"What's up Billy?"

"Oh... Not Much at my age!"

I've settled into routine here in Chiang Mai. Basically, it's the same interactions every day. It's good morning to the construction workers pouring concrete outside my door. They're so close I can see the tarry ends of the cigarettes they've ground into the already crumbling foundation.

Then its a stroll down the alley for breakfast -- a tiny kitchen where I see the healer:

The healer is some German dude that lives next to me, apparently he can read minds. My friend Liz, when she was living with Will at this same guesthouse, was bitten by a dog. Or something dog-like. While she was making trips to the clinic and worrying about getting rabies if she was lucky, having a disease named after her if she wasn't, the healer said: "You must have wanted to be bit. It means you are hiding something." So, in other words, he's a new-age asshole: one of these spiritually sensitive and open people who inevitably find -- during a sauna, an herbal face mask, or a mushroom trip -- that all along, they are at the center of the universe, and that all the mystery and wonder of the world fades and dries in the light of ego.

But I too have been unproductive and too self-indulgent here in the last few weeks. It is too easy to sleep-walk through the days here. Routine is a killer. To shake it up, get myself writing more, I was expecting a trip to the Burmese border to do a story on the refugee camps there, a piece on current Burmese politics, but my contact / writer friend left without me. But seeing as he's been unreachable in the past few days, seemingly vanished into the jungle, it might be better that I let him drag himself off like some old Indian chief, rather than jump off the edge with him.

The snake story might be revamped as a written piece, but Austrian tv didn't want to buy it. Anyway, I haven't done any snake charming as of yet, but it should still happen.

The key here has been to balance my time actually seeing this world, and trying to work out of it. If I spend all my time reading Umberto Eco and trying to write, well, I find there's nothing to write about. The days that are so busy with adventures, or conflicts, dilemmas, and frustration where I have only fifteen minutes to write that are the best.

So I'll get back to skipping the light fandango, and take my head away from Foucault's Pendulum for a while -- though I'm thinking of writing my own proudly esoteric and nonsensical post-modern novel called Curly's Yo-Yo in which the Three Stooges unwittingly uncover the secret seal of the Knights of the Templar while researching an ancient cabalistic ritual for one of their routines and are systematically murdered for their knowledge. Think about it: Pie = Pi, and if you factor in Shemp's significance as his percentage of screen time, you find that there are exactly 3.14159 Stooges.