2025-12-13 Journal Entry

I’ve been returning to this same cafe in Bangkok largely because it’s cheap. It’s amazing how quickly one’s sense of normalcy changes. Going back to $7 matcha will be the end of me. Give me espresso for <$2 or give me death.

But I will be happy to get away from the pollution. I pin some amount of my current vaguely-shitty feeling on the terrible air quality here. (Some, admittedly, was the edibles I took too. Fucked up my sleep for weeks.)

What else? I have little else at top of mind other than the prospect of going home soon. Two months flies by quickly. It has the unfortunate effect of making me question what the hell I’m doing with my life. I can pitter away at this little noteboko and find it important, but it also feels like nothing. That is perhaps why I’m drawn to story: it allows one to thrust themselves into grander scale. Or not – To the Lighthouse certainly keeps its intimate scale. Perhaps its actually that by writing one frees themself from the maestrom of being. It’s meditation where you come away with something to show for it.

It feels a fruitless activity but I think this is largelly a matter of conditioning. Conditioning that one must be involved in commerce in order for something to be their work. One must survive, of course, but it is a rare and lovely change to live without that concern. I don’t need to worry too much for the time being. Just sit and work and let flow whatever may come. I think I worry sometimes that what comes is far too banal or boring, but it is most likely in these painful, boring stories that the truth resides. I site here in a cafe and feel as though my heart will explode. It is the most painful and yet the most plain experience of being human: to want things to be different. Mostly, one wishes that all of their desires, dreams, and goals will be achieved, thus they wish themselves to turn immediately into that type of person who obviously achieves those goals. The painter wishes themselves mysteriously and effortlessly to the canvas, the athlete to the playing field, with boundless energy to exert and clear work to be done. Perhaps, though, the real work is to trudge on even in the darkest of moments to become such a person. For the aspirant, doing is synonmous with becoming. Perhaps, too, for the expert.

I think all of this self-directed writing is perhaps my way into such aspiring. I must see all my painful thoughts laid bare so they can bathe in the sunlight' they have grown moldy in the cold darkness. There’s much to unearth here, probably. More importantly, it’s a way of paying attention. Retunring here day after day. The important thing seems to be to continue on, to keep writing even when I feel I have nothing to say. (When one runs out of words is when the real creation begins, perhaps.)

That moment for me is right now.

I put on rain sounds while I work. Its not quite fitting for the warm, dry Bangkok winter. But it soothes me, makes me think of sitting in a coastal cabin with the smell of wet sand on the beach. That feeling of limit-=testing the weather during a beach trip. The days are limited, so you try anyways to swim under heavy gray clouds. Everyone debates whether a lightining strike over the ocean will kill you. A few raindrops fall and create tiny sand craters. The surface of the sand covers in suc craters which in their number render it dark and smooth and hard. The smell of rain and salt and heat and sand rises like steam. The ocean is warm, almost body-temp, and the rain is cold and pellet-like on your shoulders. There will be no crab-hunting tonight if the rain never lets up.

So it feels to me. The memory of the beach nestles up against my current reality: memories of crab-hunting and The Red Shack and the stores around The Wharf at Sandestin that sold little puka shell figurines, in company with the whirr of morotbikes and street food and the constant company of crowded solitude.