Bangkok

24 hours in and Bangkok was starting. Wet retching into a plastic bag over the side of the bed in the pale peach colored light – smoggy morning sunshine filtered through the ribbed curtains in a Chinatown hotel room.

A week later, having seen a Thai boxing match, five star dinner, new years eve explode, Thai lesbians and stage five clingers, we need to get the fuck out of this city. I am spent, drained, overloaded with sense.

This throbbing concrete center of Thai life is a city of smells, visceral and immediate, clinging to your gut: In the back alley markets of Chinatown, the funky foot-puke scent of fresh durian drifts between overhead tarps. Crushed chilies pop like sparklers in a bright wok, glossy with oil. Pale acid-exhaust sputters from the ancient motorized machines that cough their way along the asphalt veins of the metropolis. From a deep Styrofoam box lined with ice comes the briny tang of fresh seafood still flopping, crawling, blinking, biting and tentacling their way over each other. Cold, gleaming, Freon-laced air blasts out of a shopping mall’s sterile glass abyss. It’s a mélange, a kaleidoscopic reminder of the absolutely rich texture of Thai life.

In this eight-million person mecca the choices open up. I’m simultaneously proud and ashamed of myself. I remember how to live in a city. Three out of 7 nights I haven’t gone to sleep till the sun has come up. Whoop! Good for me, right? But why is that my gut notion? What am I doing? You want to experience a culture so you stay out buying beer until all the locals are drinking their coffees on the way to work.

But goddamn it feels good to live a global life – even if just for a week. Shots at the club; a city’s worth of girls and the games that come with them. How many more 48-hour days can I blend together into a phase-in, phase-out cycle of recovery and destruction? This trip has been about moving beyond the desires I thought I wanted. Now that they’re prostrate in front of me I am grabbing them by the hips without reserve. Is it the case that I can’t handle a city? Is the rural resonance I’ve been reveling in a reminder of something deeper and truer?

I have no clue what it means. I feel like I’m losing it (me) in Bangkok. No purpose anymore – no direction. No next. No goal. I feel floating. The past week has been so unlike anything I’ve done since leaving America. Withdrawn into comfort but I’m tumbling though emptiness. Soft beds and nice blankets and harsh corners in every nook of my mind. It’s no longer an issue of using up time – pacing deeds across a line. That ended when we got here. This is what I was waiting for. Before this it was the road leading up to a new year, to Bangkok, to Thailand, the door to the south. Now we are here. This is what I was waiting for. Now there are infinite possibilities but none really hold clout. Is this the apex or the valley?

It’s the city of squalor and it keeps sucking us down the drain for more money, more time, more hangovers, more problems. But it’s been beautiful. We met up with old friends – more energy and life and goofy excited smiles and conversational shakeups than we’ve had all trip. We need this. This is, I feel, a turning point. The spot where I stop thinking about what next. Because now I don’t care. It’s improv from here on out. Starting now.

Because it turns out we need to fly out of Thailand and back in for the coveted 30-day visa. This global-cosmopolitan youth dream I’ve been living the past week will continue. On to Hong Kong. It’s time to up the ante for Asian megalopolises. I am a young man in the world.

In a place with infinite possibilities, where do you turn? Mentally you only have one choice – to scrutinize yourself. It becomes so easy to turn inward as you live a ravenous outside existence. Where you go, who you see, what you eat – with unlimited choice you can tumble your way across a landscape of glamour, dirt and spice. It’s a deep, perfumed breath of life – a Technicolor shock to the system. This is worldly. This is global. This is fun. This is a city.