Lust lost

Travelling out of Ireland in February, where frozen wind jammed ice cold pissing rain into your ears from all directions, if you dared to step outside ... to Thailand, Bangkok, where it's 30 degrees at 4a.m., and the traffic never, ever, ever, ever stops outside; my sleep pattern is dissolved into a shambles, and I. am. wired.

So far the experiment is working.  Castration without the bloody mess.  It dawned on me yesterday: I lived in Dublin when I didn't drink, now I've come to Bangkok to get away from sex.  Odd but true; that's life.  It's most likely down to how little I know about any of the culture over here, but through my western eyes the value systems of beauty and equality and desirability and women and/or men as property and objects of each others' desires -- if not better, it's at least so different that I'm lost within it and can't get a grip.  To put it as simply and plainly as my west-soaked mind can mutter so far: I don't see how they have sex at all over here.  Back on the other side, women and men checked themselves in reflections, and responded with admiration or envy or desire or disgust based on how the other people around them were dressed, or behaved.  It was always heartbreaking and sour to watch this elitist macro drama take place, excluding from this Lookers Only club unworthy characters based on their appearance alone.  And watching this feed back into the minds and behaviours of those who were told they did not belong, knocking their confidence or inspiring them to do zany things for the sake of attention, or as a buck against the implied necessity of wanting to belong to this Club ... but still in response to the Club no matter what.  Over here, Asia land, there's some other value system that's entirely divorced from whatever has osmotically creeped under my skin from my time in the west.  Studying the people on the metro, I can see that a lot of time and care and thought went into their dress, their style, their look, for the majority of who i presume are the city dwellers, that is.  But there is a sense, somewhere between my eyes and ears, that they would dress and act this way even if no one else was around; and that is the difference.

As for the experiment, I chose to come to Asia to get away from the distraction of sex, of women, of flirtation with both men and women.  I wanted to see my own sex from a different perspective, and I decided to do this by turning it off around people.  Never for a fleeting moment has an Asian person ever inspired a molecule of physical desire within me, or even brought to mind or pores the memory of human sexuality.  That is partly why I've invoked that awkward thought -- that I can't understand how they ever would have sex over here -- because I simply cannot sympathise; I am incapable of understanding these people as sexual creatures.  I'll gladly repeat that it is mostly, if not entirely, down to my own ignorance of the culture, rather than a matter of turn-ons and turn-offs.  However, for the time being, it is quite refreshing to simply walk down streets and through subways full of people, brimming with people (especially in this heat!) without being slain on a second-by-second basis by my own bloodthirsty sexual desire that only ever writhes and storms and scorns inside me anyway, never seeing fruition, never knowing how to bridge that impossible gap.

My own sexuality, in its natural state, has always frightened me, because it has always included death and destruction as a necessity.  When lusting after any person, recognising the base desire to fuck, whether for procreation or pleasure, I simultaneously feel as purely and clean the need to maim, to choke, to end their heart beating; in fact to devour them whole. It is true more so with women than with men, but it does happen with both.  Shy of joining a brotherhood of monks just yet, I've opted to move to Asia where, for now, I feel nothing at all.

Still, with the exquisite heat and all this mid-afternoon traffic at 5a.m. noise, it's quite difficult to sleep without the aid of excessive masturbation.  Walking up and down stairs and along shoddy concrete paths for six hours today in sandals in the afternoon heat, stepping in and out of Arctic chilled shopping malls snapping pores open and shut like frozen lake runs from the sauna, I thought that would do the trick.  Though I did fall asleep as soon as my head hit the pillow, I woke after five hours.  The traffic, the lights, the noise.  Never mind New York: this city not only never sleeps, it never pauses, never takes a breath.