today in BKK

Soaring towers all around, my feet are weary of the ground that punished them all morning long, the tuktuk drivers – how they thronged – enticing me to take a ride while just today the PM cried when high court rulings sent her sprawling, these mean streets may yet see brawling. I know not the creed or god of any pro-regime death squad that roams about this sweaty place, that waves its flags and yellow kerchief, here the mood is thick with mischief. Roadside stands serve the best food although the seating can be crude, broken stools and shaky tables but the cooks are quick and able, serving up thick beef-broth stew that dribbles down and stains my shoe. Bright possessions dot my room, my heart is clear of dross and gloom, for I now learn to love myself, which trumps dollar, yen, bhat – all wealth. A German maiden helped me hope, encouraged me back up the slope which I had slipped and skidded down, soon vagabond reclaims the crown that he'd abandoned long ago, with ruddiness his cheeks now glow. In Lombok she rejected me, her friendship now is all I see, but that is something I will cherish until such time as I shall perish, liberate of life's blood, face-down in cold and frozen mud. There is a blister on my toe, my pace won't be slowed for I shall wander, taking stock, of this great city, olde Bangkok. Maddening, her headlong pace, who shelters millions in her bosom, what a fierce but gentle race that sprawls from Bearing west to Chit Lom.

© americanifesto / 場黑麥

student uprising in Grigovia

From the capitol city of Grig to even the smallest of hamlets, students enrolled in the Grigovian public schooling systems – some of them merely children – took part over the weekend in often violent protests to draw attention to a number of different issues. While some rose up out of solidarity with Syrian rebels fighting the regime of Bashar al-Assad, others took to the streets to voice their dissatisfaction with capitalism and such poverty and income-inequality as is associated with this unjust and outdated economic system. The youngest protesters, however – they who are most prone to sudden, brutal violence – actively fought various police and even military forces to bring attention to the rising cost of candy and sweets, whose prices have skyrocketed following a local outbreak of the virus nonspecificus willibrandtis, which has destroyed much of the country's reserves of sugar-beets, ruining most of its sugar-beet-derived sweeteners, sweet-makers, starches, and similar smack-a-licious substances.

In a statement posted to youtube and disseminated by hand-printed fliers, the students of Grigovia's vocational-technical colleges declared their allegiance to all other vo-tech student movements around the world, especially to those in Thailand. “We – and our brothers and sisters around the world, especially in Thailand – are dedicated to the free speech, free assembly, and to the propagation and free expression of the various trades, among them woodworking, electrical wiring, and gun-smithing; any government organization that opposes our right to unionize shall not stand long.” Long columns of vo-tech students – recognizable by their red and gold shoulder-patches – marched through the empty streets, or drilled in abandoned lots.

Said Noviembr Chu-Yendt, age 7, from the northern village of Vonya Yellenda, who had traveled to Grig by train, alone, in order to take part in these historic uprisings, “Last night, I ran into some school-mates who were going to join a street-march to highlight the degradation of our national park-lands by foreign companies mining there for rare-earth-metals, but, afterward, we became separated, and so I had to spend the night in a park, which was no so bad, because I brought my father's Soviet-Afghani-War-era Makarov pistol, and all these knives.” The boy opened his knapsack, allowing us a glimpse at what appeared to be a collection of trench-knives dating back to the First World War.

Later that day, we spoke to unemployed former factory forewoman Hana Blastisyennd, a 67-year-old grandmother whom we found manning a street-barricade in front of a Home for Orphans of the Israeli Occupation of Palestine (HOIOP). “When I heard rumors that some teenagers were looting the orphanage of its silver, I erected this barricade to keep the police away while my grandsons went inside to re-capture the stolen goods and to give those damn teenagers a good spanking,” Mrs. Blastisyennd said before stooping to pick up a hissing tear-gas canister, which she promptly threw back into the midst of an approaching phalanx of riot-gear-clad policemen. Pulling an AK-74 assault rifle with a telescoping stock from a floral-print carpetbag resting by her feet, the otherwise-unassuming old woman fired it into the upper windows of a building a few blocks away. Her well-placed shots caused two men who had been hiding there to flee, carrying what appeared to be scope-equipped rifle and a pair of binoculars away with them. Furthermore, the phalanx of cops – which had approached to within a few scant meters of her position – drew back in haste, reforming behind the thick stone walls of a nearby auxiliary citizen's armory. “On any other day, if these policemen had asked nicely to make sure everything was OK within the HOIOP, I would have let them pass in peace, but these pig-dogs are not acting like gentlemen, so fuck them – fuck the police.”

Analysts except the protests to spread before they peter out, hopefully sometime around the harvest festival, in late November.

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