Near Failures #12

I was down in Kaohsiung one weekend in early 2011, in an attempt to escape at least some of my demons in Taipei. Everything was feeling off in a most frustratingly confining way, and I felt like a change of scenery was in order.

Kaohsiung is the largest city in southern Taiwan, a huge industrial seaport, and accessible from Taipei via an hour-and-a-half trip on the bullet train. Even though it’s also a large city, it has a completely different vibe from Taipei, better weather but worse air quality, more spread out, slower-paced, yet somehow more connected via its huge port.

Intent on having no plans, grimly determined to wander aimlessly to clear my head, I’d bid farewell to some indigenous musician friends I’d run into on the train, including Matzka and his band, who were playing a gig that night. Matzka had just released his first album, which went on to win a Golden Melody, and I’d been a fan of his reggae-style music since I saw him playing gigs at Riverside in Gongguan before many people had heard of him.

Matzka invited me to play along with them that night, but I said I’d neglected to bring my trumpet. “We’ll find one for you!” he said, but such was my state of mind that I still (politely) declined. This was surely a sign from the universe that I needed company and connection more than solitary wandering, but I stubbornly clung to the idea of “getting out of my head”, as it had seemed to work in the past. But now I wasn’t even seeing photographs, so internally focused were my thoughts, and respite from them continued to evade me.

I made my way eastward towards the harbor. My footsteps were dogged and listless, my mood spiraling; a spur-of-the-moment day trip was woefully inadequate to the task of getting my mind right. The weather, dull and grey with a languid threat of rain, did not help, nor did the sudden demise of my iPhone 3G’s battery, meaning I couldn’t even call anyone. I’d gotten, it seemed, exactly the measure of isolation that I’d wished for.

It pissed me off.

I walked towards the harbor, because that’s what I tend to do. I’ve always been drawn to the meeting of water and land. The sight of the massive tankers moving implacably through the mountainous gates towards the open sea had always comforted me in the past, and I once again sought the solace of imagining where they were going, who was aboard, what their lives were like.

The waterfront, previously almost completely industrial, was now filled with more entertainment possibilities than I’d remembered from before…a few restaurants, cafes, boardwalks, etc. Once, at the end of the 1980’s, I’d boarded a ferry bound for Macau here: 25 hours of pitching seas, awful food, and rows of bunk beds deep in the bowels of the long-gone Macmosa. The service was discontinued a few years later in the early 90s, alas.

I walked along the waterfront until I came upon the scene above: a small girl wrapped in bright pink with striped pants sitting upon an old, coin-operated giraffe which happened to be the same shade of orange as the lifesavers hanging from the white barrier. She was staring at a forbidding sign that read: “DEEP WATER: DANGER: DO NOT CROSS: NO ENTRY”, and another STOP sign, in front of one of the harbor’s tug boats, its closed doors the same shade of orange. The harbor lay beyond, just out of reach. She just sat there, waiting for the giraffe to do something, but it didn’t. It was broken.

Something about the scene stirred something inside me, the waiting for something to happen amid various warnings, the refusal of our purported mounts to take us where we want to go, or indeed anywhere at all. My phone was defunct, but my Canon 5DII, which I then called the Invincible Rabbit from it’s name in Chinese, worked just fine; I raised the 16-35mm and took this shot at f5.6 at 29mm, ISO100.

It didn’t solve any of my problems, but it let me realize I wasn’t the only one in the world feeling stuck.

I kept walking. In some warehouse somewhere, Matzka and his band were probably bringing the house down. I eventually found a cheap business hotel and let the city do its work.