In The Universal Defence Of The Bargirl, You And Me
I just returned form another trip to Thailand (2nd time in three months) and have now become an avid follower of Stick. I am no Farang but I am a westernised Indian and have lived in the US for some years.
Pattaya is a surreal place (and so is Nana, Cowboy, and Bangla Road) and I was smitten by a cute damsel-in-distress bar girl. I take pride in my discipline and my clear objectivity, but I have fallen. The Pattaya girl (from Buriram) sensed
it and in 4 nights I spent more than $1,300 without once bedding her. She had me by the balls and I was helpless. She just made me spend more money on massages and dinners and kind of led me, trying to educate me and being petulant. And f@&*
I loved it! On the 5th day I found my wallet empty but I still had this desire to go back to the gogo to meet her. It took extreme willpower not to visit the ATM but to visit the Thai Airways office in North Pattaya to pre-pone my ticket home!
My irrational desire to keep going back and spend sh$tloads of cash on a bar girl who was treating me like $hit was a revelation. F@%*, I wouldn't take this $hit from my boss, but here I was paying to get shafted, and loving it! The
conflict between “insanity” and “rationality” was intense but believe me I was on the verge of giving up and be totally “insane”. With this revelation of my own dormant weakness I can now only empathise
with the drug addicts, lovelorn men, alcoholics, chronic gamblers and the superior scorn and contempt is gone.
We are educated (or conditioned) to lead this staid, dreary, hard life but cannot escape the ultimate inevitability of death. What is the point and who is profiting? Religion? Culture? Race? Face? My own revealed vulnerability is now forcing
me to think on deeper questions beyond the conditioned facade. Cormac McCarthy in 'No Country for Old men' asked, “If the rule you followed brought you to this, of what use was the rule”?
This is a clear defence of the attitudes of bar girls and their patrons. The baffling question is WHY is it that an educated, well-travelled man falls for a rustic girl with no morals from Isaan, Buriram or Surin? Here the assumption is that
an educated, well-travelled man is superior to the rustic girl with no morals and I want to kill that assumption.
WHY do we humans do what we do? To the rationalist the education and the culture gives us solid rules and goals for life. The law of causation is absolutely accepted and thus we become the Masters of the Universe. We humans are intensely
conditioned to find static predictability, certainty, solidity and the solace of permanency. But life the great trickster eventually thumps us, and we realise that it is intrinsically dynamic, uncertain, precarious and temporary.
We can rationalize after the fact, but we cannot make fact. Newtons Law of Gravity is an equation but it does not explain the fundamental question, “WHY do two objects attract each other”? Einstein went further and revealed
that the masses of the objects disturbs the elastic space matrix and thus creates the attraction. Great! But WHY?
WHY do we want to live? WHY do we want to be right always? WHY do we drink unhealthy alcohol? WHY do we smoke? WHY do we forget that life is temporary? WHY? WHY? WHY? WHY do we ask these 'why' questions?
It is just a circular never ending questions with no answers. The continuity solution is, “It just is”.
I am deeply moved and here is the lyrics from the Pink Floyd 'High Hopes':
There was a ragged band that followed in our footsteps
Running before time took our dreams away
Leaving the myriad small creatures trying to tie us to the ground
To a life consumed by slow decay
Looking beyond the embers of bridges glowing behind us
To a glimpse of how green it was on the other side
Steps taken forwards but sleepwalking back again
Dragged by the force of some inner tide
Encumbered forever by desire and ambition
There's a hunger still unsatisfied
Our weary eyes still stray to the horizon
Though down this road we've been so many times
Thank you,
The Penitent Man