Experience as Creative Alchemy.

How Travel Can Fuel Creative Transformation.

This week’s Bluezone is the 20th(!) weekly edition of this newsletter, if you’ve been here a while or just joined, thank you for reading.

This week features a piece of auto-fiction, inspired by Jack Kerouac’s ‘On The Road’.

My objective is not to be completely original, but rather to better understand the style and flow of Kerouac’s writing, so as to develop my own. Check out the archive for more.

---

Mike Brodie (above), looking not too dissimilar from myself in Thailand, circa 2018

I woke up as the sun was reddening, bleeding almost, into the edges of the room. I was far from home, bag-eyed and haunted from travel, in a cheap hostel I’d never seen, hearing the hiss of a stream outside, and the creek of the old wood flooring, and footsteps upstairs and all the sad sounds, and I looked at the cracked ceiling and really didn’t know who I was for about fifteen seconds. I wasn’t searching for my identity, I was just somebody else, some stranger. I was halfway across Thailand, at the dividing line between the South of my painful past and the North of my promising future, and maybe that’s why it happened there and then, that strange red morning. 

My travel partner and I had stumbled into the hostel at some godforsaken hour the night before, paid for a night, squinted eyes hovering at us in the dark room, and fallen into our creaking bunk beds to sigh ourselves to sleep. Our eyes had barely sealed themselves before the light trickled in. A row of twelve bunk beds lined the room, one side to the other, duvets doing little to muffle nasal snores, tousled travel hair pocking out onto thinning pillows, a heavy odour in the air. 

We had to get going again, so I picked up my bag and said goodbye to the old, tobacco-chewing hostel keeper, chasing the chickens away with dusty footsteps on the sanded trail. My travel buddy and I, both as delirious as one another, remained silent as we retraced our steps. In those days I didn’t know him as well as I do now, and since we’ve fallen out, I’ll call him Benny. 

Benny and I, the Bangkok club scene still clinging to us from the previous morning, ran away from the city after an unwelcome stint with the local police. Eager to get away, to get going,— we considered it a good idea to surf the train without a ticket, filled with a youthful naivety that believes outwitting the train conductor is an easy feat. We slipped onto the carriage like everyone else and watched the world go by outside, the landscape morphing from urban grey to thick green tundra.

Hours later, the train sways lulling us to sleep, we’d awoken to the angry conductor leaning over us. We had no choice but to grab our stuff and shuffle out. Thai profanities followed us into the blackened night, the rhythmic click-clack of train wheels fading as the carriage abandoned us on the shores of solid land. 

That was last night.

I clambered onto the train after Benny again as I’d been doing all my life after people who interest me, because the only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a common thing, but burn like falling embers off a Viking arrow. Looking back, it’s like a part of my brain was shut off, frontal lobe yet to be unlocked, like an engine room awaiting access. 

Now, we were back on a new carriage, train tickets acquired, leaning on each other with fingers waving and smiles growing as the sparks in our stomachs prickled us with excitement from moving ahead, ahead, ahead. In that moment, Benny was charged with a pulsating excitement for life, and even though he was a con man, he was only a fraud because he wanted so much to live and get involved with people who would otherwise pay no attention to him. He was conning me and I knew it at times but I loved him too much to care. He knew and I knew, sometimes that is, and we got along fine. Choosing not to see the truth for what it was would come to bite me in the ass later, like ignoring a bleeping red light in that engine room I had no access to. At the time, I was a kid stripped bare of any semblance of selfhood, and those fifteen seconds of unbeknownst identity white-out on that coil protruding mattress was the most truthful moment because when I stripped away the posturing armour I put on during the shameless midday sun, I really was very little. 

Benny’s intelligence was dulled to a gleaming glow of street smarts, without the academic hubris that oh-so-bored me at the time. His ‘criminality’ was not something that scorned, yet it was something dazzling, daring and bursting, (we’d climb skyscrapers) it was pure adrenaline-induced zeal. A little bit of trouble, roughness and even Benny’s eventual sabotage of me as a friend couldn’t stop me. What did it matter? I was fresh and I wanted to take off. It wasn’t just because I was a filmmaker and because I needed new experiences but it was also because somewhere along the line I knew there would be adventure, visions, stories, stories mainly,— and that perhaps, if I was lucky, a moment of clarity would break apart the thick cloud cover that concealed myself from myself and reveal to me a key, a way into the locked door of that pristine engine room. 

Our train journey, which was meant to last eleven hours, stretched itself into sixteen. We didn’t mind so much, we spent a lot of time between the carriages, feet dangling over the evolving train wheels that knifed along the rails, cameras in hand, slaves to the sunlight’s dazzling rays, we captured all that we could. I tingled all over, I counted minutes and subtracted miles and imagined what our destination would hold in store. 

When I look back now, it’s not the destinations that provided the glimmer of the truth which I thirsted after, and even though I never found it, not blatantly at least, I was closest to it in the transient moments from one faded place to another. There was a magic in the idea of ‘becoming,’ any new thing that waited for us around the next corner, the next bend in the road, the next sleepy village. The bulbous passion which seemed to hang in the air of the most humid nights was really a feeling of open-minded embrace. The confidence that comes from living somewhere you’ll never be again, where no one knows you, or expects anything of you, shifted inner paradigms in me, and sparked new energy into my creative passions: writing and filmmaking.

I no longer believe as blindly in travel as I once did. Maturity has sobered me to the fact that no matter where or how far you go, your problems come with you. Yet one thing is true, the stories we live become the stories we tell, and through those stories, we make sense of who we are, and who we’re becoming. It’s only much later, when we step off the train, when promises have shattered, and lies have unfurled themselves, that we see how it all fits together— every misstep, every laugh, every tear, every fleeting moment of clarity, so that all that remains is the unspoken magic that ties together this moment and the next. And that all that is left to do, is to sit still for a moment, and mark it down.

---

Images by the author, from that eternal train journey from Bangkok to Chiang Mai

---

Bluezone — Philosophical Musings On Artistic Pursuit.

Leave a Like. — If you enjoyed this post, please click the ❤️ below.

Support Me. — If you enjoy the work I provide and want to support me further, you can simply make a one-time donation here, at Buy Me A Coffee. If you can. I appreciate you all subscribing to this page. Thank You. <3

Spread the Love. — If you want to make my day, share it with a friend

Talk to me. — If you want to talk to me directly, reach out. Reply to this email or leave a comment below.