Solitude sinks its teeth into my stomach. It’s got me twisted up in knots, shooting glances at my gut–not trusting it knows how to get me back to humanity.  So, I pacify it with whiskey.  Shot after shot across every bar stool I can find in Thailand.  And I sit in silence and stare at the barflies. Every fucking town has one or a couple or a goddamn dozen. I don’t understand a word they say: what little Thai I know gets lost in the liquor that lathers their tongues. But I don’t need to. It’s Day 24 into my 30 day vacation and I haven’t said a single word.  I don’t know what my voice sounds like anymore. I go into a store, I mime, I gesture,  sometimes I write shit down, or just I point at the cheap Thai Hong Thong variant of liquid courage, and I have the strength to listen.

The men who drink in a-road pubs and wraith flies
The rapturous players at the petrol station
All lost in the same sea

But here, in between shots and the otherwise starkness of sound in my life, they are what Real Lies calls ‘rapturous players’. They are brazen, they lost the memory of what they were supposed to give two shits about.  I respect the hell out of them. They’re coping, they have a point of view; and, hell, that’s in rare supply these days. But they, like me, are on the wrong side of life. They look at me and by the miracle of blotto boasts say ‘Maestro, this can be all yours’, with a grand sweeping arm gesture at this fuckhole in the wall around us.   But I raise my glass, down it with dourness, and leave.

I’m just a mobile sack of bones with the sense to swim myself out of the bottle to the  station to catch the next train to wherever my three pointer fingers landed on the map.  I only need the 28 baht ($.67)  ticket, I’m going to sit on the floor. So says my little note written in Thai that I wear around my wrist like a medical bracelet.  These old trains, they allow you to hunker like a hobo on the edge of the stairs looking out at the midnight landscape rolling by. It’s always different,, indistinguishable; and I think, no longer do

I still walk the same road at night
Watch the same rain melt the same lights

But I still have a

Bag on my shoulder and a pocket full of rage

And I always wonder,

How many late nights does it take you to change?

It’s better than what I did for Tet in February, which was chem myself into a blitz, listen to Jade Blue, and stare at the mirror on the ceiling and wonder who that Stranger From Moscow was. Nowadays, night after night, I’m precariously perched on the edge of the stairs, vicariously living life through my own eyes. I don’t care if I fall off. These aren’t bullet trains, there is no bullet coming at my heart. Nothing to kill me if I careen onto my face. I did, once, outside Lopburi. I just rolled out over into the grass and stared at the sky smiling at the thought that the stars would swallow me. The real danger comes when I take a stroll down

Suicide bridge in the morning watch

It’s not a good idea. It is for about 2 seconds. Maybe 3. But, see, I get where this fucking brilliant song is coming from. I’m on the wrong side of the window from everyone in my life. I’m not lonely, I don’t even know what that means. I talk, I talk to myself, I talk all the time. I like the conversation. But the barflies are rapturous because of how much I’ve robbed myself to remember what I sounded like roaming in the eardrums of others, what it was like to remember that people didn’t hold me back– they held me together.  I’m cultivating the care, the accumulation of sound, the courage of a crescendo, the scariness of a ‘crashcendo’ when my life collides not with the ground, but others again.

CATCH A FREE DOWNLOAD AT THIS SOUNDCLOUD LINK.

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