Bangkok - City of Plums

Bangkok: Land of 7-11’s

It had been a year and half since my last trip to Bangkok and stepping off the plane, going through immigration and customs, and getting in the taxi line I felt somewhat like I was at home. You see as I was going through my divorce three years ago Thailand was the first trip I took that set me on the path I am now following. At the time I just needed to get away from work, friends, life, really just everything and be alone. For me Thailand was that place and it just felt right. The people are exceedingly friendly except for the few taxi drivers that try to rip you off…make sure they use the meter. Getting off the plane this time I knew that I could relax and start finding what it is that I need.

We had booked a hostel (Suk 11) for a week as we were going to be getting our visa’s to go to Vietnam and it could take up to a week to get them arranged. This was fine by me as I could stay in Bangkok for well over a week and the list that Peewee had given to us of things to do would probably take a month! To be perfectly honest we didn’t do a lot when we were in Bangkok the main thing for us was to relax and figure out our next steps. We loved the first few weeks of our trip but as we were traveling with friends who had limited time it was always kind of go, go, go…and it was fine for the three weeks but it’s not how we want the entire trip to unfold. The more I think about it I never want my trips to be like that I want to take my time and really know the places I go not just see a fleeting glimpse. So I guess what I am saying is corporate America has seen the last of me.

Anyways, back to Bangkok we did do a few things we went to Chatachuk for the weekend market, rode the riverboat to see Wat Po, Wat Arun and the Grand Palace. Walked around Chinatown on our way back from the temples. Got some great massages for about $8 an hour (Baan Thai was great! Thanks Peewee). Spent a night people watching on Khao San Road. Ate some great street food for super cheap and it’s always fun to not really know what you are getting and then eating it and loving it all the while paying under $2 to be stuffed. Mitra got to spend time going to meetings, as there was a nightly meeting at the hotel right across the street from our hostel. One thing that we didn’t do that I wish we had is to go see a movie at Siam Paragon, which is the most ridiculous mall I have ever seen. Oh and they have 80 baht movies on Wednesday’s which is about $2.50 for a movie in a super nice theatre. And one thing for everyone that was in the Philippines…on the first night in Bangkok Mitra went to a meeting and I went to a bar Cheap Charlies as I was drinking and speaking with some British girls a guy walked past selling oversized lighters. So of course I had to buy one and I bought the red one that we have named Rusty!

Over the week we were there Mitra had made it painfully obvious that she needed some beach time so I did some research and found a place for us to go….Koh Mak. I spoke to some people at the hostel and got some recommendations on places to stay and we headed off to the islands for an indeterminate amount of time. All I know is that we have to leave Thailand on February 20^th and that our visa to Vietnam starts on March 1^st. So we’ll get to the beach and Mitra will bronze herself with coconut oil and I will look good in SPF 50 hoping to not burn to a crisp.

To me Bangkok is great city and I found a new place to stay while there that I will recommend to anyone as it’s convenient, nice, clean and friendly. It is a very easy place to travel to beautiful beaches, other countries and to meet amazing people from all over the world. Although it’s not on the beach it’s definitely a place I will come back to often and who knows maybe someday live.

Laa Korn

Brian

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Bangkok – Where the World’s Your Oyster

Song for the post:

One Night in Bangkok by Steve Gibson

would be too easy.  Soooo…

Wishing Well by The Airborne Toxic Event

What to do to get my shit together in Thailand (in no particular order):

Massages

Catch up on blog

Get back into morning routine of reading and writing

Catch up on e-mails

Start working out again

Quit smoking…as much

Go to AA meeting(s)

Learn to meditate

Floss regularly

Brush teeth in circles, not up and down                             

Stop eating fried shit

Drink more water

Start loving myself more

Wake up earlier and DO shit (not do SHIT)

Figure out the meaning of life and my purpose in it and try to understand why exactly I am nuttier than squirrel shit

Extract head from ass and enjoy

            So after an entire day of traveling, we arrived in Bangkok at around 11p.m..  I was cranky and irritable and we all know where my head had been and the hot, dusty, bumpy 17 hours of travel did nothing to improve my mood.  Shockingly, I did not turn into a bundle of delight and joy on the plane ride from Manila to Bangkok.  Dear reader, I’m sure that I don’t need to tell you that when you’re in a foul mood and seething with confusion, constipation, and self-loathing, you will – after giving yourself a thorough, internal beat down – inevitably unleash your irritability on the closest person, place, or thing that has the great misfortune of entering into your realm of poopy-headedness.  In my case, that was Brian.  It was a long day for both of us and I think we were just aching to get to our hostel and get some sleep so it seemed like every look, every breath, every word that passed between the two of us, bugged the ever-loving shit out of the other.      

            We arrived at our hostel – Suk 11 (please refer to B’s post to glean just how seriously wonderful and highly recommended by the both of us it was) and with some weariness on both our parts and yet great resolve in myself to wake up in the morning bright-eyed, refreshed, and ready to have a more positive and enthusiastic outlook on our new nomadic life and myself, we crawled into our big bed and went to sleep.  Now I’m not sure if it was all the traveling or the fact that I was reading “The Fountainhead” and that was kind of messing with my already muddled mind, or just the general uneasiness I had been feeling, but I was having horrible dreams and usually my dreams pertained in some way to me being viciously pissed off at Brian.  So I wasn’t sleeping well to begin with, still somewhat exhausted from the hustle and bustle of the past few months really and now seriously flustered by these all too realistic dreams, that I didn’t wake up till almost the end of breakfast time, totally disoriented, not very refreshed, and unsettlingly angry at poor Brian.  Not a good way to start off the new me and navigate my way to healing in Thailand.  Within the first few hours, Thailand was not going as planned.

            To add to my irritability – as I power smoked my way through breakfast – I checked my e-mail first thing that morning and received really upsetting news about a friend back home.  I was sad, dismal, upset and distraught and pretty much spent the day just going through the motions and wanting to cry at any given moment.  Now when B and I were looking at places to stay in Bangkok, he’d of course done some reading and searching on the net and found this cute little place called The Atlanta.  It looked very charming but the big selling point for me had been the fact that it had a pool.  B being as wonderful as he is – despite the fact that he seemed to want to stay at Suk 11 – set about on a mission while we were in El Nido to book us into The Atlanta.  You can only make reservations via fax or phone call so he spent a fair amount of time Skyping The Atlanta to try and reserve rooms. After 2 days of trying to make contact, he finally got in touch with the guy that made the reservations only to find out that they were booked for the time we would be there so he got back on-line and got us into Suk 11.  As fortune or coincidence or some sort of force in the universe conspiring to kick me in the ass would have it, (I had mentioned that it might be a good idea to try and get to an AA meeting while in Bangkok and B thought it was DEFINITELY a must that my crazy ass get to a meeting) the Suk 11 was located right across from The Ambassador Hotel where they held AA meetings every night of the week.

As part of my desire to shake off some of the crazy I’d been feeling and in an endeavor as part of the plan to change the latitude of my attitude, in the Philippines I was totally game for hitting up a meeting.  After that first day in Bangkok, as the meeting hour drew near, I was beginning to think that maybe I’d put it off till the next day.  B sat my sulky, sullen self down and basically kicked me in the ass and what it boiled down to was him telling me to stop making excuses and just DO something about it.  So, a little hesitantly, I went to the meeting.  I sat down next to this older gentleman who had welcomed me and directed me towards the back of the restaurant where the group was and the meeting started and the secretary announced that this gentleman – Jerry – would be speaking and sharing his experience, strength, and hope.  Jerry introduced himself and started by saying he was born in a tiny, little-known town called Durango in Colorado.  If I hadn’t been so horribly constipated, I probably would’ve shit myself!  If that wasn’t a freakin sign!!!  Not only that, but we talked after the meeting and he told me he’d spent his last night drunk - almost 35 years ago – in Fairfax County Jail.  I was born in Fairfax Hospital, grew up in Fairfax County and the beginning of the end of my drinking career had also landed me in Fairfax County Jail.  Meeting Jerry made me feel more excited and more fantastic than I’d felt in a long time.    

I left the meeting and met B at a bar where he was having some beers and waiting for me.  I told him about Jerry and the meeting and things were good.  Better than they’d been in a while.  But that night, I had some crazy dream about Brian being an ass and woke up groggy, exhausted and pissed off.  That was how the mornings were spent and the evenings saw me finding some sort of respite and solace in the meetings.  I wasn’t meditating, I wasn’t working out, I wasn’t brushing my teeth in circles, I wasn’t loving myself more – I was just as uncomfortable and frustrated as I’d been in the Philippines, only the meetings seemed to help and that was only slightly, until I found myself somewhere in the middle of the week just completely breaking down at one.  I laid it all out on the table and basically discovered myself admitting to myself and others that I felt like a complete phony, just going through the motions, having no clue who the fuck I am or was or was becoming – that it all seemed like and itchy, irritating lie – and how mind-fuckingly painful it all was and that nothing seemed to help.  How it felt like everything was whirling out of control and coming unraveled and there wasn’t a shred of anything that I felt like I could even just grab onto and pull myself back to center.  It was a relief to admit but also overwhelming.
                                                                                             

The idea that after all of this time I have finally admitted to myself that for all of my sobriety and searching, what I’ve been doing has been trying to constantly outrun having to take a good, long, deep, hard look at myself, that I really have built an existence out of half-assedness and excuses because for all the front I put on and the big talk I put out, I’m truly terrified of what my life would look like if I only cared what I thought and not what all the people around me thought that that would make me nothing and that there is so much work ahead of me was somewhat discouraging.  And yet, there was hope.  Time takes time and nothing changes if nothing changes and from here on out, it was going to be baby steps and so, I took some minor forms of what I felt was the appropriate action – the next right thing.

To be honest – I can tell you fuck all about Bangkok!!!  I mean the city is vibrant and lively and has this sort of eclectic energy.  We checked out the weekend market, which was pretty cool, did the river and checked out some Wats and the reclining Buddha, went to Khao San road and a bit of people watching on Soi Cowboy.  Spent a day in Siam Paragon which is the most ridiculous, massive mall I’ve ever seen in my life and after hemming and hawing over where to eat out of the multitude of restaurants to choose from there, ended up deciding on dining at Conizza where they feature pizza in a cone, and I got my first Thai massage ever at Bann Thai (Oh my Thai!!!  Thai massage is the Shiatsu!!!  That little girl bent my body in way that I truly never imagined!!!  I felt like I was a performer in Cirque du freakin Soleil!!!!  It was AWESOME!) and for the most part, just kind of chilled.  (And we did miss out on the fish pedicure and the ping-pong show, much to both of our dismays.)  But mostly I was in a fog.  I was just itching and aching – as I had been from the beginning of this journey – for some sort of flip to switch and something to change and for the world to just instantly open up to me…or me to it…SOMETHING!!!

Dear reader, my confession to you is this:  my deepest, darkest fear is not of death, it is of never truly living.  But what sends me into a paralyzing, huddling, hiding panic is that all that is meant for me, the thing that I will never be able to overcome, is the tiniest, most meaningless, inconsequential, nothing existence.  Even now, as I write these words, my chest is tightening, my breath restricting, my pulse quickening and I just want to scream and cry and combust and break into millions of fiery, passionate, furious pieces and I want to throw up.  And the great irony is that my great, vast, bottomless, seemingly insurmountable fear of not living is the biggest hindrance to my truly living.  I’ve made every excuse in the world to escape, outrun, avoid acknowledging this truth about myself and now it’s barreling down on me like a single-minded Semi truck.  Dear reader, I have a wish.  My wish is this:  I want to love you.  I want to love each moment, each day, each person, each smell, each victory – from the greatest triumphs of the human spirit to the tiniest mishaps of the smallest creation, each heartbreak, each sweetness, each horrid, vulgar, ugly corner, each cell, fiber, molecule, speck, drop, each look, each breath, each word, each blessing, each travesty, each everything and each nothing with the same combustible, fiery, furious passion that I use to destroy the very same in myself.  

   

Right now, dear reader, the best I can explain it is that I exist in two parts – I am made up of out there and in here.  It is my greatest wish that I should find a way that the two should meet, that they should so easily come together as if they were two old friends who gaze upon each other with a secret, unspoken knowing and embrace, and melt into one another like liquid love and in their coming together, they grow so big and abundant that they seep through my skin and spill out and over and onto everyone and everything around me - and in that seeping and spilling, continue to grow - and stave off any further thought of life having the massive weight of caving in on me and finally for once, dissolving into all that luxurious liquid, finally, for one soaking, basking moment, I might breathe.  That is my wish, dear reader, just one breath.  And my wish for you, dear reader, is this – that you may love yourself as those who love you, love you.  I’m reminded now of one of my favorite quotes by Marianne Williamson:  “Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate, our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure…” I will leave you with that, dear reader.  Until then, I’m left waiting, holding my breath and wondering when and where shall all our pieces meet…

xoxoM

Song for going to The Beach:

Soul Meets Body by Death Cab For Cutie