Watering holes in Bangkok
We are now in the heat of the Songkran (or, better known as the “Water”) festival, and Bangkok is one magnificent, hedonistic party.
On the usually gay Soi 4, straights are having as much fun on this wet night. Over crappy speakers, shop fronts blast Bono, Britney, and the Black-Eyed Peas. None of it matters - so long as there’s a beat, there are bodies and booties to grind.
Water guns drench half-clad boys. Girls, in skimpy beach wear, parade their sexuality. Everywhere, there is tanned skin, wet with desire and delirious with alcohol. Everyone is laughing.
Songkran, like water, is a perfect metaphor for life. This is what it feels like to be free. To be touched by strangers, to laugh with strangers, to acknowledge - in a single expression of abandon - our mutual existence.
April 20th, 2007 at 9:21 am
[…] But while I am in the thick of living, Heidegger wants me to abandon my inclination towards calculative thinking, and aspire towards thought more meditatively. My frustrations, he says, comes from desire, the prospect of something, the waiting for. Yet it is not contentment he teaches. Instead, it is to learn patient desire, to live life with an openness to its mysteries, to remember that life goes on, independent of desire. […]