Entry #6 I Went to a Whorehouse Last Night

I wake up, head to the gym, shower, and go to work. Sometimes I have lunch at a nearby restaurant and sometimes I bring my lunch. I leave work around 6 PM and sometimes I have dinner with a friend. Other times I cook at home. Nothing fancy, just whatever I can throw together to form an edible bowl of assorted foods that bear a faint resemblance to something I have eaten before. This is how I've spent my days for the past 2 months. Oh yeah, sometimes I have dinner with some relatives and maybe head to a bar later with my cousins.

I often wonder to myself while I'm in Shanghai, usually on those lonely cab rides home at 4:00 AM on a Sunday morning, what the fuck am I doing here? My mind floods with a deluge of short answers, but not one is satisfying enough to quell the whimpering fire of my self-loathing curiosity. I can't even write anymore.

I came here with a purpose, but some point down the line, I lost it. Why am I going to bars and clubs and getting pissed drunk with strangers every weekend? I mean, yeah, it's fun sometimes and it's a good way to past time, but it's nothing I can't do in the US with people I would probably like better.

So like I said, I went to a whorehouse last night. It was for some guy's 25th birthday party. He seemed like a cool guy. Dragged there by his friends while announcing that he absolutely refused to "fuck a hooker". I think we could have had some good conversation had he not been drunk enough to spit on himself. We both apparently like to watch "The Hunt for the Predator" on NBC and anyone who hates pedophiles enough to love a show which completely strips them of their human dignity while engaging in hardcore entrapment is okay in my book. Now, before you jump to conclusions and pronounce me to be a dirty pathetic perv, I will let you know here and now that I did not partake in their services. In fact, I didn't even touch a whore despite the fact that a number of them were eyeing me like a pack of hungry she-wolves ready to pounce on a can of SPAM. It was a disgusting joint of an establishment. Chinese girls pulling in customers from the streets by their semi-flaccid cocks and drowning them in overpriced faux-beer and disease-ridden kisses. Had I gone there alone, I would have felt like I was the detached self-destructive main character of some long lost Hemingway novel. The cheap colored light bulbs casted a lusty red shade over every ecstasy painted face masking the deep void beneath, which easily betrays itself, if you would just look a little harder. But no one ever does.

So what am I doing here? Am I the same as them? Trying so hard to fill some draining well of a hole inside me but I just think too highly of myself to resort to paying for sex? Do I think I'm better than the guy next to me who is shamelessly having his cock stroked through the cheap fabric of his Made-in-China denim jeans sold off of some peddler on Qipu Road? Yeah, I guess I do.

I need to stop hanging out with people I barely like.