There is something debilitating about Khao San Road, something that chews on your spirit, refracts your perspective, refutes morality, and keeps you drinking until you are sufficiently sedated to not let it bother you. The sticky heat is oppressive. The streets are saturated with sexuality, eyes darting between this skin and that skin, some silky and some sweaty, but always there, always everywhere. What should shock you with revolt or at least turn your stomach with unease transforms to the everday mundane. 80 year old German, Australian, American, Canadian (too diverse to stereotype) sleazy, lewd oldtimers with sad members hidden under folds of pasty fat walk proudly with 16, 17, maybe 20 year old girls too young to know better. Girls who, like us all, are looking for something better, something bigger in life.

You see them at the airport too. Their thin arms hung around the double-chinned necks of their two-generations-ahead boyfriends. I wondered where they were going, these couples. If such relationships could actually survive outside of surrealistic Bangkok. If love in any case can exist as something separate outside of the environment where it first grew. I’ve been thinking about that a lot lately.

Well, it is Friday and my first five days, the workweek, has already gone by in this giant metropolis. Bobby and I leave at 6 p.m. on an overnight bus which will - and we don’t know exactly how - drop us off tomorrow morning on the sandy tourist island of Ko Pan Ngan. We are leaving Khao San Road, this miserable vaccuum of spirit. Thank god.

Two days ago was Bobby’s 24th birthday which we predictably enough celebrated in drunken debauchery; a bar-hopping, pleasure seeking treasure hunt where booty was exactly that. In short, Bobbo would get faded and pretty girls from the world over would congratulate him with kisses on the cheek for surviving so close to a quarter century. As great pirates always do, we succeeded and this photo of Bobby with eight icelandic girls staring enamored into his Nordic blue eyes should be proof enough.

As was Thursday morning’s hangover - a perverse sort of bond between us - mutual suffering on the scale of prisoners of war, only that the torture was self-inflicted. I didn’t know how best to combat the throbbing techno beats going on in my head but a triple shot americano didn’t do the trick. I walked back to our hotel, my hands shaking uncontrollably, feeling like a crack addict, only to be somewhat relieved that Bobby and Kevin were all to evidently in equally dire condition. The cure was obvious. We needed to get the fuck off Khao San Road, but to do so would require effort of epic proportions.

Against all odds, we made it. We got out. The few, the lucky. And what we found was a bright beautiful world with royal blue skies, clouds carved by artists, a refreshing breeze to cool our rum-saturated sweat. We found a city that didn’t necessarily reek of sewer, run on vice and addiction. We found a city that was a city. With proper urban planning. A transnational megatropolis with businessmen and women of all shades and colors. And we found a Mexican restaurant: El Gordo’s, which elicited a synchronized "holy shit" from us all. We cheered, we hugged, we danced around in the street. Burritos could be ours.

"Funny," Bobby pointed out, "that it’s not American food that reminds us of back home, but Mexican." He’s so right. I have never - or at least so very very rarely - yearned for a hamburger while traveling. But give me a good burrito, give me even a half-assed attempt at guacamole, and I won’t be able to properly behave myself. Never have I experienced such gastrointestinal pleasure as when Emily and I found an all you can eat Mexican buffet in Cape Town, South Africa. I’m sure it wasn’t, but I remember it as the best meal I’ve ever had in my life.

El Gordo’s turned out to be a.) very expensive and b.) closed, but as we glanced over the menu the owner came out, a graying Thai-Chinese man who winked as he talked and had an immediately endearing personality. We joked around the four of us for some time. "El Gordo my son, very big boy, is American," he explained to us. "Ah, that sucks," was my reply, but he didn’t seem to harbor any ill will towards us Yankees. In fact, surprisingly the only "anti-american" sentiment I’ve sensed at all has been in conversations with other Americans which usually start with the awkward embarassment of ‘I’m the kind of American who wants to meet other Americans who don’t like being American’ disclaimer. After that’s established, it follows with the typically American loud garble that eventually turns to: ’so, like who’s up in the Lakers series?’

From El Gordo’s we took a quick wide-eyed and daylight stroll through Bangkok’s infamous Patpong district. (infamous for the genital ejection of pingpong balls, bananas - 15 feet they say, and inhalation of cigarette smoke - 3 cigarettes) And then to - perhaps the very antithesis of Patpong - the soothing green lawns and manmade lakes of Lumphini Park, named after the Buddha’s legendary birthplace in southern Nepal. Lumphini Park draws immediate comparison to Manhattan’s Central Park - a soothing refuge where, almost magically, the molestations of air and noise pollution is exiled by a well protected frontier of flora and fauna. Only the giant sky scapers and their wavy reflections in the water remind you of the chaos you’re hiding from.

I experienced something nearing spirituality while in Lumphini Park, the sort of self-realization that can only occur in such strong contrast as a peaceful park in a sinful city. While Kevin and Bobby tried to nap away the still present hangover on a shaded hill sloping down to the lake, I put on my headphones and scanned the iPod for what would fit best. Started with Nightmares on Wax but that wasn’t doing the trick. Then Radiohead, but after High and Dry I couldn’t find another song that seemed to fit my mood, my thoughts. Finally Nick Drake, a mix of songs - the best ones - from Bryter Layter and Pink Moon. A calm of content took over me, a feeling that has been absent from my life for far too long now. It’s a feeling that is impossible to put into words. But I hope that you know what I’m trying to describe.

It’s a completely emotional experience, not rational at all, but you trick yourself into thinking that you’ve rationalized your life, that you’ve come up with the answer, that it all makes sense now. A cruel illusion, because once the feeling is gone, so is the sensibility and you end up pecking away on your laptop trying to capture, trying to articulate, how you solved all the world’s problems in your head, but all that comes out is diarrheic banter. Little words, strung together, trying so hard and failing so miserably to describe what it is to be in Lumphini Park, walking barefoot as all the athletic runners streak by you in a blurred race to nowhere, and you are there walking, step by step, mud squeezing between your toes, listening to Nick Drake.

I did the circuit, made it back to Kevin and Bobby where we sat staring off in silent franternity. It was past six o’ clock already and a comfortable cool took the air. Then, as we headed back to the sky train ("dude, this is just like BART," quipped Bobby) we passed one of the most unbelievable displays of public civic life I have ever encountered. Hundreds - maybe a thousand or even more - of cosmpolitan Bangkokians clad in pirated name brand lycra were moving in eerie synchronicity to an aerobics class given by one small statured woman with perfect proportions and graceful self-confidence as she instructed the throngs of weight-watchers into their next aerobic sequence. It was eerie because this one small woman commanded the attention of so many people on a Mao or Hitler-like scale. When you see so many hundreds of individuals following the command of one person you can’t help but be initially skeptical of some sort of Fascist plot. We felt bad as we took countless pictures of the spectacle.

Then, wanting Kevin to take this picture of me as supreme emperor of Bangkok, I asked Bobby to hold on to my book. Which he did briefly and then he set it down on the ground to take more pictures of the bouncing aerobics enthusiasts. And there went my book forever. It was perhaps an appropriate lesson in non-attachement at a park named after Buddha’s birthplace, but nothing is so frustrating to me as starting a book and not being able to finish it. Vinelands by Thomas Pynchon was the book and I was just getting into it, just finally adapting to his quirky style and imaginative "could this really ever happen" take on life and his "do people like this really exist" characters. But if the Buddha says this is not the time, well … I suppose I will wait.

So this morning, after waking up at 7 a.m. with pangs of hunger I took a post-digestive detour into a used English language bookstore and chanted my ‘about to enter a bookstore mantra’ which goes: "will not buy more than one book, will not buy more than one book, will not buy more than one book."

I am still swayed by the very very incorrect assumption that buying books ineveitably means I will read those books. Sadly - even after so many trips to the university and public libraries - I have undoubtedly bought more books in my lifetime than I have read. This morning I am sure will only add to the imbalance. Here is what I bought and how much I paid. (40 baht = 1 dollar)

• Amerika by Franz Kafka - 150 baht
• A Primer of Jungian Psychology by Calvin S. Hall and Vernon J. Nordby - 120 baht
• Jailbird by Kurt Vonnegut - 150 baht
• The Labyrinth of Solitude by Octavio Paz (which I’ve already read most of but have always wanted to finish) - 200 baht

I think I’ll start with Jailbird. In fact, I think I’ll start right now.