: in the privilege of contemplating our lives before they are gone, in the importance of uninterrupted conversation, in the beauty of play. In the thing in itself – unmediated, leading nowhere. In the present moment. Admittedly, the present – in its ontological, rather than consumerist, sense – has never been too popular on this side of the Atlantic; we’ve always been a finger-drumming, restless bunch, suspicious of jawboning, less likely to sit at the table than to grab a quick one at the bar. Whitman might have exhorted us to loaf and invite our souls, but that was not an invitation we cared to extend, not unless the soul played poker, ha, ha. No sir, a Frenchman might invite his soul. One expected such things. But an American? An American would be out the swinging doors and halfway to tomorrow before his silver dollar had stopped ringing on the counter. I was put in mind of all this last June while sitting on a bench in London’s Hampstead Heath. My bench, like many others, was almost entirely hidden; well off the path, delightfully overgrown, it sat at the top of a long-grassed meadow. It had a view. There was whimsy in its placement, and joy. It was thoroughly impractical. It had clearly been placed there to encourage one thing – solitary contemplation. And sitting there, listening to the summer drone of the bees, I sud­denly imagined George W. Bush on my bench. I can’t tell you why this happened, or what in particular brought the image to my mind. Possi­bly it was the sheer incongruity of it that appealed to me, the turtle-on-a-lamppost illogic of it; earlier that summer, intrigued by images of Kaf­ka’s face on posters advertising the Prague Marathon, I’d entertained myself with pictures of Franz looking fit for the big race. In any case, my vision of Dubya sitting on a bench, reading a book on his lap – smiling or nodding in agreement, wetting a finger to turn a page – was so discordant, so absurd, that I realized I’d accidentally stumbled upon one of those visual oxymorons that, by its very dissonance, illuminates something essential. What the picture of George W. Bush flushed into the open for me was the classically American and increasingly Republican cult of movement, of busy-ness; of doing, not thinking. One could imagine Kennedy reading on that bench in Hampstead Heath. Or Carter, maybe. Or even Clinton (though given the bucolic setting, one could also imagine him in other, more Dionysian scenarios). But Bush? Bush would be clearing brush. He’d be stomping it into submission with his pointy boots. He’d be making the world a better place. Now, something about all that brush clearing had always bothered me. It wasn’t the work itself, though I’d never fully understood where all that brush was being cleared from, or why, or how it was possible that there was any brush still left between Dallas and Austin. No, it was the fre­netic, anti-thinking element of it I disliked. This wasn’t simply outdoor work, which I had done my share of and knew well. This was brush clearing as a statement, a gesture of impatience. It captured the man, his disdain for the inner life, for the virtues of slowness and contemplation. This was movement as an answer to all those equivocating intellectuals and Gallic pontificators who would rather talk than do, think than act. Who could always be counted on to complicate what was simple with long-winded dis­cussions of complexity and consequences. Who were weak. And then I had it, the thing I’d been trying to place, the thing that had always made me bristle – instinctively – whenever I saw our fidgety, unelected President in action. I recalled reading about an Italian art movement called Futurism, which had flourished in the first decades of the twentieth century. Its prac­titioners had advocated a cult of restlessness, of speed, of dy­namism; had rejected the past in all its forms; had glorified busi­ness and war and patriotism. They had also, at least in theory, supported the growth of fascism. The link seemed tenuous at best, even facile. Was I serious­ly linking Bush – his shallowness, his bustle, his obvious suspi­cion of nuance – to the spirit of fascism? As much as I loathed the man, it made me uneasy. I’d always argued with people who applied the word carelessly. Having been called a fascist myself for suggesting that an ill-tempered rottweiler be put on a leash, I had no wish to align myself with those who had downgraded the word to a kind of generalized epithet, roughly synonymous with “asshole,” to be applied to whoever disagreed with them. I had too much re­spect for the real thing. And yet there was no getting around it; what I’d been picking up like a bad smell whenever I observed the Bush team in ac­tion was the faint but unmistakable whiff of fascism; a democratically diluted fascism, true, and masked by the perfume of down-home cookin’, but fascism nonetheless. Still, it was not until I’d returned to the States and had forced myself to wade through the reams of Futurist manifestos – a form that obviously spoke to their hearts – that the details of the connection began to come clear. The linkage had nothing to do with the Futurists’ art, which was notable only for its sustained mediocrity, nor with their writing, which at times achieved an almost sublime level of badness. It had to do, rather, with their ant-like energy, their busy-ness, their utter disdain of all the manifestations of the inner life, and with the way these traits seemed so organically linked in their thinking to aggression and war. “We intend to exalt aggressive action, a feverish insomnia,” wrote Filip­po Marinetti, perhaps the Futurists’ most breathless spokesman. “We will glorify war – the world’s only hygiene – militarism, patriotism, the destructive gesture of freedom-bringers….. We will destroy the muse­ums, libraries, academies of every kind….. We will sing of great crowds excited by work.” “Militarism, patriotism, the destructive gesture of freedom-bringers,” “a feverish insomnia,” “great crowds excited by work” … I knew that song. And yet still, almost perversely, I resisted the recognition. It was too easy, somehow. Wasn’t much of the Futurist rant (“Take up your pickaxes, your axes and hammers and wreck, wreck the venerable cities, pitilessly”) sim­ply a gesture of adolescent rebellion, a FUCK YOU scrawled on Dad’s garage door? I had just about decided to scrap the whole thing when I came across Marinetti’s later and more extended version of the Futurist creed. And this time the connection was impossible to deny. In the piece, published in June of 1913 (roughly six months after An­derson walked out of the paint factory), Marinetti explained that Futur­ism was about the “acceleration of life to today’s swift pace.” It was about the “dread of the old and the known… of quiet living.” The new age, he wrote, would require the “negation of distances and nostalgic solitudes.” It would “ridicule . . . the ‘holy green silence’ and the ineffable land­scape.” It would be, instead, an age enamored of “the passion, art, and idealism of Business.” This shift from slowness to speed, from the solitary individual to the crowd excited by work, would in turn force other adjustments. The wor­ship of speed and business would require a new patriotism, “a heroic ideal­ization of the commercial, industrial, and artistic solidarity of a people”; it would require “a modification in the idea of war,” in order to make it “the necessary and bloody test of a people’s force.” As if this weren’t enough, as if the parallel were not yet sufficiently clear, there was this: The new man, Marinetti wrote – and this deserves my italics – would communicate by “brutally destroying the syntax of his speech. He wastes no time in building sentences. Punctuation and the right ad­jectives will mean nothing to him. He will despise subtleties and nuances of lan­guage.” All of his thinking, moreover, would be marked by a “dread of slowness, pettiness, analysis, and detailed explanations. Love of speed, abbrevi­ation, and the summary. ‘Quick, give me the whole thing in two words!’“ Short of telling us that he would have a ranch in Crawford, Texas, and be given to clearing brush, nothing Marinetti wrote could have made the resemblance clearer. From his notorious mangling of the Eng­lish language to his well-documented impatience with detail and analy­sis to his chuckling disregard for human life (which enabled him to crack jokes about Aileen Wuornos’s execution as well as mug for the cameras minutes before announcing that the nation was going to war), Dubya was Marinetti’s “New Man”: impatient, almost pathologically un­reflective, unburdened by the past. A man untroubled by the imagina­tion, or by an awareness of human frailty. A leader wonderfully attuned (though one doubted he could ever articulate it) to “today’s swift pace”; to the necessity of forging a new patriotism; to the idea of war as “the necessary and bloody test of a people’s force”; to the all-conquering beauty of Business.

Mark Slouka is the author, most recently, of the novel God’s Fool. He teaches in Columbia University’s School of the Arts. His last essay for Harper’s Magazine, “Arrow and Wound,” appeared in the May 2003 issue.

Rather than destroying the market for drugs previously sold in the shops — as was hoped for by Health Minister Mary Harney who introduced the ban — the drugs have simply moved on to the black market.
And the danger they pose has increased because members of the public may take the drugs, without realising what they are taking, and can underestimate both the dose they can tolerate, and the effects the drug may have.
The warning that has been issued by doctors within the drugs service is headed ‘Be careful — advice to anyone using street drugs’.
It details how addiction service staff have become aware of serious physical and mental reactions suffered by drug users and that as far as they can determine, substances previously sold in head shops are now being used to cut drugs such as heroin and cocaine.
This has resulted in a number of people being treated in both medical and psychiatric units.
It urges anyone who uses drugs to be “extra cautious at this time” and to report any unusual reactions to addiction workers or their own doctors.
In addition, doctors say the net effect of the banning of drugs sold in head shops has meant that these drugs they have gone underground.
Also, they warned that new drugs that were concocted in China, are being sold in the shops and “even less is known about these substances and their effects”.
The medical staff say the ban has not had the desired effect by a long shot, and they are bracing themselves for even more casualties and health emergencies, resulting from the continued abuse of such substances.

It’d be really infuriating if it weren’t so tragically predictable.

"I'm sorry you couldn't be here tonight."

Yesterday, the internet was set alight when the trailer for the ‘documentary’ I’m Still Here was released. It’s supposedly an effort by Casey Affleck to chart the rise and fall of Joaquin Phoenix as an actor, then his rise again as a rap artist.

Many people, including my good self, became worried/interested/aware of Phoenix’s problems when they watched this (piece of TV gold) interview on Latterman:

Now, taking a load of Barbituates or similar drugs and going on a talk show is all well and good, as is the paunch and beard, between movies he likes to let it hang out, fair enough. But for a long time, something never sat well with me, I never bought the idea that it was real. I thought the whole thing was some sort of performance piece, when he fell off the stage and got in a fight during a rap performance I was sure of it. I’m not the first person to figure this out of course, and perhaps Letterman was in on it, or it could indeed be some sort of huge ‘life as art’ performance as a comment on the nature of celebrity. If that’s the case, the documentary really needs to be great to pull it of. We’ll see.

If he actually has gone mad, and Affleck happened to start filming at the right time, then that’d be even better, but unlikely.

Someone needs to take a picture of Pacino holding this picture before he dies.

“I don’t need bodyguards. I’m from the South Bronx.”

With Hemingway

“It’s easy to fool the eye but it’s hard to fool the heart.”

“Vanity is my favourite sin.”

“I was a kid when Dean came out. Dean was the inspiration. Even the red jacket he wore in ‘Rebel Without a Cause,’ you saw that red jacket popping up all over the place. He really reached people in a way; it was kind of a phenomenon when you think of it. I wonder what it would be like today, that kind of a person … he made that connection with his audience. And I remember at that time my mother loved him. He reached everybody.”