Freewheelin’ in S.E.A - Day 20: Subconscious Terrorism

29.10.12

I was driving on a busy city motorway in the not too distant future when all of a sudden a happening occurred. The view of my front windscreen suddenly switched with the rear view, so I could only see what was behind me, not in front. After a few seconds of panicking I felt the impact, my car crashing into another and flipping over. I managed to pull myself out of the wreckage with blood pumping from my badly sliced foot. I phoned my best friend Sav to come and help me, but he was chatting to our old friend Dimitri about Arsenal’s recent poor form, so I had to wait for him. It turned out the car I smashed into was a futuristic police car and the officer was also injured. We were taken to a metallic shell of a room, in what looked to be a surgery, and my foot was stitched up hastily by an automatic needle and thread. A towering, powerful figure entered the room and stood over me as I sat tending to my wounds. He looked like the illusionist Derren Brown, but on a mega dose of steroids and sporting a shaved head. He warned me that what I had endured in the car was just a dummy run for what would be the largest terrorist attack on this future world, and it would soon happen to all the cars at once, causing carnage everywhere. He told me to say no more to the police, or I would suffer his wrath. I was unsure what I could do in order to stop this terrible attack, and he could read my mind, and knew that I was wondering how to save the world. He bought out the police woman, who had a large metal device pinned into her arm and was crying. He looked me in the eye with an evil stare, then as I looked at the police woman the device on her arm aimed at her head and blasted needle after needle into her skull, making a complete mess of her face and killing her almost instantly. I awoke in a cold sweat, scared shitless, buried my head into the soundly sleeping Sarah, thinking I may still be in trouble and then she awoke and calmed me down as I explained what was happening in the other world.

It was only 7.30am, but I had too much on my mind to go back to sleep so I laid there for an hour whilst Sarah snoozed and my tummy turned. I could hear the downstairs restaurant workers clattering around and I could smell the food, so when Sarah came to again and noticed I was still awake she said we could go and get something to eat. It was an all you can eat buffet, so I stuffed my face with an odd array of different dishes, then we returned to our bed where I soon passed out into a food coma. At around 1.30pm, we both awoke and I finally felt rested enough to start my day. We went down to the pool which was empty except for one guy who was with a Thai girl. After a while sunbathing we had a swim, and whilst in the pool I saw the guy smoking what looked to be a bifter. The way he was toking it made me think that it must be, so I went over and asked him if it was weed. He said it wasn’t, but that he did smoke it, so I asked if he could get us some, which he confirmed he could. He said his name was Richard, he was a thirty-something guy from Holland, although he looked more Spanish then Dutch, who had been in Chiang Mai for a few months. He said he could get us a portion for 1000 baht, so I said that’d be great, and he said he’d sort it in a few hours after he’d had ‘a shower, a massage and perhaps some sex’, looking towards the Thai girl who didn’t seem to notice his comment.

By 5pm the sun was getting low, and Richard handed me a cigarette packet that seemed empty as we were heading upstairs to our room. When I got up there I opened it to find a shy amount of compressed weed, probably weighing about a gram and a half. I took it back down to the pool and said that although I appreciate the favour, there was no way that was worth £20. He said that he had bought it for me, so there was nothing he could do. I showed him how much was there and he agreed it wasn’t a great amount, and said he’d try and speak to the guy and get us a bit more. Now the chances are that he probably only paid half of the money I gave him, if that, for this measly bit of turf, but we had to bite the bullet and hope to find a better hook-up in future. I’d been ploughing through cheap cigarettes in the absence of weed, but Sarah doesn’t smoke them, so she was happy to finally have something she could pollute her lungs with. We showered then skinned up, smoking only half before both feeling happily high, then immediately going to complete stage two in the order of stoner living. Eat. We shared a few Thai dishes at the relatively swanky Hotel M, then went and booked an adventure trek for the following day. We strolled the streets looking for a decent bar, stopping at a place called Inter Bar, where there was a covers band churning out classic rock hits with a Thai guy singing. They were pretty tight musically, but the vocals killed it. The singer, a term I use loosely, was hilariously tone deaf and it sounded extremely similar to when the South Park guys do comical Asian impressions. Sarah and I were in fits of giggles as they did ‘Living on a Prayer’, ‘Smoke on the Water’, ‘Sweet Child of Mine’ and even Franz Ferdinand’s ‘Take me out’, to muted applause from the patrons of the place. After a couple of drinks, the band had finished and almost immediately another band started, you can’t beat that kind of efficiency, however they sounded worse that the guys before them so we decided to make like a rubber ball, and bounce.

We grabbed a bottle of water and some crisps from one of the ten million 7 Eleven’s that occupied the one mile radius, then headed home for a smoke on our balcony. There was a French girl sitting opposite us, having a Skype chat in her native tongue, so I pretended to Sarah that we were watching the French Big Brother on TV and that the girl was in the diary room complaining. I made up translations of everything she said, to make sense of my suggestion and we sat there laughing until the scented candle was burnt out. We returned to our chamber and laid silently in the darkness, awaiting the return of light. Goodnight.