In the Riverside

This is when I realized the US was doomed…

Maybe six years ago I found myself in the Riverside in Chiang Mai, Thailand. It was late. I was tired. Not sleepy tired. Worn out tired. I was doing something that night that I facetiously called, putting the gun to my head and pulling the trigger. Exchanging one pain for another. I thought I’d hit bottom, but the funny thing about life is just when you think you’ve hit your low point, you suddenly feel your stomach in your throat and you’re taking another free fall. There’s never a real bottom, only a series of lows that get deeper and deeper.

But sitting in that bar that night I didn’t know how low I’d gotten…only time would tell me that.

The band was made up of Thais belting out American pop tunes. I can’t remember a single one, though through the haze I do believe I remember something by The Doors. If it wasn’t The Doors, then it should have been. And as they played and sang those Western songs with such energy, not quite nailing the songs and not giving a damn one way or another that they weren’t but putting their own twist on them, I realized that the whole world that I knew was just a sitting duck for Asia. The whole Asian world was young and hot and charged, and the Western world, run by a bunch of old white men in suits, didn’t stand a chance. Young and quick over there, old and stupid over here. It’s only a matter of time.