Life and Flow

Thursday, January 20, 2011 11:40 AM By Stephen J Christophers

The vibrancy here is intense: I sat in a little foot massage shop on Soi Bua Khao last nigh. Watching as the dancing dusk danced her soft red light over the tops of the terraced rooves. The housing lining the narrow street scape invisable behind the clutter of wares at street level. Her dance fading, slowly now the life that darkness brings; a surreal neon glow, the miss-proportioned street signs above us draw you into their line of sight. The hum of traffic, mobile food sellers, the abundance of motorbikes darting between a steady flow of ten Baht taxi-buses curb-crawling for passengers. The loveliness of it all, and activity, the now-ness, the smiles and glances from passers by, the purposefulness of it, the ambience. People: Asians, Arabs, Indians and Europeans; an amalgamation of fashion, every nationality, every stereotype, from the most obscure to the mundane, life in all its diversity. This place is a silent insult, an insult to mainstream convention, it has nothing to hide, it can be ... there's flow here, it has everything and nothing, rivers of it, an ocean of it; every individual is his own brand; structureless humanity supporting it's own intense ideal, dirty gaping pretentiousless humanity in flow ... something like that.

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