No more pretty words for the money people

I’m writing from Chiang Mai, which is about as cliché as it gets for a particular activity in a particular location. I’ll be away from home for five months or so barring an unforeseen catastrophe or poverty or both. Winter’s an unsavoury time to be in Berlin and I need a break from producing pretty words for the money people. Like public relations, copywriting isn’t something you choose but something that happens to you after getting your journalism degree. Maybe someday kids will tell their parents they want to be copywriters instead of war correspondents or Sally Rooney but I doubt it.

Copywriting is distinct from actual writing in two key ways. The first is that it’s never your own voice and the second is that you’re not speaking to people but consumers. Many jobs require you to spend long hours as a fraud, and this is one of them. After a while, it became spiritually unsustainable, and I’ve always found quitting something to be up there among the great motivational forces alongside spite and desperation.

Not working can feel a lot like loitering, which is essentially the criminal act of existing without generating profit. There is a point to be made about the privilege of loitering and I’m not blind to it but I don’t think people should feel bad about de-commercialising themselves every once in a while. I only wish the privilege could be extended to everyone.

Some, when I tell them my plan, say they hope I find myself. I’m not sure what they mean exactly so I nod and say mmm as if they’re telling me about a dream they had. I think the mission’s more about losing a bunch of things: assumptions, routines, mailbox anxiety. A mailbox in the bureaucratic republic of Germany—I had to revise my vision of hell after what I’d seen there. It’ll be April before I have to reach into that little chamber of indictments again. This alone is worth leaving for.

I spent the first week of my trip in Bangkok and then took a bus and ferry to Koh Tao, a sprout of sand-rimmed jungle in the Gulf of Thailand. My Kindle disappeared somewhere en route, which is materially inconsequential but felt like losing access to a boundless dimension. There was a bookshop on the island but most of the books, judging by their covers, looked as though they might open up to reveal the board game Settlers of Catan. It was all Mark Twain and the Brontë sisters, etc., not that there’s anything wrong with that. I bought nothing and walked to the beach, where I excavated an old magazine from the depths of my bag and read an article about Bertrand Piccard’s attempt to fly around the Earth in a sun-powered balloon. I was also trying to decide if I should learn scuba diving, which Koh Tao is famous for. I almost drowned once in Cuba when I was in the phase of life traumas take hold, hence my hesitation about spending long periods underwater. Two minutes into reading, I was confronted by this passage:

“Routine is more dangerous than adventure,” [Bertrand] told me. “I don’t like le risque aléatoire”—random, incalculable risk. “I don’t like Russian roulette. But routine is killing us,” dulling people’s sense of curiosity and purpose and wonder, leaving them looking back on their lives with regret. He went on to attribute a saying to an early aviator, Jimmy Melrose: “Someone asked him, ‘Are you not afraid of having an accident?’ And he said, ‘The accident would be to die in my bed.’ ”

The next afternoon, I signed up for the dive course. For our third dive, we planned to go down 18 metres (60 feet) or so. I descended terribly due to my erratic breathing (buoyancy control is all about how skilfully you let air into and out of your lungs). At 12 metres, I became horizontal as instructed, scanned my surroundings, and to my left saw the epitome of grace: a whale shark, the world’s biggest fish. For the next half-hour, we shared the same space, at times in tandem. There’s nothing I’ve seen on land that moves with such elegance of manners and I felt somewhat ridiculous in all my gear and gadgets next to its nude brilliance.

Swimming with a whale shark is like—just kidding, it’s not like anything. It’s surreal and humbling, but also bittersweet. I cried into my dive mask at being among its gentle perfection of form, but also because seeing animals in places formerly known as nature always makes me keenly aware of our toxic anthropocentrism (it seems needless to mention that whale sharks are endangered when literally everything is, but yeah, they’re on the official list). Plastic debris, dead corals—this, too, was part of the scenery. These days you’re rarely given the opportunity to enjoy something before being confronted by its inverse negative consequence.

Next stop was Pai, a town in Northern Thailand where Westerners go to do spiritual cosplay and psychedelics like mushrooms and breathwork. One of the first people I met there was a guy wearing a shirt that read “Expand Your Mind” over an image of Einstein with a tab of acid on his tongue. He was from Denver, with an eager face that looked as though it was gearing up to pitch a condo development in Miami. He told me he came here to go on a personal journey, all spectacle over substance, speaking like an AI if the machine was fed only seven pieces of data—the Bitcoin whitepaper, some Joe Rogan podcasts, a Yuval Noah Harari book, the roster sheet for the 1996 Stanley Cup-winning Colorado Avalanche. I got the impression his life to this point had been a series of small, correct decisions and he was now ready to jump ass-first through the doors of perception. “Good luck on your journey,” I said, and he did too despite no mention of such on my part.

The next day, at a café, a girl approached me asking if she could intrude on my energy for a moment, her voice a never-ending exhale. She wanted to know if I was going to the wood-burning ceremony that night and if I’d like to join. I said I was not and that I would. The event involved several logs of seemingly generic wood, emitting no special smells or energy, far as I could tell, burning in a low-cut oil barrel. So it’s just a bonfire, right, I remarked with pristine ignorance. She looked at me like I couldn’t possibly understand, and I suppose I couldn’t. I suddenly felt incompatible with the others around the fire – each of them forever amazed and eternally grateful – and stared into the flames melancholically, as if there were any other way. 

I guess ‘ceremony’ just means giving special attention to something ordinary, which is actually a great mindset for travel. I try to avoid sightseeing – looking at the things people say you’re supposed to look at – because it feels like the “spiritual surrender” Don DeLillo described in White Noise when talking about the Most Photographed Barn in America:

“No one sees the barn,” he said finally.

A long silence followed.

“Once you’ve seen the signs about the barn, it becomes impossible to see the barn.”

He fell silent once more. People with cameras left the elevated site, replaced at once by others.

“We’re not here to capture an image. We’re here to maintain one. Can you feel it, Jack? An accumulation of nameless energies.”

There was an extended silence. The man in the booth sold postcards and slides. 

“Being here is a kind of spiritual surrender. We see only what the others see. The thousands who were here in the past, those who will come in the future. We’ve agreed to be part of a collective perception. This literally colors our vision. A religious experience in a way, like all tourism.”

Another silence ensued.

“They are taking pictures of taking pictures”, he said.

Unsurprisingly, my best experience so far was in an unmapped location while on my way somewhere else. I’ve found that most of the magic usually happens between all the seeing and doing. I was walking to Chinatown for dinner, already on a couple of beers, when a bunch of youths playing football started yelling “Farang! Farang!” at the sight of me. An invitation can take many forms and I wasn’t about to turn it down just because I was undernourished and kind of drunk. Nevermind that it was 35 degrees in the shade. The pitch was a concrete floor surrounded by a metal cage under a 12-lane highway. Most of the guys lived in adjacent shanties where three generations occupy a single room. Chopped meat is laid out on newspaper on the floor, folded boxes are for sleeping, and a single bulb of cold white light ensures everyone can see. When you see poverty like that, the first thing you feel is shame and right after that you want to blame someone, even yourself.

I ended up playing for two hours and at the end laid down on the hot cement with my eyes closed in a moment of makeshift rejuvenation. When I opened them again, one of the guys stood over me with a towel and a bottle of fantastically cold water. I will never forget this gesture, a simple scene elevated to minor revelation. I briefly felt that all was good in the world. This, I guess, is gratitude. Sometimes, like at the ceremonial fire, I forget we have an infinite supply of it.

I was too tired to make it to Chinatown so I got a soup near the football cage and decided to call it a night. In one week I’d already had more soups than a Warhol retrospective. Walking home, I almost slipped on a rat. The cruelty of coincidence, of two lives trying to occupy the same space at the same time; 50,000 steps in two days and one of them took place on a rat.

I do love coincidences but it was unfortunate that Eva said on a recent morning that she can’t believe Peter Schjeldahl was still alive and then by that evening he was dead. Schjeldahl was the New Yorker’s long-time art critic and in 2019 wrote ‘The Art of Dying’ after he was diagnosed with the lung cancer that would eventually kill him. I think it’s my favourite thing I’ve ever read by anyone.

At some point I lost the issue in which the article was published so I printed it out and carried it around in a yellow envelope, taking it with me to Italy and Canada and smoky bars in my neighbourhood where I’d sit alone and read it under a candle for full effect. In one of many unforgettable passages, Schjeldahl writes, “You get to be clueless in a new place only briefly,” a credo I intend to abuse for all its worth.

I’ve always wanted to write Mr. Schjeldahl but never knew what to say other than thanks and wow, which would have been good enough now that it’s not possible to say anything. Some lessons are obvious before they become lessons.

I’m off to be clueless now, and then I’ll move on and be clueless in another place.