On lifestyle

I had an itchy throttle hand and nowhere in particular to be or to go, so naturally I found myself back in the fetid saltwater swamp from which I ran the day before. Something about it called me back: it was so shocking, so alien that I had not taken any pictures. I needed to photograph and document it, that was the issue.

Back down the road, weaving through pedestrians and livestock, dodging bikes and mopeds and busses going all directions, past fruit stands and grill stands and chop shops, past farms and villas and shrines to the stank of prawn ponds and salt marshes.

Prawn farming, as it's practiced here, is one of the worst looking sports imaginable. Sewage settling bonds are nicer: they stink less, and they aim to purify the water; a prawn farm is an isolated pond that begins with the rank odor of a saltwater swamp and packs on consecutive layers of aquarium rot depending upon how long it's been since the farmer drained the pond back into the bay. Meanwhile, there are little agitators spinning a brown froth, presumably to oxygenate the mess but looking—and smelling—more like a manure spreader on a large-scale farm in Iowa.

Welcome to paradise.

It's enough to make you promise yourself that no matter what, whenever you see shrimp or prawns from Thailand, you will cook the shit out of the suckers. Pun very much intended.

In each block of shrimp ponds is a hut on bamboo stilts that hold it maybe four or five meters above the mire. Each hut is thatched with bamboo—roof, walls, floors. From inside, jaundiced eyes stare from shadows; or maybe they aren't eyes but holes in the walls. Most have a large, screaming red satellite dish for internet or TV or both. At a guess, they have a hole in the floor for sewage, and sit on bare bamboo slats to watch a wall-size plasma television.

It reminded me of some of the places I've seen in Alaska, but without the... call it righteous indignation. Certainly without the governmental support and subsistence.

Driving down the singletrack jetty between murky, dark hovels was certainly not a comfortable experience, but it lacked completely the anger and fear of walking down a street in an Alaskan tribal slum. It might not be impossible, but I don't think such poverty could exist in America: the tide washes in styrofoam bowls and clamshells and little kids pick through the packaging first for food and then for fun.

So here's a bamboo thatched bungalow over a reeking saltwater cesspool full of flotsam and jetsam and worse through which little kids in scraps of cloth grody beyond mention dig for entertainment and nourishment, and here I am on the pearl white Honda scooter, wearing a silver helmet, with a big ol camera dangling from my neck while every head turns to stare at me.

In Alaska, the stares were angry, malevolent, and I guess ultimately carried a resentment or maybe jealousy completely absent in Thailand.

Driving through the Thai countryside, I am the pitiable one who cannot kickstart his bike, who cannot read or write, who does not know how to eat right or drive right; driving down the hand-built jetty, I am the one burdened by lack and loss, the one without country or family and hiding under expensive clothing and equipment while the shadowy figures sit amid all they could ever want.

And that, I guess, is why I couldn't take photos, can't convey the experience into a series of easily digestible bytes. Maybe that's the thing with poverty and the distinction with subsistence—poverty embraces and enforces the sense of injustice and entitlement, declares that one group has something the other group wants and insists that this is as it should be. Subsistence involves neither wealth nor possessions but a sense of well-being or satisfaction; the prawn farmer in the bamboo hut has food, family, entertainment, a sense of place and culture, a means of participating in the market economy without compromising heritage, belief, tradition, or custom. Who cares if the ponds are dirty as long as they pay for the satellite? What matters the Western world when there's family gathered ot cook up a net full of fish? Who needs flashy packaging when there are all sorts of cool whatnots drifting in on the tide—especially when you can't even eat most of the stuff in a big toy box?

When I come in and see poverty, lack, loss, where I interpret my own discomfort with what would be a lack of material well-being, where I feel guilty for what I have, I inflict my own cultural values and biases on an unreceptive and indifferent audience that wouldn't have interest in spitting a prawnshell at me or my hangups. Sure, maybe someone might want to upgrade to my bike, but that's about the only enviable component of my character, and there are a lot of other bikes that are much more exciting, so I'm probably flattering myself to think I have anything to desire.

And this is why I couldn't take photos—anything I shot would seem pathetic and impoverished and desperate because it would be ramed in a Western cultural context in which it should feel guilty or apologetic or somehow lesser, when the reality is just the opposite. Whomever's eyes stare out from the shadows does not want out, the kid picking bits of noodle or whatnot from a styrofoam bowl does not want the new hand-held-electro-super-wireless-blasto, and the Western eye is wallowing in arrogance and false superiority to think otherwise.

Mayhap.

But then again, who am I to say?