05/23/19

Living, living, and living. Hardly writing I am. But am I really even living? Sometimes I wonder this. Writing can be living too, though. Yes?

Kuala Lumpur is a fascinating city (I wrote something similar in my last journal). It  seems to me like the melting pot of Asia. Chinese, Malays, and Indians being the predominant ethnicities here. Thais I think make up the majority of the minority. So, it’s sort of a melting pot, but not necessarily to the degree that one might say the United States is. I haven’t seen more destitute and homeless anywhere since leaving the U.S., though. It seems the more developed a country becomes the more poor and homeless, at least in its cities, it produces. And nuts. It produces more nuts too. This is probably an effect of being homeless, penniless, friendless, having to scrounge and beg for change or food, picking out scraps from trash bins, sleeping on a piece of cardboard on a concrete sidewalk beneath an awning, wearing the same filthy articles of clothing everyday. I recall walking along a sidewalk recently and passing a half-crazed looking woman, who nonetheless did not look poorly dressed, only to hear a crash and the smashing of glass bottles shortly after. I turned around to see that she had overturned a trash can into the street. Only a moment later a blue construction helmet flew out of the bushes lining the sidewalk, then out came this woman who simply proceeded to continue sauntering down the sidewalk like nothing unusal happened. There have been others too: the filthy Indian man sitting on the curb shouting at some imaginary figure—I can only imagine obscenities—the guy on the street corner yesterday, bent in half, face down on the concrete with a metal bowl in his outstretched hands; and the types one sees everywhere, sitting with a paper cup, faces passive, expressionless, barely a glimmer of life in their eyes, their bodies sunken into themselves like a torpedoed and sinking ship. This is life in a modern, developed city. Something I saw less of in Bangkok, and and saw none of my entire time in Vietnam.