The holy grail is not for sale.

Gather round, friends. This one's for the gibbering idiot in us all.

Pictured: The Holy Grail of commodity. I'm pretty sure Jean Baudrillard was buried with one. 

This here is a combination fishtank-clock radio-pen holder-reading lamp. Or, what we refer to in the business as the holy grail of pointless brilliance. 

Soak that up. Soak it up.

I asked the lady running the watch shop where she got it. She said she had them in stock before but no more. I asked where I could get one. She said she had no idea. I asked if there was any possibility if I could buy the one she possessed, tiny fish and all. She said something in Thai that I have reason to believe what a quite sophisticated insult that referred to me as a white, gold-spewing man-child with the flattened head of a rotting fish. 

At this point I complimented her on her fingernails. I was told by a Thai friend that this was how to haggle when the haggle was doomed. 

A tense, immeasurable period of silence passed between us. In such moments you realise it is nothing for the oceans to become deserts, that one day your teeth will divorce you and that death is just like walking into another room - another room where you're dead. 

The lady running the watch shop said take a photo. She also added that the photo was free. I took the photo. Then she said fuck off. 

I did.

But now a hunger beats inside me. And tonight, when the moon drips valium down into the light pollution of Bangkok, and I sleep to the harrowing sounds of stray kittens tearing each other apart on adjacent rooftops, I will be calm. I have my mission.