retrospecticus I

It's only my fourth day on the beach at Koh Phangan, but it feels much longer. I walked into town, to the 7-11, just to feel air conditioning for a few minutes.
The dogs are chasing a calf that has wandered onto the beach. Next door, locals are burning a pile of trash. Rain falls on the thatched roof sometimes, punctuated by the occasional coconut. This afternoon, the tide will go out, and children will string a huge net along the sandbar to catch crabs.
---
A week ago, I was still stuck in Bangkok, at a hotel I could never afford, listening to a jazz trio. The older gentleman at the next table has a fifth of Jack to himself, which he will finish by the end of the show. The trio is improvising to the changes of the M.A.S.H. theme song.
At intermission, I approach the pianist and ask if they take requests. "Well, that all depends, now doesn't it," he says. "On what the request is?"
I ask if they play any Mingus.
"Y'know, I never got into him myself, and half these people wouldn't understand that kinda shit. Some things are just out there. Why, I remember this one time, we'd had no rehearsal, and the band leader says to us: 'I don't wanna hear any chords tonight!'"
The pianist is from California. He appears to be in his 50s. "But I wouldn't go back there if my life depended on it! 12 years gone?! My crone of a mother would kill me! And the women here...so many gorgeous women here," he says.
At the next intermission, he disappears into the bathroom behind the bar, and I can faintly hear people shouting inside, a man yelling for them to get out. Is it him? What's the deal with that? Should I be leaving? There's a feeling in the air that something is wrong. I feel disoriented, but strangely like a beacon of stability, despite the sense that I will knock over the next glass I try to pick up, or trip over my own feet as soon as I stand. What goes on behind the scenes at places like this, where everything appears perfect on the surface?
By the time they are back on stage, there are only four of us left in the audience. "Boy, they really cleared out, didn't they?" he says. "Was it something I said? It must've been something I said, because it's aaalways Randy's fault." He paws at a few keys on the piano and turns back to the mic. "So whaddaya wanna hear? Huh?" The audience is silent. I imagine him flying into a rage if I try and tell him what to play next.
The drummer says, "Let's play Piano Man, Randy." They close with Piano Man.

Outside, the city is still writhing, in a friendly sort of way. An elevated crosswalk sports a filthy older woman and a baby on a mat, who I can only hope are not trying to sleep to the noises of the torrential traffic below. A gauntlet of at least twenty girls in miniskirts are sat on the curb when I cross the street, calling out to me. Further on, are the motorcycle taxi drivers, busy at a card game, until I approach. "Hey, you! Where you going?"

The next day, I take a boat up the river, to Taling Chan floating market. The boat is called a long tail, reminiscent of a gondola, but with a big noisy motor on the back in place of an oar. It could seat about twenty tourists, but it's only me and the driver. The ride takes over an hour, headed West of the city along a narrow canal lined with houses cobbled together from rotting wood and rusty metal sheets, the stilts at the base seeming ready to collapse at any moment.
We idle up to the market docks, and a large woman cackles in her tiny boat as she passes in front of us, narrowly avoiding a collision. The market itself isn't exactly floating, but the vendors are. They sidle up to the docks in their little boats filled with all sorts of food. Fat, fried fish on wooden skewers; a pot of adorable little turtles; the largest mixing bowl I've ever seen, filled with mountains of tiny shrimp being stirred with two paddles by a squat, wrinkly woman. Several mangy dogs wander the tables, wagging tails, panting, drooling at the food. A volunteer band playing all sorts of wooden instruments with no coordination, though somehow all in the same key. A girl feeds an entire school of fish at the dock, and I imagine I could catch hundreds of them with one scoop of a net.
I am paralyzed by all of the choices before me, and only twenty minutes before the boatman picks me up. I settle on something that looks vaguely like a taco, except that it is the greasiest thing ever conceived by Man.

That night, two overpriced beers with dinner convince me to hit the town. My little green notebook goes with me, and here's the resulting prose:
[I sit at a nearby bar, eat skewered crocodile, and watch two whole soccer games on the TV.] Do they have cheerleaders at soccer games? I've never seen any. It seems obvious, but where did the term 'shanghaied' come from? Cryptic text on the newscast about the soccer game: "Love man, love ghost!" "Man city, best!" "Man u champion alone!" Deep South Americans? No, Australian women floated in like blimps and began expelling various unintelligible noises with hearty twangs, the willowy Thai bartender's limbs quiver in fear of them. In the bathroom, a sign: "No matter how good she looks, some other guy is sick and tired of putting up with her shit." Thanks, green sign! I'm not certain what emotion it's meant to inspire...  Met two girls from Cairo who seemed exactly like two girls from the US. Welcome to globalization. Big old Aussie women are dancing to Daft Punk. [The prose ends, but the night continued...]

Before my flight to the South islands, the cab driver takes a wrong turn and becomes lost in a warren of what appear to be abandoned factories, except for the occasional armed guard posted along a barbed wire fence. I brush off the driver's apologies with relief, as his confusion reassures me that I'm not being kidnapped, and also that the piles of rubble around me are not considered an airport. At the real airport, I eat two whole meals in succession, in an attempt to crush the hangover I acquired the night before, when I drifted in a haze of decidedly poor decisions.
---
In the present, the wind is picking up. The island of Ko Samui looms in the distance, its low mountains capped with rainclouds. The restaurant's skinny, shirtless waiter is sprawled on the floor in his sunglasses and jeans, his long limbs flung out in every direction. Presently, he jumps to his feet and paces back and forth, chanting: "Oohh. Fuck. Fuck...Oh Fuck." Sometimes, when I talk to him, he seems to be looking at something just beyond the back of my head, his eyes wide, and a toothy carefree smile on his face. I wonder what he's on. The question is answered for me later in the day, when an Englishman tries to order a Red Bull. The waiter says, "Hey, sorry man. All gone. I drink them all." Red Bull's a little different here than back home. It supposedly contains amphetamines. He sleeps half the day, and sprints the other half. Later, he explains that in the afternoon, he woke from a dream of a snake eating him.
This beach has instilled an unfamiliar brand of lethargy in me which I feel increasingly desperate to escape from. The air is filled with a disturbing lack of obligations, even to myself. I can understand why the dogs here rarely seem to move.