letters to thailand - part 7

to the boys and girls of the LEO CLUB
C/o the honourable chairperson BeeBee,
The Construction View Hotel Ao Nang, Krabi

POETRY SLAM

Dutch poetry, my fellow lovers of the cosmic dream, often has that comfy feel of a slow train, safely taking it’s passengers in a rythmic cadence through a mindscape of unknown origin…yet ever so recognizable.

Imagine you came to this miniature sized country, mistakingly ending up in Rotterdam. Wondering what the heck it was that made you go there in the first place you will soon enough come to your senses and take the first train out of town.
In doing so I for one would desire one good last look at the steadily shrinking outskirts of Xenofobia, indulging the departure as an act of self-liberation.

Hastier minds of the parlementarian type however thought it necessary to spend a few billion on a high speed railway system that will reduce the travelling time from Rotterdam to The Hague with 10 minutes, thus bridging the gap in minus ten
seconds or so. For want of leaving Rotterdam it doesn’t sound too bad, however souls of the more romantic kind complain that cows in the meadows become a blur; nothing more than a stain in a bigger patchwork, leaving the retina in utter confusion.

In this nation of giants where future generations are racing towards a state where they will topple over because of sheer length, thus creating a race that is back on all fours, the greatest of poets (most of them well over 6 feet ) all seem to have taken this bullit train called poetry slam.
Panting, their bitter mouths now dripping with saliva, then squirting like a pussy in overdrive, they race through their lines…wittingly outdoing eachother in the safe knowledge no-one can ever make out one whole line, leaving the more inquisitive of minds in a mist…a hazier state of being.
Once I was there…the jury, three foot five, carried an enormous moustache and cup d sized boobs…was it a scam?

P.s. Making up one group taking part in this year’s TV-I.Q. Quiz were brothers and sisters worshipping the Holy Herb. I guess it was the tobacco in the reefers narrowing their cranial vessels preventing them from getting first place…they came in second.

letters to thailand - part 1
letters to thailand - part 2
letters to thailand - part 3
letters to thailand - part 4
letters to thailand - part 5
letters to thailand - part 6

letters to thailand - part 6

To the boys and girls of the LEO CLUB
C/o the honourable chairperson BeeBee,
The Construction View Hotel Ao Nang, Krabi

WHO’S AFRAID OF RED, YELLOW AND BLUE?

My dear friends, how fondly do I remember those simmering nights at The Last Café, the full moon pulling its weight as we were pondering the magic that is chaos… the joy we felt at the notion that the wing beats of countless moths fluttering about, could actually ripple yet another faraway beach.

It seems completely lost to this society where the glistening shine of chaos is mercilessly blunted…the grain of life replaced by a darker shade of grey.
Streets, bars, shopping malls…they are all teeming with would be individualists, confusing their status quo with independence, not recognizing being a mere fractal…an object similar to itself on all scales, a matter of self similarity.
Just get out your boy scout magnifying glasses and discover that each fractal looks exactly the same as the original shape…a clone born out of chaos.

If you need some convincing that virtually everything is made up of fractals just get some paints, say red, yellow and blue and indulge into beautifying the apartment of mister imperturbable himself by splattering those colours onto the walls. Now just zoom in to the point where you realize that, apart from blood, sweat and sperm stains, inside the red there is a spec of yellow and inside the yellow a spec of blue…ad infinitum.
Where this could be a wonderful celebration of shape and colour, society just shows us an ugly face…degrading it to an incestuous affair.
Meanwhile I cannot defractalize myself from it all…unless I would travel to another dimension there is no escaping this mask of horror.

letters to thailand - part 1
letters to thailand - part 2
letters to thailand - part 3
letters to thailand - part 4
letters to thailand - part 5

letters to thailand - part 5

To the boys and girls of the LEO CLUB
C/o the honourable chairperson BeeBee,
The Construction View Hotel Ao Nang, Krabi

New York… If you can make it there
You’d make it anywhere…but Rotterdam

I’ve said it before and I’ll now say it again…coincidence is mere cosmic poetry.
Just two days, my friends, after I told you about those different dictionaries going around, the mayor of Rotterdam spoke:

“(…) we have to make it clear that when you don’t carry Dutch inside your genes, you simply won’t make it here” (…).

Alas…Rotterdam once was reckoned to be a world city.

As I was brewing my morning coffee the old fashioned way, savouring the exquisite aroma filling my home, my last girlfriend sneaked her way into my head. We had a tough relationship, you all know the kind…in between stupid arguments we fucked our brains out. We did so mostly on the very couch I was having my first cup…our DNA has screamed its way so deep into the upholstery, it might still hatch.

My mind wandered back towards a very different morning…a morning where I saw even more clearly why I had always hated those pretentious gadgets …a morning just like this one, where the air was filled with the smell of coffee, yet something wasn’t right. I’d been through that experience so often…
I cannot say why I picked exactly this day for a fight. It was all over a trendy coffee-maker…you insert a pad into a kind of beak, it’ll munch the pad and as water is running through, your doll house sized cup is filling up.

Now, go to any Dutch birthday party, sit down in that famous circle of fun (roar) and surely you’ll hear somebody comment on the taste of this drink…I won’t go into that. There seems to be one common complaint though and that is the bloody lack of aroma. You might live to become a hundred years old in the very same house, it would never acquire that particular flavour that has been the trademark of the cosiest of Dutch homes.
But hey man; for the xenophobes amongst us it’s bad enough to feel a stranger because their world seemsto have turned into Babylon…how could they possibly bear feeling a stranger within their own compound?
What those clog-heads do? As they have their coffee pads munched by inspector Gadget they brew real coffee as well. They just won’t drink it…it’s all about the aroma…remember?

You’ve all guessed by now, this is exactly what my girlfriend did.
For all the beautiful mornings that followed those magical nights, it was the daily news however, which really triggered my tongue that very day; when darkness settled early…ripping our love…shredding it to bits so sharp they were sanding my soul.
Could it be because we’d had a serious discussion the previous night? We weren’t arguing, oh no. It just so happened that my lovely woman was into the habit of smoking two packs of blanks a day and got really pissed off when I said there should be a law against smoking in a car with children.
I was exaggerating she yelled as lighting up.
We had heard on the news that, of all people, a majority of Dutch parliamentarians were contemplating a law that would forbid smoking the weed in public places; they mean those trendy terraces where one drink costs the equivalent of one hour hard labour. Now savour this…they say it smells peculiar.

We are talking about the very same dickheads that earlier postponed a proposal to forbid the smoking of tobacco in sport-canteens and the like.
I smell a rat.

letters to thailand - part 1
letters to thailand - part 2
letters to thailand - part 3
letters to thailand - part 4

letters to thailand - part 4

To the boys and girls of the LEO CLUB
c/o the honourable chairperson BeeBee,
The Construction View Hotel Ao Nang, Krabi

DOUBLE DUTCH

So meanwhile, my dear friends, I’m holding on for dear life… riding the glacier, wondering where it will bring me, though at times I let the magical herb help me slowing it down, creating ample opportunity to reflect.
Lately I’ve been looking in every nook and cranny, bringing home memories that were long lost. The more I hold them against the light of present day, the less I feel at home, realizing I had actually forgotten why I had turned my back on it all…moving east.

The middle ground never was my turf, however now it’s gotten to be so wide…I don’t know where to put my feet. It feels like being pushed towards the very extremes of society…maybe you know the place where people hang by their nails to the rim of humanity.
Remember the people begging for receipts and free coupons in front of the bigger department stores downtown Bangkok? It became a normal sight at every Dutch supermarket.
Supporting that gargantuan incubus that government has become, the indifference by the majority towards the well-being of the individual is becoming almost unbearable.

By the way, anyone of you beautiful people thinking to bring your Thai loved one to the Netherlands? Think twice.
Integration is the name of the game; it became synonymous to intolerance.
One of many tricks to keep your lover, your spouse, yes even your kids outside is that they will have to learn Dutch before they are allowed to climb over the dikes that protect those lower lands of paradise.
Ever heard a Dutch government minister speak English?
Imagine Thai authorities reciprocating with a vengeance…what you think would happen to all those beer-bellied assholes looking for a cheap ride in Pattaya, to just name a place?

When however, you do decide to settle in the Netherlands, that very centre of the world (judging by the content of the daily news-bulletins), you can bring either one of two current dictionaries.
The first will give you the Dutch word ‘gastvrij’ as a translation of the English hospitable; the other will spell it as ‘gast-vrij’, meaning free of guests.

The choice is yours.

©ml

letters to thailand - part 1
letters to thailand - part 2
letters to thailand - part 3