White Knights and Fading Gents

*

It was too cruel; and indifferent; and whole slabs of fate just pealed away; flapping, diseased. It's not linear, a voice said. Why did you think it would be? Nor is it constant. Love comes and goes. Opportunity comes and goes. Now he was staring across the Thailand sea. No butts: For King, For Country, For Wildlife, says the sign. Even now, at 7am, prostitutes cruise Beach Road on Pattya, picking up westerners who have been out in the bars all night. There were times of need. There was a hunger which was so morbid, so filled with wrong thoughts and inappropriate gestures. Little Willy didn't work anymore, had become disconnected from the brain, from the body, from the life it had once been so ready to entertain. A dick has no conscience, he said to Rebecca, and they both laughed. See, she said, you've got your first line already.

We didn't get to walking road last night, we didn't even get to go out dancing. She's 47, no children, very good looking for her age. But what future for an older woman? What future at all here, where the Western men only glance at them, aghast at their size and ugliness, before continuing their pursuit of the baby faced prostitutes, the good time girls, I love you long time. At night there are shadows everywhere, as people by their hundreds, indeed thousands, lounge along the thin strip of the beach; watching, waiting. What's he selling, Ian asked of someone they had brushed past. Himself, probably, he replied. Yuck, declared Ian, who had three girls in tow and was forking out a small fortune on a daily basis to keep the circus in dazzling synch.

Despite his best instincts he had somehow come to Pattya for the convention; and was now expected to pay more than $50 to listen to a bunch of loud mouthed yanks. He didn't care, it was keeping him sober, in some sense. But the wild child; the dysfunctioning brain, the emotional sighs, the wobbly glitz that was reality on a bender, all of it played havoc. All he wanted to do in a new town was sort out which bar he was going to make his home; which drugs were able to be scored where; and settle in for a good time Charlie, for days following days which he would only ever remember as a blur, and couldn't care. It was dark, it was wrong, but that was it: there was no escaping his diseased consciousness, the way things just didn't work properly, the way the sky and the sea, the palm trees and the prostitutes, all merged together in a sickening desire to escape.

He listened to all those voices droning on, all those egostical f'ng idiots; he lounged comfortable in the lower lobby of the five star hotel; he saw things he wished he had never seen. The traditional Thai fishing boats dot Pattaya Bay, their red bows dipping in the morning sea, adding atmosphere to an undeniable scene. Speed boats cut their way through. The water bobbed. The prostitutes lingered. The umbrellas began to go up for the day's tourist traffic. The weather was nothing and the beach was nothing, but here it was all about Go Go girls and getting wasted. The tug of the heart. And lots of other tugs as well. What you like, bomb bomb, mouth, breast? He shivered in some sort of terrible male despair. There wasn't anyway out of this. He tipped her well for effort.

These ancient chrones, these ancient voices, all were coming back to aunt him. There was no way he was going to stay sane, sober or sensible. How could it be, when every shrieking voice said the opposite, come dance with me, come die with me. I don't have another recovery in me, they would all declare. But how could you really know? Wasn't there depth without end, wasn't their permutations on every available theme, wasn't it possible to make love to both sexes, to be kind to older women; and to even make love. Wasn't it possible, as he watched the speed boats cut past the traditional Thai fishing boats, for all ife to be consumed in a single flame, for everything, fate, desire, oblivion and fulfilment, for all of it to come rushing up from the bottom of a glass or a dripping, brand new needle. Wasn't it possible to seek oblivion in all the wrong places and still survive?

Well, not really. Most all the stories were sad stories. Most all the stories had sad endings. Lynn died pregnant. Colin died of AIDS. Jan left behind two bewildered, psychically gifted children. Their deaths, just a skeleton in the ground, makred a tragedy beyond understanding. Already the red white and blue of the sails, tiny figures beneath, drifted over the fishing boats. Tourist fishing boats just as like. He felt compounded and deranged, concerned and yet, as a provisioned oblivion seeker, worried about the dark and the derangement that was just beyond eyesight, just beyond physical thought, just beyond the "border of the real", to quote the city at the end of time. Do you dream of a city at the end of time? We're already there. We travelled out of Bangkok, past the concrete phalanxes of the Sky Train, past the airport, down the surreal, futuristic, despairing highway with its endless cars and grey skies closing in, right on to the highway. And they knew, they were already there.

THE BIGGER STORY:

http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5j3NbzvMmUDvfcUVYJxn3bTV7wZRA

BANGKOK — Thousands of protesters forced Thailand's biggest bank to close its headquarters Friday, raising tensions one week before a court ruling on the fortune of ousted former premier Thaksin Shinawatra.

Bangkok Bank shut its head office for the day and sent 3,000 staff home because of the rally by Thaksin's supporters, who say the bank has links to a royal aide whom they blame for the 2006 coup that toppled their idol.

Police said around 1,500 demonstrators had gathered in Bangkok's Silom business district. The protest movement, known as the "Red Shirts" because of their signature clothing, said 10,000 attended.

"Bangkok Bank is a capitalist institution which has destroyed our democracy," Red Shirt speaker Worawuth Wichaidit told the crowd from a stage.

The Red Shirts said former prime minister Prem Tinsulanonda, who is now the chief adviser to Thailand's revered King Bhumibol Adulyadej, used to be Bangkok Bank's chief adviser and continues to have ties to it.

They accuse Prem of masterminding the September 2006 putsch. Telecoms tycoon Thaksin is now living abroad to avoid a two-year jail term imposed in absentia in 2008 for corruption relating to a land deal.

"Prem is the one who has caused our country to collapse," Worawuth added.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/sport/golf/tigerwoods/7273941/Tiger-Woods-sticks-to-the-script-in-his-apology-and-reveals-nothing-of-note.html

He may have been among “40 friends, colleagues and close associates” gathered in a room at the PGA Tour’s headquarters in Florida, but he looked about as comfortable as he must have been that November day when his wife smashed a golf club through the window of his Cadillac.

Stiff, staccato, lumpen, he appeared to be a man speaking under duress. Indeed in his formal buttoned-up collar but no tie, he had the sartorial arrangement of a hostage, hastily dressed for a video ransom demand. Though in truth most hostages look more relaxed than this.

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Woods has never done spontaneous. Since his minders pulled down the shutters around him after he had revealed himself as a gauche frat boy with a string of off-colour gags during an interview with GQ magazine in 1997, his every utterance has been stage-managed.

Even his extra-marital relations exuded an air of organisation; many were seemingly prearranged by a third party in advance. This is a man who even conducted his flings to timetable.

Thus was his public confession more controlled than a tee shot from the third at Augusta. There were no cameras in the room snapping away to catch him looking vulnerable. No reporters to ask tricky questions. No unauthorised television lenses ready to zoom in the moment his bottom lip quivered.