Dogs

I can't decide if the video below is hilarious or horrible. Waiting on the beach in Ko Lipe for a ferry, we saw this dog in the sand. It lives on the beach, hobbling between the bars, looking for scraps and love. I don't know what's wrong with it, but it's pretty clear that it can't use its back legs. Maybe his hips were stomped on as a puppy, or maybe something went wrong when she gave birth.

Whatever the case, that motion is absurd. And as soon as I saw it, I started laughing. Too loudly, people were staring at me. A couple of travelers also waiting for the ferry were nice enough to give the pooch a scratch behind the ears, make it feel better about itself maybe.

But I couldn't stop laughing. A dog doesn't know your laughing at it, right? Is it wrong to laugh at a paraplegic dog? Is it anything as bad as laughing in a paraplegic human's face?

I think about these sort of morality questions a lot. We live in a world of grey shades, some people say, and there are no 100% right answers. I believe this, to an extent. But sometimes I think that there is a right answer. Often there isn't, like this dog on Lipe - unavoidably sad and intensely funny. But maybe there is a whiter shade of grey?

This animal has clearly lived off the generosity of others for a while. It can't leave the beach, ever. How could it drag itself like that over the paved street? Luckily for the dog, most people are nicer than me. 

A Combat Memory

 I was hiding on the bed – recon duty. From the lower vantage point, my perspective was dominated by the bright pink walls: 4x8 ft. pieces of corrugated cardboard licked with a thin veneer of offensively glaring paint. They provide excellent visual contrast to the targets. Out in the open, my partner gets an eyeful of messy bamboo ceiling and floor, a cacophonous pattern ill suited for unassisted targeting. He is poised to strike, a statue, tense and coiled. Only his eyes move, boiling with adrenaline as they sweep back and forth through the air, waiting for my direction. Across my line of sight drifts a bogey. He’s out in the open, without a squad or formation, traveling slowly, swerving like a drunk. Our plan is working.

“Near the wall,” I shout, pointing through the crack in my fort’s translucent netting. With a corking twist, the attack comes. Two hands fly through the air, driven to an unnamable set of coordinates designated by a deep subconscious awareness of time and space. A crack, and the two palms collide. When they pull apart, a black paste is smeared between the 3^rd and 4^th fingers of the left hand. If you look closely, you can see the tiny fragmented joints, dozens of them blasted apart. It brings to mind a pile of shattered black sticks jutting from the mud at odd angles.

One down. This is our first coordinated kill on the team’s first coordinated mission. The command was to move beyond guerrilla battles and quick retreats – to take it for the team and stick it out in the open field. To take casualties if duty demanded it.

We weren’t unprepared. We were armed with a variety of weaponry: short range projectiles, hand-to-hand combat enhancers and a laboratory of chemical shields and poison gasses. Plus we were fighting on our own turf. That was our blood smeared across the wall; don’t anyone forget. Fighting isn’t a choice anymore when your home is under assault.

A black static humm floats across my face. I have been infiltrated. My cover has been blown. A crack left open too long, perhaps, or a piece of the big blue cloth might fallen off the side of the bed, exposing a vital leak of airspace. Regardless, the enemy is inside; I am not safe. I thrash and clamor and twist, trying to escape my compromised position. I watch a parade of embroidered roses and cherubs fly by as the voluminous patterned netting streams across my face.

Defenseless, my only option is to join the attack. I rise to help my overextended comrade. Two fighters now, instead of one. Force multipliers. I go for my invader. There he is on the wall, brushing his hair with disturbing bravado. God, he is a big motherfucker. Black and stilted with those enormous soul-wells where eyes should be. With a squint and a grunt, I strike, remembering my second and last karate lesson from two years ago. Palm cocked, I jab at the wall, connecting with a smash as my left fist launches backwards for added torque, my whole mass converted into a slamming force against the thin cardboard. The whole building shakes with a silencing thunder clap. I pull back to examine the carnage. A crumpled dark stain held together by a satiny, mucous-y fluid that has splashed out like a cluster bomb, spewing detritus and gore to the outer reaches of its spindly splatter mark. The whole scene glints in the incandescent light swaying overhead.

My enemy left his mark though, on my palm – an engorged smear of blood across my hand. It is full and red and vital looking. Drop-like, before it breaks, and runs, dripping across my skin while elation fills my stomach. I am shimmering with acidic glee from the inside out. A post-murder high. Whose blood is on my hand? I have avenged him. I raise my hand in triumph and press it too the wall, a bloody palm marking my victory. Transfixed by the death, the shuddering, immediate snuff of a life, I fail to notice the smaller, near translucent short-range interceptor land on the back of my hand. But I feel the stab. Hyper alert and juiced on a raging adrenal gland, I can feel every molecule of puncture as the foreign object slides into my wet skin cells.

When I swat at him, he doesn’t move – just stands there and takes it. Another sign that our smoke coils are working. Planted throughout the room, these slow burning, lavender scented smokers perfume the air with a heady smell, one that seems to retard our enemies.  Stupid and slow, we take advantage of them. In this state, they are wont to lay low, sleep in their humid little corners on the ground, staying away from the smoke. They like the bathroom, the earthy humidity of the concrete floor and stagnant toilet water make a comfortable base.

Now we are the invaders. I turn on the shower head and direct it through the air, across the walls, soaking the six-faced little cube room. I hope to infuriate them. Drive them wild in the artificial rain. Tongue between my teeth, I relish in these war games, the all or nothing, us vs. them mindset consumes and drives me. I am a vehicle for this primitive barbarism embedded in my genes. As my foes try to escape the flooding torrent, instinct drives my appetite for devastation.

In the bedroom, my partner waits, silent and coiled once more. He is holding a large, laminated map, folded like an accordion into a thick, floppy rectangle. This is the ultimate swatter. As the little airborne terrors streak past the bathroom door, he is ready. When one pauses against the wall, or bangs around in the corner, the map whips through the air like the hand of god, dealing death with explosive percussiveness. The room rattles like a bass drum every time the hammer strikes. 

We have them in a pincer. As the decimated squad retreats from the bedroom onslaught (how many have we killed? twenty? thirty?) I stay put in the bathroom, waiting to reengage. A group of five or six tries to hide in the contours of the wavy sheet of tin that serves as a wall. I pounce without mercy. I use every piece of god-graced weaponry my body has. I punch at the metal. I scratch at the wood sill. Wherever there is motion, I move to eradicate. Another down below; the knee. Quick twist. The metallic rattle echoes brutally in the confined space.  One more – top left. A palm strike and the thin metal bends back. Fresh air floods in and he escapes through the opening momentary opening.

I am frothing; my blood is on fire. I want him back. I want to pull him limb from limb. I am consumed by desire and steam is hissing between my clenched teeth. I have lost control.

Here, Fishy, Fishy...

Entering the water as a predator reminds you that our bodies are engineered for land. Even at that, they are engineered rather poorly. We dominate the biosphere’s hierarchy not so much because of what we can do physically, but because of how we have learned to do it. This capacity for learning – our abnormal amount of grey matter – lets us tame plants in neat little rows, shoot holes wild animals with explosively-charged pieces of metal, and drain the oceans of fish. The common denominator for each of these feats is the use of tools. As a species, we are really good at building things – shovels, guns, nets – to augment our weak but flexible bodies.

One of our first and most versatile tools is the spear: essentially a sharp piece of something attached to a long, rigid something else. For thousands of years this combination of long and sharp has advanced our reach and enhanced our force. Our pre-human ancestors used spears to fell mastodons. The Chinese perfected the art of using the spear as a weapon against other humans. Many groups of indigenous equatorial coast-dwellers still catch dinner every day with a spear in the water. 

I built my spear with a rusty three-inch nail I pulled out of my bungalow’s wall, a four-foot piece of gnarled tree branch and a roll of duct tape. With enough tape wrapped around the end, the tetanus-inflicting point smoothly tapers to the shaft, and I have an authentic, hand-made fish sticker.

With this five-minute hack job and a mask and snorkel, I enter the ocean for the first time not as a spectator but an active member of the ecosystem, if still an alien one.

Sunset Beach faces west, a short stretch of sand between two rocky promenades in a bend along the north shore of Ko Kraden, about ten miles of the west coast of Thailand, in the Andaman Sea. The sand is white and the water is a luscious shade of turquoise for roughly the first 300 feet. During low tide, a maze of sharp orange rocks covered in slimy plant matter emerge around the beach’s left corner, as you gaze out to sea. But when the tide comes in, these drowned stones become a feeding ground for thousands of brightly colored tropical fish ranging in size from little inch long clownfish to the (relatively) elephantine parrotfish, at almost two psychedelically colored feet from teeth to tail. With a water level wavering between three to six feet deep, it’s a perfect proving ground for the hungry amateur.

One of the difficulties with spear fishing is that fish are very good swimmers. While I pride myself on a certain natural aptitude for swimming, my bulky, jointed body doesn’t stand a chance in an agility contest with anything living here. If they sense an attack they can dart, weave, double-back or dive with the immediacy of an electrical pulse. And they are very good at sensing attacks. With protruding spherical eyes, fish have a near 360 degree field of vision. Water acts as a natural sound amplifier, carrying waves 4.3 times faster than the air, but even if it didn’t, a fish’s entire body acts as a microphone, (it’s roughly the same density as the water they’re swimming in – sound passes right through their body, vibrating the tiny, dense bones of the inner ear). And while humans can see and hear in the water, we certainly cannot smell. Fish detect chemical change by passing water over the tiny nostril-like holes on the front of their face, called nares; this “smelling” is one of the ways they search for food.

These attributes, carefully selected over millions of years of evolution, make fish very wary of foreigners. When my pale, gangly body floats by with a snorkel and nothing else, I look like a very ugly immigrant – one that couldn’t do much damage even if I tried – and the communal reaction is one of rather benign disinterest. The only time my presence warrants a reaction is when I make a move to try and reach out to touch a fish. However, when I enter the water with a rusty nail duct taped to a long piece of wood, and use this article as a forward appendage, a palpable sense of anxiety permeates through the shallows. The alien object with the sharp point instantly raises alarms in the aquatic community, and my presence is a planetary mass in their tiny satellite orbits. You can measure where the fish will be based on where I am. They circle in orbits just outside the reach of my stick, and constantly have one eye trained on me. Some curious ones will turn to stare straight at me, before deciding the best course of action is to dart under a rock. They are very good at keeping these immovable solid objects between themselves and the nail. I am constantly registering with frustration that the group of fish I was stalking – the ones that seemed to disappear thirty seconds ago – have been hanging out around my feet. As I’m rather encumbered by my mass, by the time I turn around they are already gone again. I will never out maneuver these guys. I have to outsmart them.

Which is how I’ve come to categorize three distinct techniques in the amateur spear hunter’s quiver.

1. The One Handed Bum Rush: This is perhaps the least nuanced method, and the one I tried first, and most often. Holding the spear forward, with one arm partially extended, I locate a group of medium-sized fish, preferably densely packed and near a rock. The best way to rush is to wait for an incoming wave and to glide forward on it. This not only offers more propulsion than a human body could ever self-generate, it also looks much less conspicuous. Instead of a flapping noisy, attention calling motion, I simply let the wave push my stationary body until I get within range. At that point all pretense of secrecy is abandoned and I lash out with maximum effort at the middle of the group, hoping to pin one unlucky guy against the rock during their scattershot escape.

2. The Two-Handed Concealed Guidance System: This is a more stalker-ish, predatory attack. The spear is held in the dominant right hand, which is extended as far back as possible, so that the spear point isn’t very far in front of my body, while left hand loosely holds the forward end of the stick. In theory, this protects the nail from view, making me a less menacing object as a whole. It also, with my arm fully cocked back, provides a great deal more torque, so that the subsequent spear thrust has much more force. Furthermore, the guiding left hand directs the spear so that it’s not so much a blind plunge as a quick sniper shot. Instead of blitzkrieging the fish before they know what’s happening, the key here is to try to be as inconspicuous as possible, until I am right on top of them and ready to unleash targeted death.

3. The Cast Away: Adapted from Tom Hanks, this involves changing the game a little bit. Instead of being a water-borne predator, I use my considerable evolutionary advantage to amphibianize the battle. Instead of swimming through the shallows, I stand with my head bent forward. My feet are on solid ground (sand) and my mask-protected eyes are just below the surface – I transform into a satellite observer, looking down instead of across. Most importantly, I hold my spear completely out of the water, concealing all danger from the suspicious aquatic eyes. The key to this technique is rigid stillness. Walking around, kicking up dust and looking very unnatural, will just scare my prey away. Instead, I anchor down, and become just another part of the landscape. Eventually, the fish’s wariness will turn to curiosity and they will come check out these new pale, hairy rocks sticking out of the water. When that time comes, I strike downwards, splashing through the surface and hopefully not spearing my toes in the process.

There are major problems with each choice, (the first is too obvious, the second rips my palm apart and the third makes such a big splash when entering the water that everything is scared away) and I am sorry to report that in two hours of hunting, I went away trophy-less my first day.

It’s another matter completely to debate the morality of this practice – something I did at length, although I can assure the reader that I had every intent of eating my catch – and the discussion is a good one to have. But it’s impossible to debate the excitement, the plain old fun, of trying to catch a fish with nothing but a stick and your own wiles.  I never managed to do it, but I’m not going to stop trying.

Ko Phi Phi Wont Let Me Be

I don’t consider it an exaggeration to call Koh Phi Phi the most beautiful place I’ve ever visited. Brutal limestone cliffs covered by a luscious green blanket erupt 200 feet out of the turquoise sea to scratch at the vast blue sky. These cliffs guard stretches of gleaming silver sand where stunningly clear water slowly licks back and forth throughout the day. In the shallows, you can count grains of white sand through the crystal liquid; further out the surface protects a rainbow world – reefs living and eating and dying in a Technicolor whorl of motion. 

 

Some philosophers consider beauty as an aesthetic term. It can be taken to be considered as a matter of form. If a form is complete and whole – if an observer feels the essence of the thing in itself follows an expected pattern, contour, shape – it can bring a soothing mental effect. We don’t have to imagine any of the missing pieces, because there they are, right in front of us. Obviously, this means that there are a lot of beautiful things. Art is often beautiful, a mother and newborn can be beautiful and much of the earth is very beautiful. But of course there are shades to everything. Our lives are not split into two categories: the beautiful and the everything else. And so, in terms of degrees of beauty, the island of Koh Phi Phi takes the cake from this observer’s standpoint. It is beyond soothing to visually take in the landscape. It couldn’t be more complete.

 

But thinking about it this way, I wonder: Is the only reason I think this place is so beautiful because it supplies so many criteria I have been taught to think of as “beautiful”? There was one embarrassing moment in the beginning where I caught myself thinking, “This is almost like in the postcards.” My inner disaffected youthful criticism could still point out the flaws. And I can only assume that most other people could go through a similar mental exercise. Because here’s the thing: most other parts of Koh Phi Phi can be pretty gross.

Thailand is the most visited destination in Asia, and while the country’s Tourism Authority does not supply exact figures, it is widely acknowledged that Koh Phi Phi is one of the most heavily trafficked destinations. And that once the island’s iconic Maya Bay was cast in the title role of the 2000 Leonardo DiCaprio film, The Beach, what was once a sparse and rugged island has been radically transformed into a highly charged commercial engine, throwing a manic energy atop a soporifically enchanting landscape.

90% of menus have pizza on them; hillsides once covered by untamed jungle are being stripped, the I-beams of a soon-to-open hotel stand naked and sheer. In the town center, mother and child teams build and sell “buckets” to young shirtless men along a neon parade route of beachside bars. (A bucket is an electrifying combination of liquor, soda and Thai Red Bull – itself banned in several countries – stirred together with ice and served in a small plastic bucket. About six shots, and some speed to go with it, ready to drink through one of seven straws. It is the most popular drink in Southern Thailand.)

And none of this is necessarily a bad thing. The residents of Koh Phi Phi are certainly better off financially now that a flourishing tourist industry has found a home there. But it makes it weird to visit. There is a rather extreme dissonance found within the experience.

All around, you are surrounded by one of the most visually stunning places in the world, while the smells, sounds and claustrophobic mangle of the small society you are now part of are enough to keep you locked in a hotel room for the night. It may just be a richer experience.

All my new friends aren’t in themselves the problem. Like every problem, its true source is a personal one. The issue is that going out and partying with an enormous group of young westerners is undeniably fun.  After months of near total sobriety, I was suddenly surrounded by a gyrating, strobe-lit amoeba, filled from the inside out by some unstoppable desire to act like a complete moron. I blame the buckets. 

So here we have, on one hand the foggy memories of belligerence from last night (and the night before, and the night before that), and on the other, a snorkeling trip through a silent world of blue clarity followed by lunch on an wide arc of spotless white sand. Ping-ponging between the serene and the obscene. It takes an emotional – and, eventually, physical – toll. It is, quite frankly, absurd.

 

I seek solace in the water. After months of traveling I am finally surrounded by ocean, day in, day out.  When the powers of the tropics get to be too much – the heat, the blinding sun, the sweat, the crowds – then it’s time to find the water. To maybe strap on a mask and paddle through the shallows, to follow the solar rays filtered through the lolling surface. It really is crystalline. It’s shallow enough that there’s no room to tread, I have to swim horizontally, staring directly down at this beautiful fluid flux of light. Streams like liquid electricity dance through the water, refracted through the unhurried turbulence of the surface.  The phenomenon of it all is doubled, because the wave movement that births this show is also moving me, and so my motion and sight are linked. I feel the liquid sun. Nothing else.

Or when the beach is crowded, to walk into the lazy water and lie, face up, in the ankle-deep shallows on a silver bed of sand. I lower my head under the empty, clear liquid. The melee of European language is put on hold and the still, heavy stasis of the ocean fills my head with silence from the inside out. The rectangle of cliffs and sky above my head is an empty world.

Absurdity is the new beauty.  

Spice Orgasm

As I ran my tongue over the glistening, bloated interior of my lips I felt the blisters beginning to bubble.

“Uuughhh…” I let out a moan that’s half pain, half pleasure, before diving back in for more: filling my thin metal soup spoon with the red liquid and slurping, mixing air and broth and inhaling the spice. It constricts in my throat before seeping, boiling, in rivulets across my esophagus. My throat relaxes and another mouthful of heat percolates down into my stomach, and the process starts again.

This is the end of  a bowl of noodles at the restaurant simply named “Noodel Soup.” Madam Puii, the proprietor, sets up shop in front of the gas station convenience store every evening to offer a small make-your-choice selection of noodle soups. You choose the noodle size, the meat of choice, and she delivers you a new level of euphoria.

You get high from this soup. A slow, surging wave of power that multiplies on itself – a mitosis charged though each successive spoonful of broth, each slurp of those noodles dragging with them across your lips a confetti of black pepper, onion, sweet chili and fried garlic.

By the time you realize you’re on fire, it’s too late. Are those tears running down your cheeks from the heat or from the pleasure? Where is the sweetness coming from? Why is your mouth singing? Now you are crying, snorting, laughing. Is it a chemical hook or a metaphysical one?

It doesn’t matter; the only thing that matters is that you don’t stop slurping the soup. You can barely make out your utensils through the fog of water in your eyes. Your lips went numb long ago, so when you manage to get the chopsticks up there you fumble around like a blind man until your tongue can take charge.

Before you realize it, the utensils have been dropped onto the wet wood table and the plastic bowl is in both hands and that peppery smell is now in your sinuses and the world gets a little darker as your vision clouds behind the circular rim of your destiny. The red tide of flavor lies cradled halfway up the sides as gravity guides it, slowly and precipitously, into your half-open mouth. You can’t stop for air, if you do the spice will choke you, a cough will erupt and you will lose the nectar. Your only choice is to keep going, power through it, until this liquefied crack has passed the portal and now you can’t move your lips, they are swollen.

There is no more talking, but there doesn’t need to be. For now, I am flying. 

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.