Siam Soothsayer

My boss took me to see the palm reader who works in the same apartment complex that our English school is in. Now honestly, I've never thought that you could tell someone's future or know anything about them by the lines in their palms -- especially if they are as hairy as mine. Sure, I check my horoscope every day at about the same time I check up on Garfield but that's always a little personal and vague. But when a Thai fortune teller holds your hands and tells you that there are two dead baby ghosts following you around -- you listen.

When I first sat down with her she asked me to open up my spirtual channel -- direct my thoughts to my spiritual master. So I tried that; I was very polite to the purply cosmic fog that envisioned in my mind, but the woman couldn't get the right reading out of me. I tried again, pleading to the coursing stream of time, illuminated in a drifting fluorescent haze, rushing like a school of luminescent mackerel beaming flickering specks of light swimming towards the great dark pools of man's destiny... still nothing. Desperate for an answer I closed my mind and brought towards mine third eye the only spiritual being on whom I could truly focus... "Elvis?"

So with the king as my spiritual guide I went on a magical journey which concludedt that I should move to New York, wait for a 45 year old woman to show me the way to success, and not write anything that might reinforce a negative perception of Thai women. Seems you can get a socially aware version of the spiritual truth.

I ventured down to Pattaya beach after seeing the feminist fortune teller and realized what she was talking about. PB is perhaps the whoriest place on Earth. It's the cancun of the las vegas of the seventh circle of girly-bars. What could I say about this place that hasn't been observed by the generations of American soldiers that have docked in its harbor and stormed ashore for weeks of R&R&STD. What could I add about a place where bars have run out of names and call themselves Playboy Bar 3 or #1 Bar 2. Where the streets are clogged with pawing and prodding girls and ladyboys. It's been said. It's been said by me and by a thousand others before... so the story exhausted itself before I even got there.

But I will say that there was an egg-related strip show that caused me some trauma.

So yeah, there were bar girls, big deal. I still think there are too many good things happening in this country to keep lingering over the flesh trade.

In other news I have an English student who is a doctor and while I was interviewing him as if I were the admissions department at Harvard Medical, he took 20 minutes to explain to me how to use a Foley Chatheter ... at which point I explained what the word "Gross" meant.

See y'all July 1