It(')s Friday in Bangkok

Let's talk for a while. I mean really talk. Let's put away the metaphors and the allusions, the allegories and the confusion. Let's just look at us.

At what is.

The city. Lowercase 'c' but no less important. Cars fill up the roads. Thousands of endless cars. From the window of the traffic helicopter they resemble ants, moving too and fro in hurried motion. Everywhere someone must be somewhere that is not here. I hear the marketing slogan in my head from Ford himself, "Everything in life is somewhere else, and you get there in a car." But I cannot help but see that every somewhere else is not something else.

The same smog. The same crappy buildings built next to ones trying to be nice. The same line after line after line of advertising. The same private little enclaves of serenity – beautiful 3 bedroom houses with a little yard and a big driveway – ignoring the filth that stagnates a few miles away. (Perhaps hoping that the trees will save them.)

The same in Canada. The same in France. The same in England. The same in Thailand. My father tells me it is soon to be the same in Laos. I feel it is sure to be the same in a community near you.

And with the city comes the culture. That almost-American, world-dominant-intellectual/local-belief/marketable tradition cross culture. The myriad of beliefs and systems that resembles socially those roadways that they develop physically. In the west I know they call it multi-culturalism. In 2nd world countries, they call it progress. Here, where the destitute live side by side the rich, they laugh and simply call it life.

The city is such a big project. Bigger than the two of us, at least. I fear that it will almost certainly be completed. People get up every day and depend entirely on it for their survival. The markets, the cars, the high-rise buildings with their office jobs. It is the combined ingenuity of a billion people working together for a mutual but individual sustained happiness.

I don't want to get lost in flowery words. I just mean that the whole world is vast. The city always reminds me of that inevitable upward progression. Of what happens when more individual people than you can count are observed as a whole. The city is all about trying to act as a whole.

My first reaction is always the same. I hate the city, no matter its form. Here, there, Vancouver or Bangkok. L.A. or New York. I suppose that's because it always looks exactly like madness. It looks like people packed in, each working too hard for their individual space. And yet, people choose to be there. Not everyone, but so many people choose to be there, to commute into that closed space every day. It makes my heart sink.

But there is something about it that tickles me. There is something that makes me feel small, but not humbled. After the grumpiness disappears and the nausea fades, it is slowly replaced by an empowering sense of anonymity. Here is another quote in my head for the city: "you can never step in the same river twice." Those cars drive by at miles per hour, but I am never seen more than once by them. My dirtied, inconsistant, wandering thought never knows itself twice... even though it sometimes feels like I am in the same place.

And all the while, the city will be whatever it will be. While I am helplessly refreshed in it, it does not need to be refreshed by me. It is strong and steady. It continues. It is the cumulation of all its people and they are many.

With this, the city frees me. I don't like it, it doesn't sit right, and it feels like a certain recipe for disaster. But every day that depresses is, without a doubt, a new depression. Every time I breathe, I can always be baptized there in different smog. Everything is new. Nobody needs to know me.

And so, if you and I go together, we can be lost together. Because it's bigger than either of us. We can be as loud and as great as we want, and there will never be a shortage of people to hear us. And, if we fail, or want to disappear, there is always a taxi and always a train. As soon as it picks us up, we can be gone. Lost in thousands of endless cars.

That's the bounty of this madness. That's the beauty of the city.