Image: My Beautiful Apocalypse (detail) by Catherine Forsayeth PARIJAH DIARIES 4 /July 2020 Sometimes I experience a disorientation on waking, not knowing where I am. If something wakes me in the night or pre-dawn, I’ll lie there in the dark for a long moment, listening for cues and trying to arrange my surroundings around me. […]
PARIJAH DIARIES 9 An old acquaintance of mine has opened a new bar down by Rawai Beach. The Phuket Pirates, he calls it. I met him on an obscure beach about six years ago. It was early in the morning, and I’d had my swim and was mooching around bagging up today’s plastic from the […]
“First, a strict spatial partitioning: the closing of the town and its outlying districts, a prohibition to leave the town on pain of death, the killing of all stray animals; the division of the town into distinct quarters, each governed by an intendant. Each street is placed under the authority of a syndic, who keeps it under surveillance; if he leaves the street, he will be condemned to death. On the appointed day, everyone is ordered to stay indoors: it is forbidden to leave on pain of death.”
PARIJAH DIARIES 3 It’s the absurdity that bites. Children in social distancing hats. Chalk squares on the playground. These slave masks. These gags. Social distancing robots in the parks. Instructions to stand in the corners and face away from each other in lifts.The sheer reach of this insanity. The pettiness of tyranny. The insistent tang of […]
PARIJAH DIARIES 2 April 18 2020 Kriminalvården Anstalten Tygelsjö Skiftesvägen 10 218 74 Tygelsjö Sweden Attn: Xxxxx Xxxxxx Hallo my friend Well shit, if you had to go away for ten months for growing indoor plants, you chose the right time! We’re all in prison now. I don’t mean to minimise what you’re going through, […]
It was a sliding doors moment, though not so slick, so finely calibrated. Slow motion — but still a matter of timing. I was coming to a decision to leave Thailand — must have been early to mid March I think — and to go back to Europe to look for alternatives to my plan […]
PARIJAH DIARIES 1 It’s not very common in conversation, not in its original sense at least. People stick to ‘weird’, which is a whole other story, coming from Old English wyrð, meaning fate or destiny. You generally only see it when some hack journalist has been detailed to put down the latest outbreak of truth from […]
The boys had gone swimming and Red wanted to go too, but her mother wouldn’t let her. She was too young and didn’t know how to swim. So she waited for a while and then sneaked away, following the path to the pond. As she approached through the trees, she could see their backs, five […]
I found the place by accident, like everybody does. I’d stayed in Phuket longer than planned, to keep an eye on Apsara’s kids while she finished up in Bangkok and got ready to move down here. I was living in a simple holiday bungalow and had rented another one for them. It was around the beginning […]
“There’s an understanding that is not desired to exist” It was 1970, and Eric Dollard was sleeping rough at the RCA-Marconi Wireless Station at Bolinas, California, where he had worked from the age of seventeen until it was closed down. He’d started sleeping on site in an effort to protect his property — the 25 […]
the lethal text 