BITTER DREAMS

The YMCA Clock courtesy Brain Pickings

There hadn't been much time in between.
Bitter Dreams: Foreigners in Thailand.
"Your problem was you didn't have anyone around you who cared about you," his wild mate said.
Well that was true. He had been surrounded by thieves who did nothing but thieve.
Fruit for the picking.
Pursued from one end of the kingdom to the other; hunted by every go-go bar with mafia links and protected by corrupt police. Which was all of them.
So they turned his life into hell, and laughed.
Only the Thais rob you with such malicious glee and then ridicule you for being stupid enough to be robbed.
Or, if you showed any signs of financial stress after being so repeatedly robbed, ridicule you for being "lek, lek", small.
The Thai government didn't just watch, weren't just criminal in their neglect, but were active participants in the pursuit.
And once they had become involved, would do anything to cover their tracks.
Preferably by bringing on his death.
Well he was still alive; and here, in a place he did not want to be.
But if he hadn't been there, he wouldn't be here, and it was impossible to stop what had happened running around in his head.
What doesn't kill us makes us stronger. In crisis, all the old cliches come true.
He didn't wonder any more what the point of it all had been.
They had hurt so many people in their pursuit of a foreigner, and they didn't care. Every organism protects itself. Except perhaps him; whose evasive actions, false trails, double meanings and triple blinds had all lead to nowhere of consequence, to a cold suburburb and frigid winds, to a place outside the story line.
Get down off the cross, we need the wood.
So many things would happen, had already happened. Some of the multiple characters in a confused story line were already dying, even if they did not know it.
Targetted for elimination.
Excess to requirements.
Frigid in a frigid place.
The only tunes were haunting.
"Bad boys," scribbled in black on cold brick. There was nobody about. No engagement. People nodded as he passed and that was it. There couldn't be a solution, not here.
He was here because he had been there; because he had allowed himself to be robbed, in a sense. A fool and his money are easily parted. Well, perhaps. But it was interesting to watch who did the robbing.
And so he exposed himself like some faithless martyr, dying for a cause not even he believed in.
While in the background ran the seething politics of Thailand, red shirts, yellow shirts and all the rest.
And here, in Australia, "Prime Minister" Kevin Rudd and Opposition Leader Tony Abbot slug it out.
Rudd, it is true, looks querelous and unconvincing. And far from Prime Ministerial. Shrugging off the hooh hah over the notes he had taken into the first televiised election debate between the two leaders; despite the rules against them. Rudd had laughed off the notes incident, the slug line at the bottom of the screen declared all day, as if he had a choice.
Abbott is just maintaining the course. Nobody, as he declared yesterday, is the suppository of all wisdom.
He might have meant repository, but the moment was gone.