Holy Books of Guttersnipe Das: Essays in Idleness

Kenko, Essays in Idleness

English translation of Tsurezuregusa

Translated by Donald Keene

Tuttle Press, 1981

“The most precious thing in life is its uncertainty.”

If you ask the value and purpose of this book, you will most often be told that it is a touchstone of Japanese aesthetics, an essential text praising what is imperfect, unfinished and perishable.  Certainly that’s true.  In Tsurezuregusa, a mid 14^th century text, you can see a lot of values and ideas that are still very much evident in the 21^st.  And not just wabi sabi – forcing people to get drunk is also a venerable Japanese tradition!

But to value the book only for this reason – is to render it a museum piece, a textbook.  What a shame that would be!  Essays in Idleness is not just a book which expresses the Japanese aesthetic.  It is book, like Montaigne’s Essays, that is in a hurry to figure out the best way to live.  Like Montaigne, Kenko is a middle-aged man determined to make the best use of his time – he’s a sociable renunciant who knows how to enjoy himself.

For example, I was amused to discover how similar Kenko’s essay on drunkenness is to Montaigne’s on the subject.  Both men passionately denounce liquor, then admit it’s enjoyable, and finally declare that imbibing is quite human and excusable!  It’s easy to imagine either author, halfway though his denunciation, discovering that he was. . . thirsty. 

 Of course it’s interesting to read about classical instruments and imperial manners  -- I am very glad to know that “the carp is a most exalted fish, the only one which may be sliced in the presence of the emperor”.  But for me, Kenko is most powerful when he speaks passionately about how to not waste one’s life, or drives home the truth of impermanence:

“I suddenly realized, from the large number of people I could recognize in the crowds passing to and fro before the stands, that there were not so many people in the world, after all.  Even if I were not to die until all of them had gone, I should not have long to wait.” 

Perils of the Free Zone

from Idleness, Bangkok section

1.

Chai Pinit, whose life story of sexual abuse and deep suffering is portrayed in the book Bangkok Boy, now works as a manager at the Scorpion bar in Soi Twilight, where he serves also as the bar’s chief offering and display.

Chai Pinit is in his mid-forties now.  He still has a jaunty haircut and does one-armed push-ups.  He wears eight Buddhas around his neck, each in its own plastic case.

His nose is obliterated, his eyes are slits, and he remains somehow adorable -- perhaps by sheer force of will -- which suggests to me that, contrary to what you have heard, beauty is maybe the most durable thing in the world.

Chai Pinit immediately offers to be my boyfriend.

2.

Chai Pinit is, above all, a businessman.  Or aims to be. 

“I got to make some money.  Everybody they know my book.  I could get a bar – Official Bangkok Boy – or a disco!  He opens his notebook, shows me a plan for the sandwich board he wants to put out front, which will read:

Bangkok Boy!

Buy his book!

Meet him here!

I want to buy his book from him – but he charges double what it costs in the store.  Instead I buy him a drink when he asks – and hope to god it’s a virgin cocktail, as the doctors have said his next bender will kill him.

It seems unfortunate that he works in a bar.

Chai Pinit puts his arms around my neck and offers to show me the sights and the shows.  He promises he can find me a very nice boy. 

Chai Pinit is wholly uninterested in starring in the tale of his own redemption.  He wants cash.

Who blames him? 

3.

Depravity in a monastic setting – that’s Bangkok’s Malaysia Hotel.  Like a cheerful hospital room, suitable for bodily emergencies.

This, too, is compassion: the intelligence which recognizes that this is no place for a carpet.

4.

I have always esteemed the tenderness of bathhouse doormen.  The unexpectedly gentle smile on the face of the man who greets you as you slouch in from the street, and smiles again, at the end of the night, when you pass him the keys and stagger back out to the street.

It is the same reverence I feel toward the staff at the Malaysia Hotel, who cheerfully do a job that would make most people stark raving mad, and treat us all like ladies, ladyboys and gentlemen, as we proceed from one mess to the next.

Bless them, they speak to us with tenderness and respect – though they know well what the laundry looks like.

4b.

Who am I kidding?  Not just the laundry.  Also the walls, the floors, and not infrequently the ceiling, or even the halls, which are popular, from time to time, for naked screaming relays.

5.

In the locker room at Babylon, I meet the giant.  He’s all finished, and now is getting dressed.

“How was it?”

“Pretty quiet.  One hairy Pakistani.  One Brazilian.”

“I’m glad you’re leaving.  We’re competing for the same audience.”

He grins, then taunts, “I got the Brazilian’s number too.”

I glare – but just then the Brazilian stops by for one last kiss.

Now – it is well-known that fully 80% of Brazil is porn! star! hot!  But this guy – he’s from the other 20%.  Not that he’s so bad, mind you.  It’s just that I get my hopes up when I hear Brazil.

I always think that I would do so much better, if I were a giant.

6.

I have always thought it useful and important that there exist “free zones”, where people can go to do as they choose.  That cabin in the woods.  The house where the Mom lets the kids smoke pot.  The home of your courageously sleazy friend.  Montreal, Amsterdam, Bangkok.  It is instructive to see what happens.

How is anyone supposed to learn about the nature of desire – if desire is not, from time to time, fulfilled?

The free zone – ideally everyone would have a turn.  Which is, of course, not remotely what happens. 

In a just world the cleaning ladies would be queens on Tuesdays and ride the sex tourists like burros, up and down the halls of the Malaysia Hotel.

6b.

I should note, too, that I think it would be extremely challenging to live in a free zone – but then, self-control is not necessarily my forte.

7.

Walking around Patpong Night Market, trying to choose exactly the right t-shirt to wear home for the next family gathering.

My choices include:

a)      No Money No Honey

b)      Clockwork Orange

c)      Little Miss Bossy

d)      I Was a Mistake

8.

I have warned my husband it is inevitable.  It is as certain as death and, however regrettable and embarrassing it may be, there is nothing that can be done to prevent it.

One day at home in Tokyo, at tea with respectable people, perhaps while spooning clotted cream onto a jam-smeared scone, one of those estimable high quality first-class gentlepersons is going to say, “I just don’t know how people do it – sell their bodies” and then, so help me god, I am going to explain it to them, I’m going to spell it out with so much vigor and thoroughness that their scones will be reduced to the texture and consistency of volcanic ash.  

I tease my husband that it is his own fault.  He ought to have run a background check before he brought me home.

9.

One thing that always strikes me is the abiding uselessness of respectable people.  So-called respectable people.  They are so good – you’d think that they’d be good for something.  But no.

Evidently it takes very nearly all their energy, just to pretend nothing untoward is going on.

10.

“Gosh!  I had no idea how sheltered my life has been!  But it’s OK, I guess, since most of what you write about is just pretty much disgusting!”

This is yet another service I provide: I help the wives of Big Oil feel even more certain that they are truly respectable people.

Shock is a form of vanity.

11.

There it is again – the unfortunate tendency to be shrill.  The result, perhaps, of growing up with a more-than-half-mad single parent, a man so fully encased in his own world that he was unable to hear anything less than two inch headlines.

I could not say, for example, “Hey, Dad, what’s for dinner?” 

It had to be: Child!  Starving!  Near Death in NH!

Which does not in any way serve to excuse me, or render me charming.

12.

My favorite duck-for-a-buck shop is gone.  The big one at the start of Silom Soi 4, where I used to order plates of duck one after another.  Perfectly delectable duck on little pastel plastic plates, with greens and sauce.  It has been replaced by another of those indistinct a/c tourist restaurants, one of those places you can be sure will be something else inside six months.

Anyway – when the reporters ask exactly why I doused myself with gasoline and set myself on fire – do not neglect to add this to the list.

13.

It is possible, almost, to pity them: sex tourists in the electronic age.  They came to Bangkok to be wild and debauched, mad and depraved, leashed and unleashed – and what they would up with instead is heavy secretarial.

In the old days (the Nineties maybe?) it was possible to get out and see the palace, maybe do a little shopping.  Not anymore. 

Everybody’s online now at planetromeo, gaydar, adam4adam, manhunt, daddyhunt, recon, or checking on grindr and scruff to see who’s nearby, uncircumcised and hung.  Texting a 132 times for every fuck, wondering, Is that guy in the Spiderman costume at recon ever going to get back to me or not?

I remember how liberating it used to feel, to be out for the night on Silom Soi 4.  Now the boys at the Balcony bar stare all night into the phones.  They do not even wink across the street to the boys at the Telephone Bar – they text instead, after checking profiles first to make sure they are compatible.

It is a wonder they have time for anything, those gay sex secretaries, jacking off with one hand and texting with the other.

A man beside the pool at the Malaysia Hotel waves his phone at me and asks, “Can you send a picture of your cock?”

14.

The giant has been here for weeks.  For weeks the giant has been meaning to leave.  The giant has been coming here, on and off, for 25 years.  He always returns to the 4^th floor.  Any higher than that, you can’t cruise the pool.  Any lower, the pot smoke floats down.

He possesses an enormous inheritance.  And dong.  He is thinking of buying a house in Sitges.  We’re beside the pool at 10 a.m. and he says to me, “I blew my load early.  What the hell am I supposed to do now?”

15.

A hatchback sedan has just pulled up in front of the Malaysia Hotel.  Now nuns are pouring out of it.

A caption has just appeared above their heads.  It hangs there like the Holy Spirit.

The Mother Superior, it turned out, was NOT infallible.

Guttersnipe Bookshelf: Mary Robison

One D.O.A, One on the Way

Mary Robison 

Counterpoint, 2009

I wish Mary Robison were as prolific as Joyce Carol Oates, because I swear I could read another novel like this every three months.  As it is, I had to wait nearly a decade, after having read her last novel “Why Did I Ever” half a dozen times at least.

This is a 166 page book, with 226 chapters.  There are dialogues, lists and statistics – as well as actions and events conveyed with bristling energy and an economy that would have made Hemingway feel over-dressed.  Am I peculiar for enjoying blank space on the page?  (I admit I have a love for under-visited museums, for breathing space.  I am a resident of Tokyo, and weary of crowds.)

Mary Robison, it seems to me, has found an extraordinarily fun and skillful way to tell a story – in hundreds of separate fragments – and I am surprised she doesn’t have more imitators.  (I admit I’ve tried hard repeatedly to imitate her.  But what she makes seem effortless and natural – is not easy in the least.)  She’s found a way to be a “minimalist” – and say everything.  All the action, all the scenery, all the piped in music, all the flickers at the edge of the mind.  It’s artistic and thought provoking and innovative – but most of all it’s fun, it works, and it’s several steps closer than most fiction gets to conveying how life really feels.

“Impossible to put down” said Oprah's magazine, but I couldn’t bear to read this book in a sitting.  Of course not.  I’d waited a decade for it.  I read with exaggerated slowness, rereading several times before allowing myself to continue, as if it were a collection of Japanese poems from the eighth century, each fragment worthy of deep and sustained attention.  This might be a fun book to “fly through”, but I found going very slowly was also very wonderful.  There is no doubt Robison is a perfectionist – there’s not a punctuation work or phrase or clearing of the throat that seem unintentional. 

Mary Robison deserves to be commended for this marvelous book – though I admit I wish that she could work a little faster.

Why Must You Write About Such Shameful Things?

(from Idleness, Bangkok section)

1. family hotel

Bangkok’s Malaysia Hotel: sex tourists and sex maniacs, dope fiends and dealers, whores of every stripe, and – Scandinavian families.  Always.

The restaurant at the Malaysia Hotel at midnight is like a porn convention double-booked with a twelve-step meeting.  And, there in the corner, is a beaming blonde family, rattling on in Swedish, the braless mother, the beer-drinking father, and two teenaged children getting their first look at the world.

What guidebook sends them here, year after year?  Or – is this some part of Scandinavian culture I just don’t know about?

I imagine the Mom and Dad, home at the end of the day in Stockholm, discussing the kids, “Olof is fourteen now.  And Pia will soon be thirteen.  Isn’t it time we introduced them to elderly queers in white spandex shorts and busty transgendered hookers?”

2. giant

The immensely tall Swiss man with the long blonde ringlets would like me to know that he is, in fact, a giant.  Not just figuratively.  Officially.

“Anything over six foot six is a giant.  I am six foot seven and a half.”  Not only that, he’s kicked his smack habit and possesses a sizable inheritance. 

He’s 45 or so, goes to the sauna every day, drinks beer, smokes pot, and gets laid about every twenty minutes.

It’s good to be a giant.

3. excuse me

I’m breakfasting with the giant and he says, “Oh, there’s my dealer.  Just a minute.”  He circles the pool a few times, then sits back down in a huff.

“Well!  If he didn’t go into the ladies toilet it’d be a lot easier to follow him inconspicuously, wouldn’t it!”

4.

The orange-haired queen who delivers room service has let the giant know that, for him, all services are available and free of charge.

The giant, for his part, enjoys wearing floppy faded old blue shorts and watching everyone at poolside freak, then attempt to guesstimate – if he’s that tall, and it goes that far down his leg. . .

It is conceivable that I, too, have a wistful puppy-begging-at-the-table type look on my face as well.

“Sorry, I’m as bad as any gay guy.  Worse, maybe.”

“Shallow as a birdbath,” says the giant, with a grin.

5. the voyeur

An update on the mad voyeur: he is still there, as he has been for more than a decade now, his gaze fixed upon the pool at the Malaysia Hotel.  His cloud of white hair and coke bottle glasses remain immobile, and he continues to stare, no matter how many newcomers stick out their tongues, or flip the bird, or even shake their fists at him.

Nowadays, the mad voyeur’s thing is giving shows.  (Is it true that all voyeurs dream of being exhibitionists, of possessing, for themselves, the same great force that smites them when they catch a glimpse of flesh?)

The mad voyeur hires two young men and leaves the curtains open.  The young men strip down, the voyeur positions them beside the window, and places between them, on the windowsill, a can of soda with a bendable straw. 

He sucks one young man’s cock, has a sip of soda, sucks the other.

This happens more or less every day in the window with the best view of the pool at the Malaysia Hotel.

6.

“Why must you write about such shameful things?” decent people have asked me, again and again, through the years.

I thought I ought to have an answer printed on a card, which I could then pass out.  Think of how convenient it would be at family events!

There are many reasons. 

Firmly in the lead, however, is:

“Because I have an abiding interest in what is actually going on.” 

7.

The trouble with going to bed mindful at sober at 10:30 pm is that I wake up at 3, boy-scout-ready to volunteer for any depravity whatsoever.

I guess I should be grateful that there’s virtually no sin available at this hour.

Though I suppose I could order something deep-fried from room service.

8.

In my opinion, it’s amazing that Bangkok manages to have any gay sex-for-sale industry at all.  Little wonder that its public face is pretty much confined to stubby Soi Twilight.

You’ve got to figure – it’s a totally different scene than heterosexuality.  Most everyone is obsessed with giving it away for free every chance they get.

Do the math.  Thousands of horny guys have flown thousands of miles, and spent thousands of dollars, to come have sex.  If they don’t succeed at least six times a day – note the pharmacies on every corner – they are going to feel cheated, deprived, and upset.  Every hotel in Bangkok is full of these sour-faced queens – fussy because they only got fucked twice today.

Even if you’re only average, you’ve got to figure – the place is full of addicts, with quotas to maintain.

9.

Being queer, it seems to me, is a profoundly anti-capitalist activity.  It’s one crazed worldwide queer potlatch: everybody just giving it away.

10.

Someday gay men may succeed in convincing straight men to please -- let us take care of that problem for you.

(It should be noted that millennia of concentrated effort have failed, as yet, to yield this goal.  Though we have convinced more or less everyone to worry about their abs and put gel in their hair.)

Should we ever succeed, it is likely that the economy of Thailand would be destroyed.  Followed by that of the world.

Governments would no doubt intervene against this crucial act of insubordination, the gravest since Gandhi marched to the coast and demonstrated that the ocean is full of free salt. 

The Life of a Stenographer

This state: when abruptly I find myself at ease with everything, as though I were receiving cosmic dictation; when it appears that everything has been prepared and I am merely the happy-go-lucky stenographer.

In this state, I receive messages. Which is nuts. And, when I follow these messages, my life improves. Which is lucky + nuts.

As I stand writing these notes, an orange tabby cat walks up to me, right here on the corner of a busy city block in Shinjuku. The orange cat sits on his back paws and stares right into me.

Because I wish to be sane -- which is perhaps a mistake -- I stop just shy of interrogating the cat.

Note:

about Idleness


Every day I write notes on cards and hope that they will turn into something, pull together, et cetera. But then I read Sei Shonagon, or Thoreau’s journal, or my master Kenko, and I find that I prefer notes “unassembled” or just barely. Of course, the result, “a miscellany” (which is called zuihuitsu in Japanese) is hardly recognized as a legitimate form nowadays. But maybe it is enough for me. And I hope very much that you, too, will find these pieces fun to read.

Do Not Seek Help

Do Not Seek Help.

(from Idleness, Tokyo section)

“What a strange, demented feeling it gives me when I realize I have spent whole days before this inkstone, with nothing better to do, jotting down at random whatever nonsensical thoughts entered my head.”

-- Kenko, Essays in Idleness

1. Now?

Yes, accepting that there will be many more years of thankless labor and obscurity – before I fail decisively, that I will die tragically, or endure a long and pathetic old age, that my true friends will not be found, and everyone else will gradually abandon me -- keeping all this in mind – what would I like to do now?

                                                                                             

2.

Robin Gibb, is now any time to be dying? 

That which is so often disdained -- and seems to me uncommonly human, so very much like living: the falsetto.

3. Tokyo

To say that Tokyo is inhuman – is accurate but not particularly useful.  You may as well complain that clouds are inhuman, just because we can’t sit on them.  You may as well complain to what’s left of the reefs.

I cannot say what’s going on.  (Of course not.  It was not intended that I should understand.) 

Nonetheless, I have my theories.  These seven-story televisions, for example, which cover entire sides of buildings outside Shibuya station –

Could it be that someone is trying to flag down God?

4.

Do not seek help.  I recognize this is at variance to what is most commonly said.  That fact is: the humiliation and bother of asking for help far outweigh what small help is gained.

People are busy.  People are horrendously important.  It is best for one’s spirit and dignity to not confront these facts too directly.

In the end, only those people who understand will be of help.  And it is not possible to prod people into understanding.  You would think it would be possible.  It is not. 

4b.

Another way of saying this might be: seek professional help.  Seek ONLY professional help.

Of course, it may not be any good either.  But at least you pay dearly for it and it appears at the time noted on the card.

5. Highball in a Can.

Shin and Tetsuya, drunk in the smoking room at the baths, drink highball in a can from the vending machine, and slide in and out of their powder blue robes.

Shin has clearly undergone a few calamities – but who hasn’t by the age of 35?  Anyway, he’s still that most precious of bathhouse commodities: cute.

Tetsuya is 45, sells wig for a living, and is afraid his life is over because he’s getting old, and wig business is down, and also because he has a very, very small penis.  He opens his robe and shows it to me.  “He has a clitoris,” says Shin, very helpfully.

Tetsuya nods sadly down on it. 

6.

Insanity is no obstacle to close personal relationships.

Actually, it helps.

7.

It is not possible to prod people into understanding.  At best you might trip them in exactly the right way so that they fall upon the curb and break their nose so that, while recuperating in the hospital, they might meet a nurse who might (or might not) say something revealing.

You can trip folks if you like, but the nurse is not in your employ.

8.

Attempts at immediate pain relief almost always make everything drastically worse. 

Such attempts are nearly unavoidable.

Consider yourself warned.

9.

It is no wonder that Tokyo cherishes promiscuity.  The cherry trees, the chrysanthemum exhibition, and fucking around are pretty much all the nature we have left. 

10. Misery T-shirt

This state: when the suffering of strangers on the train is so evident that it might as well be emblazoned on the front of their shirts.

Forever Disappointed. . . or     My Death is Well Underway. . . or     Alcoholic Grapefruit Soda is My Last Remaining Pleasure. . .

The solid cloud of misery around people on the train, like sickly sweet perfume in an elevator.

It is instructive and gruesome to contemplate: how many people experience almost no happiness whatsoever.    

11.

What can be cobbled together by trusting in complete nonsense?  (What else have I been doing, my entire life?)

12. Function

If I manage, in this process, to note down a few words that serve as consolation and good company to those well-advanced in despair, so that we may indefinitely postpone offing ourselves, then it could be said that this became, in spite of itself, a useful text.

13.

After a mile of shotengai, a dozen blocks of the crowded covered shopping street, he happened to turn his head and see the temple, like a great brown bird with wings outstretched, and was so shocked he actually spoke out loud to it, What are you doing here?

The temple said, I’ve been sitting here for seven hundred years.  The rest just came along.

14.

Doing the next right thing, the next thing on the list, regardless of how one feels about it, is often correct.

15. Follow Through

I’ve never been much good at completing projects.  This has very likely impeded whatever small chance I had for success. 

It is probably also the reason why I still haven’t ever quite gotten around to killing myself.

Therefore it may be said that there are real advantages to being “weak at execution”.

16. Anyway

Many years ago I used to hang around a gay long-distance trucker from Castle Rock who, though not by nature much given to reassurance, would say,

Man, you’re here anyway – you might as well see how it turns out.

17. Bucket

It is extremely unlikely that anything worthwhile can be accomplished without checking in regularly with Fernando Pessoa, who had this to say, on the fifth of April, 1920, to his on-again, off-again love Ophelia Queiroz.

So long: I’m going to lay my head down in a bucket, to relax my mind.  That’s what all great men do, at least all great men who have: 1) a mind, 2) a head, 3) a bucket in which to stick their head.

The Party Organizer

Bangkok, 2012

Recently I had the opportunity to share breakfast with one of the most desirable men in Bangkok.  As a gay man, there are two ways to have one’s popularity more or less guaranteed.  One is to have a large penis.  The other is to possess the means and willingness to pay for drugs – not only for oneself, but also for one’s friends. One’s no doubt numerous friends.  This gentleman was one of those enviable few who possess both advantages. 

I assure you I did nothing to merit this grace.  The French musclemen seated nearby shot me jealous looks. 

I do not doubt this stellar gentleman received no fewer than a hundred messages on grindr and gayromeo, on gaydar and recon, while we sat together savoring our coffee and carrot banana muffins.

Our conversation, unfortunately, will not be of interest to anyone.  First, because it is one of the very most common conversations.  Second, because it regards topics that all decent people have agreed to pretend do not exist.

Nowadays, being gay is about getting a gay marriage – and outfitting a home in style.  Straight people have recently decided we are acceptable.  We wouldn’t want them to change their minds now.  Tiptoes everyone!  Assimilate and consume, that is the theme.  The goal is to be tasteful at great expense.

We’ve left our messy and embarrassing past behind us.  Can you remember?  We were homosexuals then.  All that is finished.

Promiscuity is passé, as the editor of a gay spirituality magazine announced to me.  So, too, presumably, are blue jeans, which everyone is wearing -- and shoving down to their ankles at damn near every opportunity.

Drugs, as everyone knows, are BAD, which is why they have been universally abandoned, like white sugar, beef, cigarettes, and television.

Therefore, anything I write is guaranteed to be both uninteresting and unacceptable.  However, just as birds need nests and party boys require tabs of ecstasy – I have a compulsion to write essays.  I have a quota, understand.  Therefore, I will relate our conversation even though it will not be interesting and later everyone will be compelled to pretend they heard and know nothing.

My interlocutor, as you can imagine, was of the cream of Thai society, one of the very best families.  (Oh, to inherit both money AND large genitals – surely this man’s deeds in his past life were extraordinary.  I would rush into a burning building tonight if I were guaranteed to emerge thus outfitted and equipped!)

The face of this gentleman – one of the most desirable in Bangkok – was lightly pockmarked.  His hair was thinning.  He was 45 at least.  Still, he no doubt took some consolation in knowing that the entire city was willing to do damn near anything to get into his pants.  And his medicine cabinet.

The gentleman’s conversation, with exquisite tact and courtesy, was hovering around the fact that I was nowhere near good enough for him.  This was blessedly unnecessary.  I no more expected to be his consort than Justin Bieber’s.  Nonetheless, I did not wish to interrupt his train of thought.  I was glad just to be near him.

He was explaining that he was not available, not at any time in the future and, above all, not this coming weekend.  He was in charge of a party.  “I am the party organizer,” he said.  “Everyone says I am the best.”  He was an acknowledged authority on the best way to have a party.  He was the expert. 

The first thing to consider was the number of guests.  The number must never be even – because then guys just couple off and head to the corners to fuck.  Mixing requires an odd number.  Three is the minimum number – but, how boring is that?  Nine, it is well-known, is too many.  People steal, he explained.  Even people you think would never steal.

Thus, there would be seven people at his party.  Four Thai and three farang.  If he had his way, he admitted, there would be more farang – but his friend preferred Thais and the party was at his house.  He had his own pool.

It would be a magnificent party and he would arrange everything because he was the expert.  The trouble was it was very expensive.  (There was no question but that he would pay for everything.  And that whatever outlay was required was perfectly insignificant to him.  Still, he wished for me to know the details of his munificence.)

He knew everyone already, of course.  He would select, from his hundreds of acquaintances, the very best.  The men, however, did not know each other.  Therefore an icebreaker was required.  Half a tab of ecstasy would do the trick.  But E was appallingly expensive now.  At least a thousand baht a tab.  So, imagine, he’d already spent 4000 baht and the party had just started.

Then there was the main event – the ice.  He’d need two bags.  Actually he’d buy a third and keep it in his car.  In case the party went on long.  Which is the tendency with meth, after all – to go on and on and on.

To come down from the meth, they’d need GHB, at least 200ml, which would mean having enough for this party and the next few special occasions.

GHB, he said, was one of his very favorite drugs.  It was perhaps his personal favorite.  Indeed, I could hear the fondness in his voice, as though he spoke of a beloved grandparent.  The trouble with GHB, he said, was that you had to be a little bit careful, because you could very easily kill yourself.

The first time he did GHB he was getting fucked by two studs in his personal sling.  (He had it imported specially, he said.  It cost a fortune!)  He had a little and oh it was heaven, but then one of the tops poured a little more directly into his mouth.  He didn’t measure or anything, he just said, That looks like enough.

For a few minutes it was wonderful, but then it was like a tornado inside me!  He locked himself into the bathroom and puked and shit, both ends going nonstop.  Because of his medical training (excuse me for not mentioning this before) he knew he could easily die if he lost consciousness and so he kept his eyes pried open with his fingers.

It was one of the worst things that every happened in his life, he said, but, since he didn’t die, he has to say it was great. 

That’s why, when he organizes a party, he always decorates with syringes and makes sure everyone measures.  Not for nothing is he one of the best _____ in Thailand.  As well as the person most to be desired, if you are organizing a party.

At this point the gentleman paused and smiled at me above his coffee.  He waited.  I knew what was expected of me and I obeyed.

“So – these parties of yours?  How does a guy get chosen?  Is there an application process?  Can I interview?  Letters of recommendation?  Admission fees?”

He looked at me pityingly, and with real pleasure. 

I did not qualify.  Of course not. 

These men, I must understand – were exemplary.  They were wealthy and well brought up, they were hung and uncircumcised, fully versatile, charming, downright beautiful.

Taking out his iphone, he showed me their pictures.  He did not exaggerate.  Everyone of them was gorgeous, as well as rich and respectable-looking.  The sort of gay man that gay men want to marry.  And straight people find charming and tasteful.  The absolute right kind of gay.

Breakfast was over.  He had to be going.  He had so many errands to run, so many appointments, so many friends and lovers.  Life can be very busy, especially if you are one of the most desirable men in Bangkok, and have a party to organize.

Meanwhile, I had nothing.  No anxious lovers, no parties to attend, no occupation other than to write about the very most common things, which everyone has agreed to pretend do not exist.

I worried that I might always be one of those negligible persons, who pass beneath notice, awash in the hope that we might be among those permitted to live out, unnoticed and un-chosen, our unimportant lives.  That hope our only luck, our only solace.  That sweet relief. 

Guttersnipe Bookshelf: Wasted World

Rob Hengeveld 
Wasted World: 
How Our Consumption Challenges the Planet

The University of Chicago Press, 2012

If I could choose the next runaway bestseller, the next Tuesdays with Morrie – 206 weeks on the NYTimes bestseller list! – it would be this brilliant and essential book.  That will never happen.  This has got to be one of the least heart-warming books on the planet.  And one of the most important.

I admit I have become fond of books that begin, as this one does, with the statement that the book “is not optimistic in its contents or in its conclusions.”  What a relief.  The author intends to treat me as an adult and tell me the truth.  I’ve grown leery of optimists.  If the firemen arrive while your house is in flames, do you demand that they stop first on your doorstep and tell you that your future is rosy?

We are using up the last of our resources and burying ourselves in waste.  We have very nearly reached the end, and we still go on pretending that nothing is happening, that growth is eternal, that we have, in some hidden pocket, unlimited worlds to squander.

Chapter by chapter, Rob Hengeveld shows what we have done – the exhaustion of resources, the loss of biodiversity, the creation of a world that is ever-more abstract and prone to collapse.  I imagined him sometimes as a cranky uncle, determined to explain everything so that even I (who am a little slow) will understand.  Step by step, process by process, he goes on explaining, not necessarily cheerful, but painstaking and patient. 

The great benefit (even pleasure) of this book is that on nearly every page I found myself thinking, “Yes, I heard about that before, but I did not understand it.”  Hengeveld is extraordinarily gifted at making difficult issues and processes clear and understandable.  I have no math or science background, yet I was able to understand.  Looking at a chapter title like “The Energy and Information Content of Society”, I thought, “What chance have I got?” -- yet he guided me through it and I understood.

Looking back at my notes, I am amazed how much I was able to learn in 300 pages.  It seems as if there are 1500 pages of information.  He makes vast and complicated issues clear and immediate.  For example, although people may be aware that we are running out of oil and water, how many realize that we are running out of phosphorus, of potassium, even helium!  And we cannot live without phosphorus any more than we can live without water.

I have never found such clear and riveting depictions of the loss of freshwater, biodiversity and essential nutrients, of the continents of plastic filling our oceans and the poisons in our air, water and soil.  If you read this book, you will understand why even the change of even a fraction of degree in the Earth’s temperature matters tremendously, why a newly planted forest does not reconstitute an ancient one, why ‘carrying capacity’ is a misleading idea, why an abstract world is increasingly prone to collapse.

If Hengeveld is a “cranky uncle”, always keeping an eye on numbers, processes and proofs, explaining everything step by step, that only makes it more powerful when his descriptions open up into an anguished and utterly informed lament for the Earth, for all the natural and human wonders we are on the verge of losing.  The beauty and emotion startles and convinces, like a cranky uncle who suddenly sings in a sonorous baritone. 

This book, if it receives any attention at all, will be attacked.  Because it shows plainly and vividly that “business as usual” cannot and will not go on.  And that is the very last thing we are willing to hear.  The solutions he proposes are mortifying – but the alternative is to consent to the death of billions.   

The content and conclusions of this book may feel emotionally and psychologically  overwhelming.  Particularly because, when you close its covers, you return to a world where virtually everyone acts as if nothing is going on, as if “business as usual” can go on forever.  If you find your emotions challenging or hard to bear, I warmly recommend that you read Joanna Macy’s Active Hope. 

Although I learned a lot from Bill McKibben’s Eaarth and David W. Orr’s Down to the Wire, I think that Wasted World is now the best overview available of our global environmental situation – also known as “life on Earth”.  I plead with you to read it.