Ratvithi road and nearby

I took this video in Chiang Mai in north Thailand where I stayed for a while and met some beautiful people and ate some great food and had a wonderful time. I'll go back again one day to see how it is.

This is about my travelling around Thailand but mostly about being in Chiang Mai and walking the streets looking for food and some observations. Chiang Mai is an overnight bus ride from Bangkok.
And so the sober wheel of dawn turned splendid where the strange light of a purple pear spoke to me and said many things that I dared to listen to and in doing so absorbed them into me and felt like a rebel, but the deal was indistinct and so I turned into what I could not express in any other way but this: woo hoo.
And then the Immaculate Conception came in a jeep and I had a hard time keeping up for all I was worth, not that it mattered all that much for I was spent and had nothing left to give after all the walking to get there.
I painted a coffee with honey but couldn’t taste it, just drank it down in big gulps as a big noisy fell around the corner and looked at me as it went past which was a little disconcerting to have it look at me while I’m slurping coffee as if it knew where I lived and was keeping tabs on me; but I told myself I was just being paranoid, nobody knew who I was anymore and I was on the other side of the world now. Anyway, it roared on and I didn’t think any more on it.
“You know, it doesn’t matter who you’re with so long as she’s the right one for you,” said the Butterworth sandwich to the old ghost who was buried in reluctance to come out.
The tree that shaded them smiled and said to them both: “And this place is a place for those to be without blurring the boundaries of anyone else’s existence in that most crucial of good manners called respect, within the bounds of good taste of course.”
“Of course,” said the Butterworth sandwich. And the ghost nodded in agreement too.
The holy rosary spirit was making inroads that were not making me feel any better so I donated one of my five watches to the Buddha in an offhand crazy kind of prayer and carried on to the top of all I could perceive.
At the top I walked once around to see if there were any strings attached but found none then sat down in the shade to rest.
On the way down I gave two of my remaining watches to two girls and left them chattering happily behind me with their new found treasure. It was enough, and I still had my two original watches which was fine by me. It was a good trade.
And then, falling along a hot road past the paddy fields I found philosophy to be an echoic bone buried deep in the mountains of gush where plurals of exceptionalism met me head on then passed on by without a word said.
Much later I spent an hour talking to the lizards that grew on the walls of the mud hut I was staying in, but they too remained silent, and so I passed on from that too.
If you have a central premise to work from even though it may be an elusive loadstone then you have a base to return to again and again as the gods look down and scratch their heads.
And so the machine listened to me as I spoke my dream on the left bank of where I was. And it came to me that I was my dream.
But if I am boring you then take this sneeze pepper and go over there where your bus will come soon and take you to another story.
So with a little bit of this and a little bit of that I hobbled onwards, in other words: you can always make it somewhere to get anywhere to make it eventually.
I eventually came to a place where the walls were just thin reeds of whispers to catch that quicksilver squirrel of your listening: so she says she’s an artificial fish, and I say women are strange, but everyone has their own life expectancy in a world that is changing fast, and enlightenment is now the in-thing with the question being how as the broken leaves of the past flutter and fall to become one with the earth.
And there really is only one divine over the dictates of our upbringing as still the big birds in the luxury of the lovely, lovely tree sing of their privilege and tell you otherwise.
And if I would have a moment of my time with you then let it be this that our meeting in that sacred place was a good one that we shall cherish always.
Some things don’t need to be told, they belong to us and I would keep them that way; some secrets are too beautiful to be told.
But momentarily I will tell you a poem after I have finished this koan I am harvesting.
And then, taking hot tea in the quiet of a space, your shadows dancing for me, and flickering lights the neon reflection of my outing; a clandestine excitement for the late night children to squeal about, a game of see and tell; and when I’ve moved on, what will be left?
I will weave my dreaming and the excitement will tell me if it’s true; but right now I ask: am I really where I want to be?
In a woods full of trees that I came to I found a camp with a big tent, tepi style. Inside were a whole bunch of sleepers. One girl looked up and I invited her to sleep with me in my bag and she did.
In the morning I lost her in all the faces, but later in the town by the harbour she found me lying on the wall and staring at the sky for all I was worth. I knew it was her by her soft voice.
When she looked into my eyes she could see I was lost in the clouds so she left me there forever and I never saw her again, except once from a distance and I saw that she was lost in the sex of her new love who was taking her where she wanted to go and then I had no more thoughts for her.
Corners come sometimes and you never know what is around them which makes them exciting.
On one corner I came to I met my best friend taking a walk with a hound on a lead. There was much to say about our side of the corner and we talked for ages.
When the moving came we each took the same tangent to become immediately lost in all the doorways of the day and all we’d talked about became hearsay and a memory that was left to fend for itself behind us on the corner.
Nancy was never my girlfriend but I wanted her and so whenever we were hanging out together I would hope she would look at me and maybe even talk to me, but she only had eyes for my friend, but he didn’t have eyes for anyone at all it seemed to me even though he could have had anyone at all if he wanted and in that way he was faithful.
One day we were cycling downhill very fast on a bike without brakes that I had found in a skip while rummaging around for gold.
My friend was hanging on for his life on the back seat as I pedalled and we passed Nancy so I waved with my leg and she waved back and I would have stopped then and there to talk to her but it was a long hill and we were going too fast and so by the time we did stop she was long gone and so I didn’t go back, such is life.
She married a hippy farmer one day so I went round to see her on her farm to wish her good luck. She was radiant and happy and I was pleased for her.
If you plant a tree it’s supposed to grow so when I planted a seedling oak tree in the garden I took out my watch and began to time it.
The summer season came and went and it didn’t change, and then the winter and spring came and went with no change and it was around this time that I put my watch away and lost all enthusiasm for its growing.
At the end of the second summer it still had not grown so I thought it must be a slow grower and I forgot all about it.
I moved away then but I do feel that now after ten years it must have grown a little bit. I will go back there one day and see if it has.
Let’s have a bonfire and burn this. Take a memo to leave this corner soon and let the wind take the dust of this edge to blow where it will; but where would I burn to if not here?
Today I read about the gateless gate and some master of it who burned as he rusted and he said that when there was nothing else for you, you would find there was no gate and no way to get there.
I took what I could with me and had a bowl of hot rice soup and found there was nothing to think about.
Anyway I left all this in a courtyard without doors where the rust burns night and day, and leaving it behind me I carried on.
They say there’s an exploding waiting to happen down in the engine room where the fat fish swim with open mouths, gulping everything into them and I wonder, do these fish feel wrongness and do they know it?
I’m about to meet master Ying and so maybe he can tell me.
With Master Ying out in the night: A tuppence worth of skinny Buddha in a long skirt was holding out for a good fart while proceeding to glide along the pavement as the traffic of the city centre sped past the restaurant where I was having a burger and pineapple. (Chiang Mai, north Thailand)
The karaoke with a guitar was trying to do a rendition of a Beatles song with remembered words he didn’t know; at least the guitar was tuned.
Master Ying was hiding in the background and wouldn’t come out for anything so I had to do it all on my own. So I sat at the empty table for three full of the sound of the city rushing past and finished my food and spat out the bits of plastic from the burger and put up with the noise.
What can you say about a city that has woken up to the nightlife but this: that all cities are the same and are made up of the colours and sounds of those that live there and it seems these days everyone is becoming the same the world over.
The burger over with, I paid up and set off into the night with master Ying tagging along somewhere...
Under the sails of the naked lady I became invisible, again and walked along the top of the lights to where the nighthawks gathered and had a giant fritter full of banana and then looked at the lights shimmering in the canal as I sat to eat it.
It was a hot night with candle driven rice balloons floating upwards and in all the movement around me my bare feet were cool on the unmoving ground.
The city was growling as behind me a singer in the jazz club was belting it out with good lungs, and in a break in the traffic I crossed the road and went back to my room to sleep.
The veils are lifting: Sometimes the familiar becomes foreign and even family can sound strange as if someone else unknown; and as you listen and don’t recognise you ask: who is that?
But slowly a turn of phrase or familiar sound will bring you back to recognition and you wonder why it felt so strange and foreign.
Sometimes our soul longs to return to the source and listens out for that so that when there is an intrusion that brings the soul back to the body this world can seem very other.
This is not our home, it is a way station of sensations that we become inured to and gradually lose our identity to and put on another one in its place, and so when the veils lift and a quietness prevails a transparent simplicity descends over the soul and in that space any sound can be an intrusion, even the most familiar.
The far worth of an empty pot of gold was crying in a rusty corner of smoke fumes, a cardboard box of fishing rods and a Buddha head that was smiling in an enigmatic way.
Another very skinny matchstick was trying to start a motorbike until the wind came and blew her away in a cloud of dust.
Out the back of where it was all happening a cockerel was making a noise like a king accompanied by an elephant on its travels that was strolling by and had decided to stop for a break.
And grass was growing green and tall but hid no snakes which was something to write home about for the frogs.
So when you take all this and squeeze it through a comfortable five minutes you get one lump or two in your coffee so saying and chew a brick if you have nothing better to do.
And as I’ve never been to Hanoi yet you’ll excuse me I’m sure for not saying very much about the place.