Songkran Chapter 1

Today was the first official day of the Songkran festival. The tiny water guns and hoses that had been appearing on sale at street shops and in the hands of children over the past few weeks are now the 45 gallon barrels carted around in the beds of pick-up trucks full of howling hooting shirtless Thai men, dousing every motorbike driver and especially every white person they see. If that white person happens to have breasts, well, they’re really gonna get it.

This is the Thai new year. I don’t know what it means, all I know is that the moat is now lined with an arsenal of people devastating each other with its filthy water. I drove around on my bike, being careful to avoid the main splashways and only getting a few water gun pissings on my route through the center of town.

Tour buses of all kinds are bringing in Thai country people and youngins from Bangkok to get wet and whacky. Thai country people, by the way, are the spitting image of American rednecks. They drive big Ford pickup trucks, they listen to their own kind of country music and they chew tobacco. Now they’re coming into Chiang Mai and turning the old city into the infield at the Indy 500 – a beer glutted and soggy splash-all. The folks on the street are actually opening people’s car doors and throwing water in at the drivers. It is fucking fantastic, and it goes on for five days. I couldn’t be more excited

I’m learning quickly how to survive this thing. My natural spidey-sense paranoia is not enough. When driving around I look for three things: a group of shirtless wet people standing on the sidewalk being suspicious; wet spots on the road indicating past warfare; and children. Children can be so cruel and I can just imagine how I would have acted if there was a holliday in the States that was basically just a no-holds-barred water fight. I was walking around and a kid just followed me shooting a steady stream of ice water at my lower back, a laughing little psycho newt. Tomorrow I’m going to get those little bastards back. There will be tears.

I’m also on the hunt for Thailand’s biggest fireworks and have recruited my retired Thai judge friend in the process. Together we will blow shit up in celebration of the New Year or the harvest moon, or the equinox or something.

I will keep y’all updated on everything that goes down. Tomorrow I’ll be out in the crowds for sure and the next day I think we’ll have a pickup truck for our own mobile command unit. I am also looking for the biggest baddest fuck-all water gun – you know, the one that the neighbor’s kid has.

This is the best of Thailand, when people here party they really do it to exhaustion and without the slightest care for public safety. The intensity of the fun and fear of it so outweighs the tight-security, Tony Danza hosted, 1812 overture of a holiday that we call the Fourth of July. Which I will be back in time to gripe about first-hand.