To grandpa

And finally I have the time to write again... it's been a hellish couple of months, but that's not what's on my mind right now. Looking forwards, and what in 2 days I'll be 24. 3 years after expectations. 3 years after the initial scheme. I've been foolish to think that others could replace it, that things could just become as what I've heard told or retold, not what I'd lated down for myself all those years ago.

The writing is coming, but I've been afraid again, keeping it all in for the right words to flow out. The right voice, the right sound, the right words. And it is coming, like drops out of a faucet, a drip and a drip at a time. But do I have all that to wait, for the little pool to become something on its own. A little collection of words so right for what I need?

Sometimes, when I'm dead drunk or just feel like starting up at something (you can't see the stars in a city like Bangkok) I lie on the tile floor of my bathroom along the gecko and rat shit and stare up at the cracking ceiling, looking for random patterns that might assemble themselves into something, listening to the rats. I like living in this house, my grandpa's house. I've got to admit that condos are more convenient, I'll give it that, but I can't help but think of grandpa in almost everything I see here. He's cobbled most of it together from bits and pieces, like he does with everything. Plastic pipe canes, industrial sinks for basins, cement ponds to block out the water, lamps that never match, sockets that don't work, and a thousand tools mounted on rotting wood and empty cans with the nails still sticking out. He cobbled together something for his children too, while not having an real significant degrees himself my uncles are all lawyers or doctors, and none are or had to be that damn poor to own pieces of plywood tools, or build their own fans, lamps and tables. And all of a sudden I'm back to being 7 years old, building tables with him in the backyard. The tables we still have at our house. With the pieces of scrap wood left I built myself a box car. I remember hammering tails in the side, and sticking in cans in the bottom. I remember getting into it for the first time and seeing all the jagged nails sticking out which I didn't bother to hammer down cause I was so excited to just be in it, even when at that age I knew it would never move. I'd made something, and I didn't really care that it was just a weird box. Grandpa could've probably made me a box chariot, but he just let me keep it that way working on it until I cut myself with the saw, and perhaps that was all for the best.

Now if I could learn to write like that again, like I built the boxcar, like grandpa does with building whatever he had at hand. Despite the mismatch, or maybe because of the mismatch, I can learn to love the wrong words for everything. Like PVC pipe hand canes, plastic bottle lap shades, and aluminium plate clocks.