Week 10, Thailand
BAH, HUMBUG: I never liked them anyway.
I'm all alone this weekend, wandering Bangkok like some lonely orphan looking for porridge. See, the thing about drinking and staying up all night every night is that it's sort of reliant on you being able to sleep in the next day. You can fake it for a while, but eventually things start to crack.
A week of five-hour sleeps, stumbles, bloodshot eyes, spewing on the kids and yelling profanities at my colleagues (minus the last two) culminated in a really awful observed teaching session on Friday, and I decided to settle down for the weekend. Of course, Aaron's father flew in from Hong Kong on the same day so I got roped into a marathon drinking and sheesha-smoking sessions (you know, those big hookah pipes they have in Turkey and so on? Tasty but mean) that ended up at Kill Time where we chatted away until 3am. In Bangkok the entire interval from 9pm until 2am doesn't seem to exist. I've never looked at my watch and seen the time 10:32 or 12:47 - you pick up a beer at 9pm and when you next look it's past 2am. It's an amazing natural phenomenon.
So during the course of the evening everyone decided they'd fuck off to Ko Samet for the weekend. Bastards. Well, I mean, they invited me. But they could have waited til next week, surely. I knew the weekend would not be sleep-friendly so I had to stay. I'm not going to re-do an eight-week unpaid internship. Like eating fish-head soup, some things you will only go through one time in your life.
Edie and I just moved into our own place in Ari, just a little north of central Bangkok, which should mean that I'm allowed to go to sleep before midnight and wake as late as 6:30... Sweet. The place is cool, very cheap (about $30 per week), with a nice balcony and everything. A good base to launch the next phase of our plan - making some sort of income. I don't know how long that'll take, but the whole 'leaving Southeast Asia sometime soon' topic is starting to rear its head and we need some quick cash. I tried to sell my body on the streets for a while but there were no takers. Are they insane?
Aaron has raised the idea of he and I having a bit of a jam session at one of the multitude of cheap pay-by-the-hour music studios in Bangkok. Aaron's a mean guitarist; if I were cooler I might say something like, 'He shreds that shit up', or whatever it is people with guitars say about other people with guitars. Loves his blues, his Robert Johnson, his Ledbelly, his Howlin' Wolf. Somehow Aaron found out that I used to play drums, so he's keen to get me onside.
But I'm an awful drummer. Not just a false-modesty-Oh-I-haven't-played-for-a-while-let-me-see-if-I-remember kind of awful. Capital-a Awful. Awful awful.
Last time I played drums was more than ten years ago. My friend Jacob and I lived deep in the bible belt of Sydney, under the hulking behemoth of the Hillsong Church. In one of what would become several confused episodes in his life Jacob had become born-again and roped me in to playing in a christian rock band. This was not a good thing.
Our name was Templar, as in 'The Knights Templar'. Like most fourteen-year olds we thought the Knights Templar were cool, because they were knights and knights had swords and swords were cool. That was about as deep as we went into it. We eschewed the standard happy-clappy christian rock of Hillsong in favour of the sullen, whining sludge-rock usually preferred by fourteen year-old boys.
The church did not give us a gig, despite our back-catalogue (stretching the entire six months from April to September of 1997) featuring such classic staples as "Jesus is Just Dyin' To Meet You" and "Ain't No Holes in the Holy Spirit" (take that, Richard Dawkins!). Strains started to appear. The other churches in the area, to our surprise and outrage, didn't host bands. "Support local music!" Jacob shouted at them. I submitted some more, ahem, secular songs that I'd written, only to be told, "You're the drummer. You don't get to write songs." The bass player suggested we try Buddhism, since they were allowed gold idols and stuff, which I suppose he thought they would pay us with. The band broke up the next week.
That's the extent of my drumming experience. We'll see how it goes.
From next week I can start the countdown on this internship, with only ten schooldays to go. I can't say it's been the best experience of my life, or that I learnt alot, or even that they provided nice lunches, but I can say: it's almost over.
Lachie
NEXT WEEK: New apartment! New clothes! New stuff! New Idea!
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