Okay, this is pretty awful shit.  This post is why no family member or friend from the world knows that I have this account.  It's not going to be up for long but I kinda need to exercise this deamon.  I also am trying to get this guy in Jakarta to publish under my favority pen name:Anonymous.  If you have any take on it how to make it better, or want to let me know I suck at life, what ever, let me have it.

Bangkok.  Who knew a person could do so much in so little time that they could be so ashamed of?  As I slipped through the backpacker ghetto of Ko Sahn road and the Patpong district the ‘hey yous’ and offers of drugs and women dissolved into a single babble of ambient noise.  It was the urban equivalent of the ‘gurgling creek’ CDs that are supposed to help induce meditative states.  Just way less relaxing.  Within two blocks I had seen a banana shot out of a woman’s crotch farther than I could have thrown the thing, watched two men in the center of a bar beat on each other in a Muay Thai kick boxing match, and pounded buckets, yes buckets, of cheap whisky and Red Bull.  I had to laugh.  And they call Las Vegas Sin City.  More like the Suburb of Mild Indiscretions.  Comparing this with even the most debauchery ridden cities of the US was like comparing all the crack cocaine in New York City to a sip of decaffeinated coffee.

Visiting SE Asia, Thailand in particular, had been on my ‘to do before I die’ list for so long it was probably better suited to my character as a desire than a reality.  Smoking herb under the threat of the death penalty had not seemed like a desirable rush since my 17^th birthday.  When my brain was engaged, the promise of Asian women drawn to the relative wealth of Western men depressed the shit out of me and was often an overture to a rant on the evils of capitalism and maybe even an Amartya Sen reference. 

But on what seemed like hundreds of occasions that stretched literally over four years, the long desired trip had been on the calendar only to be wiped off.  It was this on again off again reality that kept the destination as a must in my heart.     

  The major road block was school.  College had been a stressful ordeal.  The wonder lust that put me on the road also stuck me into a college town in Arizona, then to the central hills of California, and then back to Arizona a year and a half later in a failed attempt to finish the two degrees I had all ready started. 

It was the same inertia of long held desire that sends married men to bed with the one time ‘hot chick’ at their 15^th year high school reunion that had me licking my chops in Bangkok.  As I knelt down between the mess of stalls selling egg rolls and T-shirts to flip through the fat 3-ring binder of counterfeit documents Bangkok took a second and whispered in my ear ‘I have been waiting for you.’  It was on the first page.  Numero-fucking-uno.  It was none other than the exact degree from the exact crap-hole college that I had unsuccessfully tried to earn, on and off, for almost six years.  The road block was sitting right in front of me just asking to be taken for a few dollars.  It was like my own personal welcoming card from the city.  I had finally arrived.     

Looking back on the traumatic events that came soon after words it was an ominous omen.  Feeling like you have ‘arrived’ as a person while in Bangkok does not bode well for your character.  While the city does indeed wait for people, it is just not the type of person you want to be or to even know.  The people Bangkok is waiting on are those saps that are all too willing to part with their money for bad reasons or all too foolish to protect their money from even worse reasons.  The trinkets, T-shirts, girls, and good times that litter the tourist section of the city are the scattered pieces of a culture being smashed by Westerners worst tastes and darkest desires.  Hours later I was to get an all too ugly and up close experience with those shards.

After finally landing my diploma, many whisky buckets and a few disposable friends I found myself stumbling through the dark streets that every anti-drug commercial loves to portray.  It was a drunken haze.  Faceless bodies scampered in odd directions like cockroaches in an infested apartment.  Women who did not care if I was good looking or not would come out of the haze, get cozy, and then disappear again.  It was always the same two or three.  They would arrive ask for something, be shot down, and then disappear again.  When one came back I made the exchange.  It was the ‘bad decision for good time’ trade that characterizes so many of life’s most intense experiences. 

       We crossed two streets together.  Even through the drunkenness, not my better side but my ‘something is wrong’ instincts were ringing in my head like the promise of tomorrow’s hangover.  It was a fight to ignore them. 

As we approached the concrete shell of a building two younger men who were hanging out in the front ran off into the night sending everything in my brain not attached to my penis into a frenzy.  “GET THE HELL OUT OF HERE!”  “No I am going to see what ever this is through to the end.”

We climbed one set of stairs and un-locked a door.  The entirely grey room was practically empty.  A mattress less than two inches thick sat on the floor and was the only amenity the room had to offer.  The cleanliness (not emptiness but actual cleanliness) of the space that could have been filthier than the imagination brought a sympathetic whirl from my depths.  It was like the walls were saying “I am doing the fucking best with what I got, okay!?”

The scene was nothing short of painful.  The room was a glimpse into what desperation and depravity really are.  I could stand to stare, and enjoy, strippers in a club or hookers on a corner, but the insight and humanity that was added by the vision of a home and life apart from that life style was horrifying.  In TV police dramas there is very often the scene where the officers are forced to search the room of a recent murder victim or even the perpetrator of a horrible crime.  In both instances the tragedy is compounded by the sights and new understanding, a sympathy, that comes from being in the belly of the beast or brutalized. 

As the business of the operation started I stayed on my feet wondering what brutal law enforcement agency the two men who had been out front were on their way to go summon.  The sound of stretching Velcro from my cargo shorts did not enliven the depressing atmosphere.  The attempt to pick pocket the 500 baht was so pitiful it was borderline charming.  The money was back in my pocket so quickly it was never an issue.  The issue, as it were, was my penis.

In a manner of protest as if speaking for my better angles it said “NO!  I will not stand for this abomination of a dead!  This aggression against good taste and decency will not stand and nor shall I!”

In an attempt to bring ‘Ol Guy around I let my hands wonder.  It was a greedy place to start wondering but this was not true romance. 

Her legs resisted against my hands but after a moment reluctantly gave way.  My fingers moved down and stumbled onto what I at first perceived to be the world’s largest vaginal lip…

It does not take a biology major to know that vaginal lips, even the really big ones, come in pairs.  However, it might take a biology major to explain what in the fuck a penis was doing attached to the woman that had just been attached to me.

I was zipped up and properly put away before my brain could properly process what had just happened.  For an instant curiosity seized me and I had to take a better look.  I tried to push shis legs open for a scientific look but heshe recoiled in protest.  Not wanting to stick around this struck me as completely acceptable and I made a beeline for the door.  As if suddenly understanding that my push was out of curiosity shim spread herm legs to show ‘scar from operation.’

I don’t remember what I saw.  I don’t know if I looked.  It was like slowing to stare at an accident on the highway and seeing the dead body just in time to know that you did not actually want to see it.

A horror flooded over me.  It was a horror a lot like…like…well a lot like finding a dick attached to the woman you had just been, uhm, engaged with. 

The entire event started to feel like a demented blues song.  The second my head was outdoors rain started to poor down with a near biblical ferocity.  It seemed like an all too appropriate scene considering the last half hour.

After all the thinking has been done I have just been left with a lot of shame over the incident.  Finding out you just got head from a man is something an extremely hearty sense of humor can learn to laugh at.  The bigger issue is the embarrassment of having taken part in the most tragic aspect of the cultural erosion that tourist dollars bring to places like Thailand.  It is painful and ironic to see that it is the values that build the cultures which we go to see that are destroyed by the tacky traveler’s presence. 

But even more painful is the possibility that Bangkok showed the real reason as to why people travel.  As Westerners out source low paying jobs overseas we also seem to outsource our worst deeds.  It seems that crossing a boarder is the permission we need to act in ways that we would not at home. 

This is not meant to be a condemnation of prostitution.  It is, as they say, the world’s oldest business and under the right circumstances nothing I can consider insidious or morally wrong.  What it is a condemnation of are people, such as my self, who contribute to the comodifacation and abuse of the humans and places we visit to, in theory, appreciate.

I scratched my head as I read a quote from a sex tourist in the Lonely Planet.

“We don’t come to Thailand for the ruins.”

Actually it looks like we brought the ruins.