Weird Mind Explosions

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By traveling in a foreign country, it's inevitable that you do some exploring into your own mind. My first few days in Thailand were spent in a sort of numb haze, where all of what I was doing was inputting information and attempting to process it all. It was physically impossible for me to try to create anything or produce anything resembling an insight because I couldn't turn a corner without coming across something completely new and absolutely insane by my general understanding of the world that demanded my attention and forced me to think about it. It was an A.D.D. nightmare of distractions but it was beautiful. Now that the initial culture shock has faded, I can at least stop and think every once in a while, but there's still a bit of that fuzz that will probably never go away as long as I'm here.

When I'm home, the writing process is very simple. I pour a cup of coffee (or a glass of beer, depending on the time of day), I sit at my desk, and I open my computer. Everything around me is normal and static. My desk is still covered in Sharpie notes, my Buddha statues are in a row, and my SMBC "Life of Thought" poster is hanging in exactly the same place it always hangs. To my right, there's a little black rectangle that I can use to contact everyone I know. Everything is normal and comfortable so I can focus entirely on the white page in front of me.

Trying to write or even think about writing in Asia is like trying to take the SATs in the middle of an elementary school dodgeball match. I knew that things would be different here, but I had no comprehension that EVERYTHING would be different. If I see a dog on the sidewalk in Richmond, I can understand it and its general dogliness, I can process it, acknowledge its existence, and ignore it in less than a second. If I see a dog in Thailand, it's game over. The dog's face will be different. It will make a slightly different-sounding bark. It will probably be chasing a lizard. It will without a doubt be the craziest fucking dog I've ever seen and I will be forced to not only process the chaos of its existence, but also place that little dog in the context of this entire strange world around me. Where is this dog going? Where does it sleep? Who feeds it? Do Thai people think dogs are as cute as I do? Does this dog hate cats or does it have some other animal enemy I haven't seen yet?

Every waking moment is a mental exercise and it's all fascinating and exhausting. And thankfully, it was exactly why I came out here.