Attention, yo. I said MOTHERFUCKING ATTENTION, yo. Ah, now that your eyes are on the proper line due to internet YELLING, please forgive the interruption in your normal music review perusing, for this ‘very special’ review of Frank Ocean’s “We All Try”. Ocean reviews  are a dime a dirty dozen these days,  so much like TV episodes on abortion, scandalous females having sex as teenagers and suburban dads flustering their shit about it, and the teenager who did Molly(pun intended), we’re taking a topic approach here.

And not just because it’s what I was listening to as I wandered around a city in Thailand that I randomly picked moments before a bus at 2am, deciding if I even believed in the joy of randomness anymore. I thought, outside philosophy I’ve labored to get agreeing with, did I believe in anything at all? And all I came up with was different shades of pain, the spectacularness of orgasms, and people to sometimes show you the value of being in the same race.  Two of those three find their way into the situation I’m in here:

Short emails, like this—to no one in particular but the people that might grace me with their fingers clicking through to it–can be long, when you’re having real emotion for the first time in ages. I felt nothing on the midnight taxi and first bus I saw to a mystery destination I didn’t bother to read. I kept bashing myself in the stomach to even get a wince out of me. I wandered around the destination city of Lop Buri and showed up at 7:30AM Friday at a Buddhist AIDS Temple, unannounced, and said ‘LET ME VOLUNTEER’ with a half desperate smile.

So I’m staying in a dorm bed, eating lentils and rice 24/7 and soaking in humanity, even if its fading for some. At least I give their life energy a little bump instead of steady decline. I’m the first visitor they’ve had in months. These moments were going to happen anyway, it is their death screaming from the near horizon, but that these moments give their voice the ability to be heard by someone who isn’t looking for charity CV lines and cloyingly petting their hand to counterfeit sympathy, means something.

Dying people don’t lack genuine feelings and smack dishonesty away with their genitals, because decorum is a douche move for the living. So far two people have died today, but it doesn’t give me woe because those last moments were spent looking into the eyes of someone who genuinely wanted their last action on Earth to be laughing at a dirty joke. Because I don’t want their tragedy to define them. I talk with them and hear similar stories to mine of destructive misreading by loved ones and strangers, and breadcrumbs of abandonment leading up to here. I think about how we’re both people who have to spend so much time convincing others we’re good.

I’ve been literally where they are, so I can say this with self-awareness, but they do honestly have the cynical comparatively shitty life game points right now on who should be getting attention paid to them. Still, they’re here because family and friends ditched out once the Kaposi Sarcoma lesions made holding their hands awkward. Some of them got here by stumbling through the streets with AIDS dementia roaring because family had reached their limit 3km back.

We’re good people outside of tragedy, too; and I get the sense that their deepest cut life slashed them with was the inability to somehow convince people in time of that, so they could have died better. I tell them with truth, I don’t think there was anything to be done. Some people are just a beacon for others to hit with rocks of rejection all their life. So, I and they and we have been talking for two days straight and we cling onto these short feelings of being understood and cared about, for once.

And when they pass, peace is theirs to lick, because laughter, not solemn sadness, was their last thought. And I’m left here wishing I could never leave so I didn’t have to be misunderstood ever again. Even if I’m haunted by my fears of being left, as so many of them are, as bags of ashes next to the Buddha because no one came and picked them up. Those fears hang like poltergeists above those bags every time I walk by.

*Bags of ashes pictured here contain the bodies of used to be living, breathing, human people who happened to be AIDS patients, and who deserved better than being forgotten. They’re here as a sign of respect, because that was stolen from them.* Picture taken at the AIDS hospice outside of Lop Buri, Thailand in Wat Phrabaht Namphu, or Buddha’s Foot, Fountain Temple.  

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