Last December, somewhere north:
Departure, No signboard, packing was excruciating. Xtorrent surfaced, time went by, the Budget Terminal. Lovely plain flight, extra long trip to Kamon, sleepy, miniminally commercialised town. Jazz festival.
Pleasantly simple. Westerners and straight perfect beaches. Buzzed at noon and Inside Enderby. Retirement for outcasts. Leaving it all behind and being intellectual.
Afternoons in languor; a life of purpose and activities that count in the long run. Running, swimming, eating, writing. Functional, pragmatic objects. A certain perfection, a defiant drive.
Days of gentle nothing.
In Phuket, it drizzled every afternoon, a sprinkling of holy water. Unfit, pudgy, pasty, swimming with Enderby, grimacing at a rows of fuschia beach umbrellas, I stumble.
One understands more, now. Fixated on a certain consumption, unable to act and, with each committment, unable to go any further, this is me. In a week, Christmas, and I will be in an even more decrepit cafe, somewhere northeast, somewhere else. There will be pen, and paper, sore legs, and not much else. I can’t read for the mosquitoes, can’t think for the chaos, so there is nothing to do but drink, mumble, and deny.
You see, there is no Muse, only a Void. By luck, or by chance, one generates meaning from fragments. A year’s worth of resolutions will always include losing weight, reading, writing, remembering every moment, line and face. Without fail, it falls away, limp and watery, though one is never sure if it is tears or rain, or a holy shower of purgatory.
The hours of each day should be apportioned and ideas ruthlessly torn apart. Just like that, just like that. No one will ever be sufficient, no year will ever be complete. But there are years to fill and lives to save.
I remember when I was in Iran, living and looking down at a soccer field, and typed madly on a stowaway. All lost, but in any case never to be read again. Cast, away. Perhaps one must sweep clean to make anew.
One last morning in Phuket, in a gleaming cafe with Bose speakers and hip-hop, and adjacent to a garish tour operator where a young thai woman endlessly powders her face. 50 metres away, happy brown people frolick in the surf. What more could I want? Worn down by the year, sedentary, inert. A holiday to forget, but every moment a reminder of the year past, mad and full of regret.
Perhaps I am too old for regret, but I am still not conditioned sufficiently to wash it down in beer or hedonism; I am still very much a creature of this world, but not for long, I think, if the narratives of the Woo Yen Yens and Enderbys of this world are any measure. I am to become nothing.
The purpose of my holidays, then, are for me to surface for air, immerse myself in the wide, impossible expanse of this universe, remind myself of my mortality, and then return, rejuvenated and refreshed.
Alone, then, unworthy and incapable of any reasonable amount of human interaction, lost. Was it ever so hard to understand?
Bustling, the cafe prepares for Christmas. Tinsel (onomatopoeic word that it is), a stunted tree, and before long good Christmas cheer and sultry recorded singing. I hesitate, I am visiting a possible future. I will stay a little longer.
What self-respecting person would fly across half the world and sit at a cafe and stare at the beach. Ideas, narratives, existence, the broken shards of time past, all sitting comfortably amongst plastic tables and glistening rattan chairs. Is this what they dream of, in winter, in their grey offices and ghost-filled streets?