Memorycemetery

It is interesting to see how, as a rule, our dreams are eclectic, and memories are selective.

Yesterday I thought about chains of days wasted and forgotten. My life reminded me an empty beer can I use as an ash-tray on the balcony. As I smoke, it is steadily fills up with cigarette butts; and so are my days being filled up with spent minutes and wasted hours. Once a cigarette or a day is finished, it’s finished for good and out of my mind. Wasted days and smoked cigarettes also bring me closer to my death. I have read somewhere that every cigarette smoked shortens life for 4 minutes. I guess a day wasted in mundane business and boredom can worth weeks or months.

So I sat on my balcony yesterday in the evening, smoked a cigarette and thought of what can be remembered of the day. I decided to put aside everything what I thought and said, or wanted to say. I wanted just to see what happened. Facts, things, events. What did fill this particular day in my life, one of many? What attracted my attention? So here it is, as the proof of the opening line.

Memories of yesterday:

1. though I live in Thailand for over a year and half now, it still surprises me. On my way to work I witnessed again what I call “a patriotic freeze exercise”. I’m getting off the sky-train and have to run down escalators to take a taxi to work. It’s 8 am, so they start to play Thai national anthem, as they do all around the country. Everybody stops. Now imagine the picture: downtown of a busy megalopolis. Morning rush, just few seconds ago people were running, fighting for being first (there?). A picture similar to that of the start of a popular marathon; many people, everybody runs. Few seconds later, like in a fairy tale about some evil wizard putting on his/her spell, in our case on the whole country, everybody is “frozen’. I really enjoy being in this moment, so I continue to move. I know I’m considered being extremely rude by locals, and my behaviour is offensive…but I can’t resist the little pleasure of being the only one who resisted this minute spell and I make my way between humans transformed into mannequins.. Who cares anyway? I despise to follow any patriotic or national paraphernalia. Spare me from brainwashing, I had enough of it growing up in a country once called USSR in the years before it collapsed. 

2. crocodiles loose. As soon as I arrive to work, I have a coffee, my morning cigarette and newspaper to start my day. In the paper I read about 38 crocodiles escaped from one of the crocodile farms with floods. They are massive, aggressive and hungry. Police shot dead 10 of them so far, 28 are still on loose in a densely populated area. Residents were alerted. So far there are no victims yet. “Bangkok Post” will follow up the story.

It grasped my imagination. I was thinking about it all day long. I couldn’t wait until tomorrow’s update. I switch on TV back home, but there’s nothing about crocodiles. They go on forever about the steadily improving health of the king: he is not in a good health, as he is very old: going to be 80 years old in a month, 61 of which he  is ruling the country. Everybody is mad about their king. Every Monday all country wears yellow to show their love for the king, who was born on Monday, a “yellow” day. He is a musician, photographer, painter and inventor, and a Renaissance man. He cares about people. His portraits are everywhere. Everybody loves him and worries about him. So I’ll cut my irony short: there’s nothing about crocodiles on tele, they are talking just about the free taxi and boat  rides to hospital for thousands of his well wishers and after a while there’s an update on football scores in English premiere league.

I still was thinking about those crocodiles when I decided go to sleep. It’s very late, well past 4 in the morning…yet another night spent behind my laptop… but before I went out to the balcony for the last cigarette, and this is what I saw:

3. two middle aged women from the house opposite, wrapped in custom Thai pieces of clothes, a traditional thing to wear for women at home: just a sheet of matter they’ll spool around themselves, nothing else. It’s 4 am, let me remind you. The street is absolutely empty, everything and everybody sleeps. One of the women holds a flashlight, as it’s still very dark. Another starts to climb a tree nearby the house. Not something you would expect from a respectable woman in her early 50’s at this time of night. I am curious. Unfortunately I cough. The women turned around, they see me a narrow little street (soi) across on the balcony of my second floor; the woman quickly jumps from the tree and they retire back to the house. So I go to sleep.

I fall asleep at once, and see a dream. It could be a perfect plot for the movie… I see quiet streets lined with palms, washed in a bright sun. The streets are nearly empty (as they say in ”A passage to India” old movie, “in such a heat, outside are only mad dogs and Englishman”). There’s a patrol pickup cruising the streets though: a heroic police officer in funky uniform with macho mustaches and in big metal framed shades is on duty, patrolling his area. Suddenly he sees crocodiles crawling under the fence and into a school yard. He hits the brakes; he’s out of the car, his trusted gun is in his hand. Bang! Boom! Bang!- he manages to shoot maybe a dozen of them (1 shot-1 dead), but ran out of bullets. So he has to employ his martial skills and doing just fine in the beginning, thai boxing at it’s finesse of the skill …but crocodiles are many and he is alone; one of the crocodiles swallowed his walkie-talkie and another one cut through the telephone and power supply cables with its jaws. Of course, in the dream they escaped not from a crocodile farm, but from a secret CIA lab experimenting with implanting computers into their brains, as crocodile’s nervous system is primitive comparing to that of primates…easier to install and manipulate…so crocodiles are very intelligent, running on 8 super-processors of new generation, latest top secret military development, each. (Even in my dream I am jealous…I think how it could be nice to put those into my old laptop and what could I do with THAT processing power… ). The  crocodiles also developed some revolutionary means of communication, wi-fi enabled telepathy.  Shortly they close a circle around our hero. The policeman is stuck on the roof of his patrol car, surrounded by reptiles… A beautiful nurse, (should be a teacher, really, but nurse in my dream somehow) watches his ordeal from a window.  His death is inevitable. Crocodiles decided to make a live ladder and feast on him. they already started to arrange their bodies in an elegant acrobatic figure. Suddenly the national anthem starts to play. Crocodiles freeze. The beautiful nurse runs out of the building and quickly switches all the crocodiles off, one by one. They have a button on/off apparently, to save their accumulator empowered super duper multi processor brain’s  charge. And then I wake up.

Actually I wanted to write about a different subject: something about global memories and time discourse. Alas, it looks like I can’t write without slipping into murky metaphysics…I came across a beautiful quote and wanted to start from it, a sure way to don’t forget it, and also built up this exercise on somebody’s else authority ;).  But I think I can finish this post with it as well, leaving you all alone with the first sketch of the unbuilt labyrinth of my thoughts, memories and reasons. Do with it what you like.

“Time is but the stream I go a-fishing in. I drink at it; but while I drink I see the sandy bottom and detect how shallow it is. Its thin current slides away, but eternity remains. I would drink deeper; fish in the sky, whose bottom is pebbly with stars.” Henry David Thoreau, Walden Pond.

Boris Kislitsin

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