Nong`s warm embrace

Queen`s Valley in Joshua Tree National Park
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USA, San Diego, 02-10-2002.

I`m lying on my bed in the small little cubicle that is my room in the Golden West Hotel trying hard to shut out all the noices that come from the other rooms, the corridor and even from the lobby downstairs,

who by now have upgraded from verbally slashing it out to physically settling their differences

No big surprise, this is a rockbottom hotel used by the local Social Services to house the homeless of San Diego. I can hear my neighbors making out, verbally slashing it out over drug related problems and drunk screaming outside in the corridor and the lobby.

I`ve been in worse places and probably will on this trip. I plan to cycle around California for a couple of months, get some fresh air, get some good excersize, visit some national parks and sleep mostly in the wilderness in my one-person tent.

A plan that took hold inside my skull a few years back when I first came to San Diego and cycled down the Baja.

reciting the Four Noble Truths of Lord Buddha inside my mind I manage to close out all rowdy excistence of the Golden West Hotel and turn inward to the gray mass that is my mind, back to Chuiming, the chinese lady I was dating last summer, her obsession with pot which got me once again addicted to Mary Jane, back to my job as a bicycle messenger cycling all day from one end of the city to the other on a mad asignment of picking up packages and delivering them.

Back to the evenings on Leidseplein selling my Mandala games that brought in the money to pay for this trip, where I met Chuiming who did her caricature thing there.

I allow my mind to go back even further, back to Thailand, back to Nong with whom I have two children, and back to Jamie, her brother who I first met in that rotten police holding cell where I got myself locked up for a full month over a fighting charge.

It was he and his sister who taught me all there is to know about Lord Buddha, the greatest of mankind. It was them that showed me the ways of Mauy Thay, thaught me to speak Thai.

When I get home from this trip I`ll buy myself a ticket to Krung Thep/Bangkok and visit them again.

despite the drunk couple in the room next to mine who by now have upgraded from verbally slashing it out to physically settling their differences, my mind drifts off to the sweet oblivion brought about by Morpheus arms dreaming of cold thai beer and the warm embrace of Nong.