The Smell of Bangkok  12/29/01

Okay—I’m going to try to describe the smell of Bangkok – and that’s a difficult thing to do… difficult and requiring at once a fine olfactory sense and an evolved tolerance for the absurdly shocking.  For those of you that have been here you will appreciate that the smell is something not easily forgotten in an intellectual capacity but something that the senses have most likely have chosen to block out – like a survivor’s blurred, grayish memory of trauma.  Trauma—the sensation of Bangkok stench.

 Odor imagery—a cocktail of competing stank—blending [dog] and mixing [dung] and drifting in [urine] and out of [exhaust] like a medley of [grey] past-tense pop [fumes] rock or a child’s [urine] experiments in [deep frying] with his [ferment] paint box.  Imagine [banana] a Long-Island [curdled cream] ice tea of [sewage] stink.  Think, finally, [decaying] of Jackson Pollock [composting] colors flowing [filth] into each other [vomit] without disturbing each other’s [stench] purity.  Yeah—that’s it—the stench of Bangkok.