The Old Woman Pulled On Her Plastic Legs

*

The old woman pulled on her plastic legs as he passed her in the street. The armless beggar looked up optimistically. The blind man played the accordion as his son led him through the early morning throngs. A handsome boy stood beside the monument at the front of Limpini Park and; and catching his sly glance as he walked rapidly by gave a big grin and opened up his arms. I'm available, it won't cost you more than 500 baht, and I guarantee I'll make you very happy, the grin said; but as he barely had enough money on him for a morning coffee and there just aren't many frustrated Western males in Bangkok, he just kept walking. A hundred meters on he glanced back, and again the boy opened up his arms in a gesturing, warm embrace. I promise I'll be fun. Well no doubt dear boy; as he listened to the tinkling of the sky and the sound of the orchestra as it drifted through the park, and the hum of the traffic as a policeman gestured him and other pedestrians across the road. He felt entirely at home here. In fact he loved it; and he had never loved anything, anywhere; except disparate states of mind and stunning landscapes and strange places in strange bars in the eternity that is the moment before dawn, the moment when you realise you've been up all night yet again and the day world is about to replace the night; with you plastered against it, plastered against the sky and the ground, triumphant, dissolute. Moi moi moi many days.

Nine days without a cigarette and he was jumping out of his skin. Alex S, an American writer of teenage novels he had met, clearly had an encyclopedic knowledge of the massage parlours of Bangkok, when they decided after a midday meeting that they would flit by his apartment to collect some money and go out for a boy massage; and they debated over whether or not a happy ending should be included. If they get frisky you just tell them no, they all want that extra tip, he advised. And at the end of being thoroughly, masterfully yanked around at one of the parlors near Salan Deng, they grinned. You always go for the boy massage? he asked. I prefer their touch, he said, and they both laughed. His books explored the issues of young gay men coming to terms with their sexuality; teenage girls love it, he explained. Handsome, sensitive, gay boys have feelings like they do. There was triumph in a wide, wild pastiche, as that other night, on the way to release his companion from his obligations, his debt to the bar, he couldn't help but look at the collection of handsome young men arrayed outside yet another massage parlour; and Aek laughed at him. You like?

They were all spread out in the most alarming array. He thought back. I am bad every day, Baw had said, and while he denied the obvious truth, there was no going back there. You ripped me off, you little prick, you got commissions at every end, you made me feel like an idiot and some of the worst days of my life were spent with you, there, haunted; and although he could have easily loved him it was no wonder his relatives were no longer talking to him, pissed off at what he had done, and everyone had warned him: if you like yourself don't go, if you love yourself ditch the boy. As Gary had so repeatedly advised: ditch the twink, ditch the twink. Well things had happened rapidly but he had one thing to be grateful for: one thing led to another, one event to another; he would never be here if he hadn't been there; he would never think, how splendid the day, how astonishing the moment, how gorgeous his lover: that elaborate letter: I love you John, I hope you love me, I want to be with you every day, I love you John. Well of course love meant an entirely different thing in Thailand than it did in the west, where it focused on obsessive passion and lifetime commitment. And so every day passed in a triumphant glaze. And just as he would pick out a rickshaw driver in India, he picked a live-in lover out of the crowd.

Everything was placed out ready to be loved. Everything was tidy. Some things could never be said, some triumphs never made, but here, there, everywhere, he walked past the morning stalls, he paid 30 cents for cut up papaya, he struggled with the pronunciation of "friend"; puhn-yen, and he caught these stray filaments from the past; grim inner-city streets and speed wracked havens in the 1980s, when mountains of amphetamines poured through their veins and he went to work without any sleep day after day; and wracked, wracked through the long nights and the infinite delight, infinite craziness that had become their ordinary state of mind; they could become tired beyond measure when the drugs ran out and ecstatic beyond everything when the kilos of white powder walked through the door, and submissive when smacked across the face by the dealer he had robbed; and devious when he walked through saunas in the early hours of every day, with water dripping and bodies gasping and crazy girls talking through the night; and here, here they just grinned at you as if nothing mattered and everything was fun and everything was for pleasure; and hey, if I can do you for 500 baht I will, the boys expression said; and he thought: just as well I didn't bring any money with me; or maybe it was just another stupid gesture and he should be up for anything. You can have a ridiculous amount of sex for not much money in Bangkok, he advised his sometimes grumpy old friend Pete: come and stay; do you good. Well they laughed, because everyone was laughing here.

THE BIGGER STORY:

http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2010/06/29/2939797.htm

Gillard's trashing of Kevin07 has only just begun

By Annabel Crabb

Julia Gillard will encourage public awareness of Kevin07's failings, to deflect attention from her own. (ABC News: Jeremy Thompson)

It's probably for the best that Julia Gillard has opted to keep Kevin Rudd out of the Cabinet room for now.

In fact, it's probably advisable, for the immediate future, for Ms Gillard to ensure she is not in any room at the same time as her immediate predecessor.

This is a man who is reported to have freaked out when confronted by an inferior sandwich at 30,000 feet.

How will he be taking the sight of his former deputy calmly, charmingly, deliberately - and with significant apparent success - dancing on his grave?

Thursday's press conference by the new PM must have been bad enough.

In it, Ms Gillard - her tresses redone in a particularly murderous shade of claret - made repeated reference to the Rudd government as "a good government that had lost its way".

If you listen to the polls, and Julia Gillard does, you can assume the abandonment of the emissions trading scheme - effected back in April, when Newspoll went south at the angle of a Himalayan goat-track - was a significant instance of way-losing.

And where did the relevant players stand, on the trashing of the ETS?

Gillard: For.

Rudd: Against.

Ms Gillard has never denied this, but she has done little to dispel the popular perception that identifies the dithering on climate change as Kevin Rudd's.

If the victory press conference was tough for Kevin Rudd, one wonders what he might have felt on Sunday morning, when he unrolled the papers to find wall-to-wall coverage of Julia Gillard's renunciation of "his" population views.

Mr Rudd has argued at length that his comments embracing a "big Australia" were not an active endorsement of a 36 or 40 million population target.

Those figures, he explained umpteen times, were departmental projections, not an objective.

For months, Tony Abbott has joyously capitalised on the opportunity offered by Rudd's "big Australia", suggesting that the Government's plan was for 16 million extra newcomers to be personally escorted into your job and mine by an obsessively expansionist Kevin07.

Which is fine, because verballing Kevin Rudd is - or was - Tony Abbott's job.

How must Kevin Rudd be feeling, now that it is clear that Julia Gillard also considers it her job?

The new PM's weekend interviews deliberately plant Kevin Rudd in the "increase immigration" camp, and herself several hundred kilometres away, which makes perfect sense if you happen to be Julia Gillard but cannot, one imagines, feel anything other than utter outrage if you happen to be her luckless predecessor.

The weeks ahead will include many such examples, as Julia Gillard tacitly encourages a public awareness of Kevin07's failings, so as to deflect attention from her own.

It's a brutal job they're doing on him.

Under these circumstances, including Kevin Rudd in the Cabinet would amount to an invitation for him to join in.

And that - after a week of indignity - would be the cruellest cut of all.

Annabelle Crabb is ABC Online's chief political writer.

http://news.ninemsn.com.au/health/1077629/asia-urged-to-adopt-aust-drug-reforms

Asian governments, police and judiciary need to adopt Australia's reforms in dealing with injecting drug users rather than maintain present harsh penalties that have led to soaring AIDs cases among injecting drug users, experts say.

Asian countries, including China, Thailand, the Philippines, Malaysia, Singapore and Vietnam, all have long prison sentences for drug users and the death penalty, especially for traffickers.

But analysts and the medical fraternity say such harsh sentencing forces injecting drug users underground leaving them vulnerable to becoming infected by the AIDS virus HIV.

In Thailand HIV rates among injecting drug users (IDUs) is at 30 to 50 per cent, despite progress in reducing HIV rates among the general population over the past two decades.

Australian doctor Nicholas Thomson, from the John Hopkins School of Public Health, says Asian governments are resisting legal and other reforms that would lower HIV rates and reduce overcrowded prison populations.

Harm reduction policies adapted in Australia include needle exchange programs as well as methadone and other medical support to users.

"Obviously the Australian model is a successful model because you've kept prevalence of HIV amongst IDU users under one per cent, so clearly it's successful," Dr Thomson told AAP.

"The reason it's so successful is because it's government endorsed.

"I think it's one of the prime differences working in this region.

"You have government sanctioned, government funded comprehensive good coverage services in Australia," he said.

The Australian Overseas Aid Program (AusAID) along with the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, have been backing projects supporting harm reduction in injecting drug communities across the region.

A report by the Thailand-based Asian Harm Reduction Network found that as a result of shortages in supply of heroin there was a growing trend of injecting methamphetamines, which was seen as particularly worrisome.

The Thai prison population doubled between 1996 and 2004 due to the criminalisation of methamphetamine in 1996 and a heavy handed law enforcement approach to drug issues, peaking with the War on Drugs in 2003.

The crackdown on drugs left more than 2500 people dead during the premiership of Thaksin Shinawatra.

Ton Smits, executive director Asian Harm Reduction Network, says all Asian countries are struggling to accept a policy of harm reduction into their laws and judiciary.

"What is happening is basically too little, too slow and too late," Mr Smits said.

http://www.colorado.edu/studentgroups/thaiclub/Images/AboutThailand/Bangkok2.jpg