It's A Jungle in Here

Someone says we exported this. Did we? Aspiration certainly seems a globally imposed phenomenon. I've heard a few people take it on the cheek like plucky ex-colonials; dutiful apologists for a capitalist system that has been marketed so well, melded so aggressively into a new way of life here where mobile phones can be bought at every ten paces, where the shopkeep's Buddhist shrines are carefully attended with burning incense. The gods of good fortune and shopping share the same realm here and so now we are giving them, these Asians tigers, their due; giving them enough rope to measure how far they can go, as we stand by and maybe mop up a little too. Everyone wins. A cheap cost of living for sensitive ex-pats means nothing. The colonial regretters are side-lined; there is no time to pause or take a breath or to compare the good and bad of change, of history being napalmed, of US reparation myths dissolving as children are still born. Without limbs. Aspiration stands shoulder to shoulder with change and it can if unchecked, unparalelled create an immolating consciousness. As the rains pour, the tail end of weather, the crest of something else, this city is turning into a 24hour building site, feeding the rush for the new.

A joke. What do people in a hurry and the citizens of Moscow have in common? They are both rushin. It got a limited laugh that one, nearly as unfunny as making cracks about revolutionary leaders or, in some countries, royal familes. Maybe that is what is happening. It's too late to stop the trucks carrying tons of cement for new apartment blocks and offices and it's too early for satire.



But it's also useful to remember as we stand by, getting a mouthful of dust, an earful of noise, please don't get misty and wish for shacks and lean to's which are everywhere if you care to really look. While sounding off about the rape of lifestyle it is useful to look at people squatting in gutters swatting at Dengue flies. Those stripey fuckers can kill. That is real and happening for people not far from this expat block. Living with noise and bad air can make you want to garotte, vent anger on some worker hammering concrete at 2.00am but our complaints, our concerns and ultimately our care are mutations from the truth and heart of matter. The apartments we are living in screwed up the neighbourhood before we arrived so we are just the latest in a line of grumpy Farangs who are used to the peace and quiet of somewhere else with different noise. It becomes a homily of sorts. An ivory tower sort of thing. This has happened before and it will happen again.

Everything comes to we who wait.