oneself off of a park bench. He felt: "I have been where you are with a
hair net on my head, many late nights splintered on a wooden stool, or
placid on a red plastic stool, strength thwarted, and with angular
crowds stumbling over me." Almost without thinking it, he felt the
horror as he struggled for words; and since he did not have his journal
with him, he tried to memorize the feeling.
He remembered those years of nights in Ayutthaya when his work had
ended and he was free of the vending cart, and embraced within the
black smog of busses. Then there was a reprieve from the gaseous smoke
of cooked food (grilled pork and chicken) trapped between canopy roofs
and sidewalk. His reprieve and liberation was only in comics borrowed
from a newsstand. It was a personal life--a bit of himself in a
vicarious existence. The words under the pictures would often zoom
across the interior of his skull in his drowsiness like cars on a
speedway and he would not comprehend anything much before falling
asleep at one of the tables. In sleep he would not exist. Cartoon
images would run amuck. His pent up needs would flow in action and
adventure although his likeness would not be in the dreams.
If thought were a product made from the raw material of feeling,
he felt more than thought: "Your reflexive and monotonous perfunctory
days and nights are gloomy in starlessness. Face draped on the backs of
your hands folded on the table, you almost look as if you are making
the gesture of 'wei' or praying to Buddha." He remembered that seconds
before he was in those minutes of sleep, at the end of the work nights,
he prayed for a way out or that community and connectedness could be
gained within his limited life. He walked by the stranger. He walked
past twenty others. With his eyes he bestowed onto them blessings.
He continued to follow his brothers through perennial steps and
time and swayed alone as lifeless as wet laundry hanging on balconies
during the dry season. The fetid one slammed him with poignant