Infinite Pleasures

*

The cleaner watches Thai pop on television. She should be working. Outside the sky lightens, that persistent rooster crows and the trees are once again filled with the sound of morning birds, lit lumiscently amongst the old homes and the not-so-old guesthouses of Chiang Mai. He was frightened of the past, frightened of the appalling loss, not so convinced of the future, but there were moments, as he trailed his fingers across smooth, friendly, paid for flesh and laughing embraces when the present churned into exultant moments, and all was well. Suzy and Hen are in Pnom Penh. Now the cleaner is on the phone. Obviously the owners are still asleep. They giggle and fill their heads with garbage. No one ever claimed they were the most intellectual; that they valued education. Song Kaw, the water festival, is coming. I was so sick on the plane they didn't even process me properly through immigration; they just wanted rid of me, Suzy said, and he called her a mad cow on the phone and she just laughed brazenly, as she always did at the catastrophe that had become her life. Now he had to enter the Heart Of Darkness. Now he had to return to Cambodia. He didn't want to.

Now the cleaner giggles on the phone and sings along to pop songs at 6am, loud, inconsiderate, her hard ugly little face equally brazen. Couldn't you be free? The man who had boasted earlier in the day about being a millionaire argued about five baht when it came time to pay the bill at an Indian restaurant. Crowds spilled out. Westerners had their feet rubbed. Terrible times led to terrible solutions; and yet there were always the kind embraces; paid for kisses; embraces across historical divides. Who knew what went on behind closed doors? Was he meant, then, to travel back into purgatory, back into hell? Wasn't it easier to stay sane? Well, so it had become. Tired of his own despair, he couldn't help smiling at good fortune and lithe forms, the power of money, the venerability of age, the stupidity of meetings, at least you're learning tolerance and patience, at least you can know you're not like them, as his old sponsor, mentor, would have said. I wouldn't piss on half of them if they were on fire. Value what fragile days you have left. Who knows how much damage we've done to ourselves; how many car accidents, how many poisons, the insouciance, the frightened ghosts, the lingering melancholy. We did not live normal lives.

Stranger, stranger, strange how you listen to the river of my corrupted story went the Augie March song. He played it time and time again. In the heat there became nothing but blistering forms, I'm going to see my girlfriend one of the hotel guests explained, walking out into the midday sun. Aching for your body? he quipped, for no one ached for the bodies of 50 year old men. Well, I have to pay, he shrugged, obviously perfectly happy with the arrangement. While Hans ranted about how some poor girl had asked for 500 baht. And he smiled in the infinite blessing of secrets; and the girls spilled out of Spicy, the bar where they all went after their own establishments closed at 2am, and his infinitely tired lungs spluttered, now off the cigarettes but failing to respond; and if ill health was to follow you all the days of your life; as the fortune teller predicted so many years ago. It wasn't a very difficult prediction to make. He had been drinking himself to death and he couldn't have been more than 17, already an old hand, already savaged by the fates of the street, already welcomed and reviled, stumbling down from that terrible place, that citadel of darkness and alcoholism where moss grew on the evil walls and the old queens raped them with their eyes; bringing out their wallets, making the negotiations. For him, at least, a bottle of whisky by the bedside was always part of the deal. He had no desire to know what was happening, what was being done to him. None at all. This was not a professional service. This was taking advantage of a boy in oblivion.

Well all things changed and all things were marked, not just for oblivion but for processing across time and space, across countries and fate lines and life stories, when euphoric recall never related to the sins of the flesh but only to more rarefied, expensive forms of euphoria, where dedicated passage had brought them to infinite excess, where crimes of passage and sins of the flesh were mere precursors to greater excesses, greater crimes against nature, where normality had long since dissipated and everything they ever did was illegal. For no good reason and every good reason. Normal people didn't live like this. No one lived like this but them. They spiraled, their heads spiraled, in high rise apartments overlooking the city, in houses with views up and down the harbour, in bookings made ahead for a choice of Thai prostitutes, for long ago streets which made The Haunting look like a picnic, and all these people had died now. Died or been imprisoned. Peter rang from Pai. He was in a shack by the river; that ever so beautiful river where he had walked by day and walked by night; every scene a framed picture; his teenage children complaining the Thai fried rice was better at their local Thai takeaway back in Redfern, where dad falling off the elephant was their greatest subject of mirth; and where all the betrayals and treacheries of the past; against himself, against nature; even against those he had led astray and who were now long dead; they all dissipated into the continuing present, the continuing presence.

Many of his friends had simply not wanted to grow old. They couldn't see the point in not being able to drink and party to dawn, in wearing the ravaged flesh of age, in not being astonishingly good looking as the case may be, the object of desire; envy, the best looking man in the room. They couldn't see the point in having to deal with age and responsibilities, in their no doubt ever compounding failures after a lifetime of excessive consumption; of not being the lad most likely, with a vast and talented future lying far ahead; into the infinite. Their faces cycled fast through a clutching, lurching memory, a sagging sadness as euphoria dripped from the end of a needle, for they had all been doomed from the very start and as virtually the only survivor; his task had become both simpler and sadder still; not just the documenter but the philosophiser, lessons learnt. Nobody can live that way; the way we chose; and survive. Just as he had tried to tell Alex: it's not possible to drink three bottles of spirits a day and live. This is suicidal drinking. That was suicidal behaviour; the path they had all been on. Yet he remembered them all with fondness, not as moral tales; and if he could do it all again he would rewrite history; only in order to rewrite the present, but these self serving analogies would never work; and so he enjoyed the day, partook of the flesh, did things nobody was around to tell anymore, interacted with entirely new generations and new peoples; and wished, just wished, someone had survived intact in order to tell the tale. To share the joke. To embrace with a great, triumphant laugh, everything that had been and everything that would be along their profoundly dissolute trails.

THE BIGGER STORY:

http://www.digtriad.com/news/national_world/article.aspx?storyid=139865&catid=175

Bangkok, Thailand -- Thai anti-government protesters continued their rallies in Bangkok, ahead of a big rally planned for Saturday.

Thousands of red shirted protesters went on with their daily routine of listening to news updates in their encampment near the Government House.

The protests have been going on for almost three weeks.

Battling fatigue and being away from their homes, some in far provinces, the "red shirts" said they will stay on until their demands are met.

"I will fight to the end, if we don't get our demands. I will not go home because we've already fought for a while now. We are making these demands to free the next generation of the troubles we now have," said 70-year-old protester On-Chan Suthipapha.

The protesters have been calling on Abhisit to dissolve parliament and call fresh polls, accusing the premier of coming to power illegitimately by cobbling up a coalition with the help of the powerful military, and of stalling elections that will likely give back power to Thaksin Shinawatra's allies.

The leaders said they are planning a massive rally on Saturday, following the failure of negotiations with Vejjajiva.

The supporters of former premier Thaksin Shinawatra accused Abhisit of stalling negotiations and questioned his sincerity in resolving the deadlock.

"Our aims in the proposal to them are to amend the constitution, that should adhere to the 2007 constitution, but leave room for changes including who will become the king's representatives in the regent," Jatuporn said.

Most of the protesters come from Thailand's rural provinces, where former premier Thaksin Shinawatra remains popular due to his programs that provided affordable healthcare.

Many have returned to their provinces, and the crowds have thinned out, from a peak of over 150,000 when the protests started on March 14.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/apr/02/hamid-karzai-west-afghanistan-election-fraud

The Obama administration said today it was "troubled" by accusations from the Afghan president that the west was trying to weaken him and that foreign troops risked becoming an occupation force.

White House spokesman Robert Gibbs said there was concern over a speech yesterday in which Hamid Karzai sought to turn charges that he stole Afghanistan's presidential election on their head by blaming what he termed "vast fraud" in last August's poll on an attempt by the UN and international organisations to deny him victory or discredit his win.

Karzai also said that the 120,000-strong Nato-led foreign forces fighting the Taliban increasingly risked being seen as occupiers – a comment that led his main political opponent to accuse him of treason.

Gibb said that the Afghan president's remarks "are troubling … a real and genuine concern. We are seeking clarification from President Karzai."

Karzai's comments, broadcast on Afghan television, came after parliament rejected his bid to take direct control of Afghanistan's electoral institutions. But the remarks reflect a growing rift with the west, particularly in the wake of Barack Obama's visit to Kabul last weekend during which he rebuked the Afghan leader for failing to clean up corruption or organise more transparent elections.

"There is no doubt that the fraud was very widespread, but this fraud was not committed by Afghans, it was committed by foreigners," said Karzai in yesterday's televised speech.

The Afghan president also accused foreign governments of trying to influence parliamentary elections later this year. UN and western officials have been pressing for greater protections against fraud.

"They want parliament to be weakened and battered and for me to be an ineffective president, and for parliament to be ineffective," said Karzai.

He also questioned the role of foreign forces in Afghanistan, saying: "In this situation there is a thin curtain between invasion and co-operation assistance." If coalition troops came to be seen as occupiers, the Taliban-led insurgency "could become a national resistance", Karzai added.

http://liveforfilms.files.wordpress.com/2009/12/sci-fi-post-apocalyptic-36436.jpg