The spirit of a place
Maybe it’s the wind, I don’t know. Maybe it’s the wind blowing night and day, and living in a wooden house and drinking absurd amounts of coffee and this pleasure at being alone with my over-caffeinated thoughts. Whatever it is, it’s been making me think a lot about San Francisco recently.
I’m not missing my life in San Francisco but the city itself. In other words, this homesick feeling that has been rising in me is not for anything that belongs to a time, only to a place. I may have had some very dark days in the eight years I lived there but at the base of it all, I trusted San Francisco. I still trust that city like one might trust family. It protected and comforted me, and never once betrayed me, turned its back on me, or shut me out like Los Angeles did.
Thinking about how San Francisco offers unconditional love to the weird, the lost and the generally maladjusted has made me think – for obvious reasons – about Nong Khai. This town has some strong similarities to San Francisco – they are both pretty, small cities on the edge of the country, and they are both the last stop for people who haven’t quite managed to follow through with the life they were expected to lead. Both cities are outposts for outcasts.
John – the grad student who’s studying the retirement community in this area – said that one of the most pointed comments he’s heard about Udon Thani and by extension Nong Khai was on an Internet message board. It was a piece of advice that went something like: go spend a few years in Pattaya or Phuket and have fun, then come to Udon to die.
It makes me wonder what it is about the spirit of a place that draws people there to die, either literally or metaphorically (as in: dying into the next phase of one’s life). I also wonder if this is why I’ve had a freaked out paranoid panic a few times here – admittedly while drunk and under extreme emotional duress – that everyone in this town is already dead and that it is not a town but Purgatory.
Flashbacks aside, there’s definitely a feeling here that is sometimes horrible and sometimes fascinating, that everyone in this place is trying desperately to figure out or find something very important so they can move on to the next level, mostly without consciously knowing that’s what they’re doing. Interestingly, I felt the same thing many times in San Francisco but never in Los Angeles. People in Los Angeles did seem to be searching on an unconscious/soul level but in a useless, frustrated way that did not allow for growth; it felt like millions of people simultaneously looking for the right thing in the wrong place.
I think I am growing to trust Nong Khai. Not only have there been more frequent stretches of feeling content to just be, like how I felt when I lived in San Francisco, but also I’ve found myself relying more on the place itself than the people in it. Most telling, I do not feel lonely or shut out when I am alone. I feel like I am happy to keep company with the city itself, much like how I felt in San Francisco, that it is a dear friend. So yeah, it could just be the wind making me feel this way, but somehow I doubt it.
ps: ok, ok – an email from Mr J Ringhoff of California, USA reminded me of the real reason I miss San Francisco…”i have eaten nothing in the past 24 hours but burritos. beautiful northern california taqueria style burritos with lettuce, steamed tortillas and all the deliciousness imaginable. the last one i ate was in SF on valencia and i believe 18th st. sooooo good. and all the places i’ve got them have had the best tortilla chips on the side and that kick ass green sauce of magic.” Sigh. Green sauce of magic.
Tags: Homesickness, Nong Khai, Phitsanulok, San Francisco, Thailand
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