And so I thrust myself unto the world again, all shaky legs and jelly arms. With a bear on my back.
We left ourselves behind to fend & build alone. No longer digging at the dirt together, instead I sulked about lack of contact in the cold weather, Pete Boggs & countryside howling winds. I must reap what I have sown, collecting pennies after years of playing the machines. Reletionships are a tightrope with treasure as a backpack.
There was an undertone of sadness lining her breath, like something had crawled inside her and started spitting out smog. The most naturally curious girl I know lay pray to a malaise I ache to crush.
Symptomatic of someone who rolled their ankle whilst running towards a sunrise.
All the faces of human exposure sit pleasant. All the limbs recoiling in slender pose to rest the heavy bones in comfort. fuck it off and go native, that's what my mind is saying but who can really say, I'd probably definitely die.
But for the moment it's enough to share tangled limbs in the same way as these other miscellaneous cats. we're all transient motherfuckers lusting after the golden egg of truth, or just wanting to feel the liquid in our souls wash clean our corporate clothes.
A large game of human jenga comes piling ontop in shared circumstance, sit around and stare at the sky, trying to find a comfortable way to sleep on terrible plastic chairs in this misc airport.
There is something inside me rejoicing at being far away from what I've known, in amongst the dirt of a glorious language pig pen. Sugar for the inside rhythm.
Kosahn road was defined by a sort of incalcuable madness.
A busting metropolis of mental, I felt a sort of let go urge in myself and sunk into a culture, provocative as it was, more deep than anything I'd felt.
I longed to seep into the bars & vendors & pukka pukka ladybugs and rinse myself for the sake of exploration. I sought only that which enhanced experience, a sort of wild fire gleaming in the midst of my eyes, broken buildings looming over my shoulders
glorious, magnificent! A fireball singing with flame. All brimmed to the top with electricity.
Tonight I sat in dim electric light all crossed legged. A hut was abode, like sitting around Cherokee cub campfire when I was a child singig songs and feeling nostalgia but not sure why. But racing through the rural parts of Cambodia, hanging limbs eleven all out of a tuc tuc whose driver you're sure isn't meant to be doing this, is a liberating experience. The thing that has bit hardest is the fact I'm not scared about travelling anymore, I do not feel in an alien country which is outside of my reach and out for blood, but rather just someone who has popped to the shops and ended up in Cambodia.
Long stretching pavement roads with potholes reminiscent of war, really digging the earthlike people who share their communities and seem to be nothing but genuine (outside of markets of course) pleasant smiles with strangers letting you know that everything is alright forever.
The earth will take back what it is owed. Nature provides for itself.
Sat eating breakfast on an English morning except everyone has lost their grasp of the language. Or maybe I'm being too hopeful & this place, i have heard rumours it has claws that I dont see.
Maybe it sleeps below he surface with a subtle malcontent which you can sense in the long stares, the overly eager looks. But it seems more desperation than aggravation, a longing for that honey butter we in the west so laud & eat and grow fat from, which is so distant here amongst the kids who play in trash, searching simply for continuation. Eating leftovers and tugging at your sleeve, I shrugged it off with a guilty pledge that I would help somebody someday & that my life would make a difference to someone. I would be that divider, pushing the walls of death away from life.
But this it, this is the old porridge eaters promise that the world would slurp me up in it's great cavernous jaws and I would let myself be digested, all the while sat smiling as I turned to sugary bone. Everyone is crying out for help, everyone is confused and scared but we stay sit, we stasis this fear and get jobs to steady the rope as we descend into the abyss.
The place becomes you, you become the place, it all works together in a sort of symbiotic refuse collecting, recycling progression into new toys.
So maybe that's why the city is wary of intruders, tourists and the odd. Because they don't melt in like the natives, they skirt around the borders and pick at things with their fingers and shrug off invitations to the club.
But we try as best we can
Driving through the poorer towns in cambodia where the adverts are left to rot.
half drunk again, left lying in the stupor of another hotel room. On Telly there is nothing but crime dramas and bizarre reality shows about exorcising relationship demons. Glorifying and airing all that is wrong, not letting people be as they are we seek to mould. another meal at some English speaking restaurant surrounded by curious locals, bizarre backwards talking forcing friendships. letting that tongue loose a quiver, whilst I manage to form something in between the sips of another foreign beer. Too deep for my own good, to high to swim to make conversation about the weather, I sit and stew about the melodies of conversation in my head. I can't force habit, I can't shapeshift into new cycles of work, I'll sit and sip towards finding answers through conversations, never just a mouth breather
Travelling is a frontier you have to break yourself, an open wound that will heal much better with fear. If I am ever to undertake anything serious it must come from sacrifice, as I have already learnt. But still lingers within me a sense to stay in the shallows, a will to keep it safe and observe the world from a hotel window, but that life does not burn with pleasure, with the winds of change.
I must look for the deep river and carry myself alone trough the jungle if ever this cacoon is to be opened. There is a treasure that lies just beyond our grasp across a ravine.
There is a wrestling inside of me, fear & intrigue of the old foes that tuck you in at night, keeping one eye open. Worthwhile things do not come to houses in the suburbs, they come to rivers & oceans.
"you've got to cross that lonesome valley. you've got to do it by yourself"
The killing fields - where I picked up a piece of bone and felt a shudder go through my entire soul, recouping at the memories which were not my own, the fears of a former self, ex lives in front of a mass grave.
We are packed with futures, full bellies with possibilities. Shotgun explosion existences just waiting for the moment we can unload, if we survive the fire to get the chance that is.
There is nothing but flesh & bone. Delicate hope amongst the storm.
I am still seeing ghosts from yesterdays exposure, yesterday at the grand palace of skulls, the blood red fields.
A monument to inhumanity, a tower to unsacred death.
we are most cruel to ourselves, through a confusingly profound lack of understanding.
Angkor Wat, Cambodia:
Caitlin came storming at the door asking in exasperated tones to be let in quickly, and in the back of my mind flashed images of her dragging a dead body in.
I took myself around shaikouvonille, or some name that's going nowhere near my memory bank, and found nothing but log roads and a seaside resort that is nowhere near as tacky as the much despised ones we have in blighty.
I sat in a cafe and ate fried rice w/ vegetables, talking to a waitresss with a strong grasp of English but not much on pronunciation unfortunately. she knew what to say but not sure how to say it. once left I caught my favourite mode of transport, tuk tuk down to the beach, beer in hand and cow blocking road. Laughing heartily with the driver about how such a thing could happen. Chiller, real chiller as the wind rushed through my being, half speeding around corners. Yelling greetings at kids who only knew hello.
The tide slowly ebbing in, sunset setting on a glorious beach with people I'll probably never see again after this, we made tracks with our feet and human pyramids with our hands, each moment erased before the next
Treated to a display of canine play with two feral dogs, each more submissive than the other, slowly testing each other for aggressive testimony, both resolving it.
Making in roads with conversation at fake full moon festivities. Burning our way through both ends of a candle, digging each other in the warm moonlight, linguistic journeymen pulling back trees to fund new ground. I hope these people will become proper friends, outside of the bounds of traveling with it's forced immediate frindship codes and strict social stratas. you're never alone until you're on the other side of the world alone, lumped together in ecstatic infantry, none expecting practitioners of freedom incarnate, speeding, always speeding uncomfortable to horizons unknown
I had lunch by myself in a small cafe, talked to a Cambodian girl whose language I didn't fully grasp, she held English like a spoonful of water, knowing how to control it but not how to stop it spupping over the sides.
night bought relaxing chairs on a beach lined with beggars & our disbelief at kids whose English was so masterful they almost seem at home in our company, spiking our enjoyment with talks of profit.
But it's all contrived, I didn't want to let loose amongst such dodgy company upon a beach I wasn't sure the name of. You can't create original culture from a copied idea and I've heard Thailand is the place to be for full lunar bodily takeovers.
But its worth it for one night of brilliant intrigue with people I might never meet again. swapping stories of comedy, drama and hope along a shoreline slowly encroaching, counting down the minutes of an ebbing, doomed friendship.
Lost to the wonderful impermanence of the world, royal transcience, bringing our hearts wherever they may roam but always away from each other towards a new 'home'
In that everyone is alive together, all the time mood.
Is this alcohol, or is it emotion?
Hard to tell when the two are so mixed up together.
But we all exist & continue to dig our crazy world more and more each day so it's all "easy peesy lemon squeezy, baby" as kev would say.
Born under the strong sign of guilt towards your fellow man, nail biter came swinging out with rounds of ammunition to face the golden dawn, long lost lovers reunited in BBQ & sea breezes that took too long to come noticed. face down with friends over a meal of vegetables on sticks and precarious looking cake for the quiet snub faced one, not in any sense of mean, more of categorization & an attempt to nail the wood shut down on names lest the coffin shut.
Air conditioned to the Max in sweaty hotel rooms. I'm leaking fluids of every sort in every sort of direction. But up at 5am for another country, another potential home away from the crater I've known.
Crater city is Yorkshire. that which holds out it's hands all covered in scraps of paper; 'this happened' etc. I've paraded, held court & vigil over too many mounds of dirt, I've chucked water onto flowers in the hopes of holiness. but who knows.
I mumble hymns, crossed my eyes and patted my beating chest to make anothers heart live, figuring out death & it's enigma.
well, thats since the great guider went home. back to soil, when in Rome we rot as the Romans do. when in hell I'll laugh & discredit the Devils attention to detail, who could be so pedantic for a place that was built out of nervousness.
He's a shuddering wreck.
content to play chess only to lose on purpose. Not sure of his own faults, making it up as he goes along. the Devils not a killer he's a crier, ain't got no town to tie his words down so he screams at the fire. misunderstood malnourished.
I'll give my money to my friends and tell them to take a shovel to the world in the hopes that maybe we can find something ripe to eat or drool over, because we've lived excessive lies in every expanse just trying to muddle through the hours. bending ourselves over with drugs & drinks to stare at our own behinds. Come on friends we'll dig together and I'll take up the corpse of my blood and swing them all about glee style until I'm sobbing and chattering teeth. I just want it all to be madness, madness inthe twilight hours or so I think. rushing and twirling in the most macabre of ways.
Every day brings the burning tiredness of lack of sleep accompanied by long hours on a minibus, half of this trip is glamorous and the other roaringly painful. but that's the price we literally paid to see the world, in all it's blazen earthly glory. I didnt want comfort, subconsciously I wanted a hard days work and a sense of never-ending fulfillment.
Homestay in Vietnam, or the attack of the insects of foreigners.
Got thompson bubbling in my brain and a long road ahead of me, after a night full of conversation in a homestay in rural Vietnam. Good food & nervous vibes. It's what we wanted though, lack of basic clean conveniences & a barrage of wonderfully large insects.
waking up through the night covered in sweat and with a thunderstorm that felt on top of your head, Kevin always said this would be life changing but I never imagined blue mosquito nets with a slim pink blanket to guide you roughly I to sleep would be the way forward. Vietnam is covered in motorcycles left to right, they must outnumber the cars 20/1 of what I've seen. A nation of slow moving independence scurrying to whatever destination they had.
but I've seen no English here yet, not like Cambodia where every other sign was had our language, Vietnam is more of a culture shock, a stiff developed counterpart to the relaxed & friendly nature of Cambodia. So far anyway, we'll see how Saigon treats us.
bus rides are easier than they were, 4 hours is nothing now compared to the cramped life we thought they signified before. My limbs dont ache so much anymore, adapting to the space.
Thin lights shadowing the huge amount of fruit laid bare for us on the table, silhouettes eclipsed by random acts of insect interest in the background.
Home made savoury pancakes. in a country full of 90 million people the earth still has a strong hold, the struggle of governance of man bs nature, with the latter winning half the time & the former popping up everywhere it can
I dunno, it's all some sort of poetic liberation isn't it. Gagging against the bile of the way ive seen it all exist. Nothing but a bunch of sickly debt collectors, motherfuckers. so I've just tried to be nice to everyone I meet bcause people are the base of it all, these hands didn't build no temples but they can understand some of the mechanisms surrounding it. I can divide my digits into political factions. Some day some bastard might write something about me, maybe that I had too many teeth to show or that I appeared callous, selfish as a snake because of the large open wounds I carried about but hid with backpacks in seldom seen parts of the world.
I can't sleep on buses so I send myself half insane with words instead. I figure The Gonzo Anthology would be a book I'd carry around with me forever, probably stapling it's words to my skin or something like some kind of crazed lunatic constantly researching everything. I just want to write and take pictures, but the one night of good sleep I've had in the last 9 days and the constant turbulence of no relaxation on the hellish clattering fuckhole of a bus mean my urge to unhinge everything had become slightly pronounced. I say I've drunk every day to enjoy the beers and appreciate things but it was really more of the fucking long haired beast inside of me scratching at the third eye gates. slobbering with a beady stare through a keyhole at some peaceful transcendence who sitting cross legged looked nervously at me. but fuck it I thought there's a lot of bile to spill and not much time to do it.
