Siam I Am

Coup Thoughts

2006-09-20T04:01:00.000+07:00

The Washington Post article: Thai Military Launches Coup

This is troubling. I've been following Thaksin and Thai politics for about a year now and can say that I did not see this coming so soon. The armed forces commanders had turned on Thaksin long ago, but to capture the government like this is drastic and reckless. Although their intentions to oust a greedy, often irresponsible prime minister are good, they are disregarding the fact that Thaksin was elected fairly and is still revered as a populist by Thailand outside of Bangkok. I'm not waving any flags for him, but because of Thaksin, Thai people have a better health-care system than we have in the US.

It is also unfair of the "Council of Administrative Reform" to claim to be acting in the name of the king, who is a proponent of democracy above all else. Last April, the King was asked to resolve the confusion over the elections that re-elected Thaksin amidst a boycott by the opposition parties: the King refused to cast a law-making decision and insisted that the judiciary do its job.

As recently as the ceremonies for the 60th anniversary of his ascension to the throne, the King spoke passionately about his worries that the country was being torn apart by political differences. He favors compromise and cooperation, whether he approves of Thaksin or not, he will certainly not approve of such a physical takeover and I believe we will see him denounce the coup in the next few days and demand a democratic solution. If this does not happen, then I'm wrong about everything.

Also, I can't help but be a little worried about the "Council of Administrative Reform" The title that the armed forces commanders are giving to their group. It sounds just enough like the "State Law and Order Restoration Council" the name of the junta in Burma when it took over the government in 1988. But this is just to explain the vibe that I get from this group, which has acted with the momentum of an energetic and positive movement to remove Thaksin, but has taken excessive, aggressive action. It is also strange that they wouldn't at least wait for the results of the elections this fall.

The next few days will be important.

I'd also like to point out the typical Thai civillian response as it was reported by the AP:

"Hundreds of people gathered at Government House, taking pictures of themselves with the tanks."

...I couldn't encapsulate Thai culture any better.

Winding Down

2006-06-26T00:37:00.000+07:00

Something happened today. Perhaps it was tainted water; perhaps it was the heat. Perhaps something sinsister sprung from the dull molten boredom that can only be afforded on a screaming hot day in the Thailand tourist off-season. And it takes a lot to shock me these days. What I saw when I came around my guesthouse and 6-month residence this afternoon, was that everyone had gone completely insane and were throwing some kind of disco-party to celebrate the fact. It could have been the rainbow that spread itself over the mountains to the south -- effecting some kind of rueful lerprachaunal vibe on the crowd, all I know is shit was whack.

This was, by the way, 5 o'clock in the evening and it had been started, accidentally, when 3 big bottles of Sangsom Whiskey combined with 12 or so glasses of ice and coke and a few hundred decibels of Thai pop music.

A quick tour of the scene:

On a bench by the spirit house, which is provided bowls of water, incense and prayer every morning, also by the alley my 35 year old Thai neighbor from down the hall was sobbing over a fresh pile of vomit and gripping a soggy roll of toilet paper while my gun-crazed landlord videotaped her sorrow with a newly purchased camcorder chuckling in the poor grivers face.

A man who had previously borrowed my ear and my patience to tell me about all the problems his Thai wife had caused him by seeing other men and demanding money and every other cliche of a bad thai-western relationship borrowed my ear once again to tell me how great things were and how happy he was to once again be giving money to her -- that is, as soon as she returned from a mysterious bangkok vacation. He later revealed to me his LSD and ecstasy polluted past, and I circled and crossed a little note in my notebook.

The gay boys from room 101 were stroking and caressing a notoriously homophobic and xenophobic (a terrible combination at my guesthouse) Canadian man. There have been a lot of complaints about this fellow, namely that he is a complete maniac. My first encounter with him came the day while I was explaining to my friend Anh what the Fleetwood Mack lyrics "a player only loves you when he's playing" meant. The Canadian man overheard me and approached. He pointed a stubby finger at me and with a vicious and unsettling look in his eye said: "you're a smart man. A very smart man."

Today he was blasting Def Leopard from a stereo he had bought and decided to place in our communal lobby, sitting there among empty Chang beer cans, his own bottle of Sangsom, with a frantic nervous look as if the derranged rats of his mind were busy nibbling at their insane cheese -- perhaps a suffering meditation on the wisdom of Wilson Phillips.

Later on I proceeded to my favorite bar to watch a little soccer which I don't understand or like. But I do enjoy rooting for Ecuador over England -- who wouldn't. In fact, in every game I like to choose the biggest underdog, or, if possible, the colonized country over the colonizer. For me there is also a kind of magic to watching Mexico play Angola that is hard to define.

Unfortunately, I was unable to peacefully enjoy the game because one of the regulars -- the only guy not Thai at this bar tonight, insisted on yammering at me. He told me about all the atrocities the Scottish have suffered from the English, about weather patterns in the South Pacific, about early Russian literature and everything that's wrong with America while I'm just trying to show my Ecuador pride. I'm not sure what makes me such a good target -- probably complacency -- but everyone with a chip on his shoulder, a story to unload, some gripe or grievance finds my ear and unloads. He sips at his whiskeys and his beer, he pulls on his cigarettes, he slurs and he repeats, he talks through my eye rolls, he depresses the hell out of me and he simply wears me out with his chattering. And right as I think that the molecules of my brain are going to diasporate in protest he says:

"you know, you remind me a lot of myself when I was your age"

Every day I find another good reason to leave.

But I'll miss it, and I'll be back -- with more sunblock, business cards, a place in the mountains and more occasions for a tailor-made Thai silk gray pinstriped suit.

feels good to unload. sheesh.

It's Good to be the King

2006-06-11T13:33:00.000+07:00

Hot Damn! It's celebration time again in Thailand. Seems you can't go a week and a half without some reason for fireworks, candles and a ban on alcohol sales. This time around it was for the 60th Anniversary of the King's ascension to the throne, which makes him the longest reigning monarch. The day was marked with some gigantic celebrations in bangkok, and a makeshift jerry-rigged event in Chiang Mai highlighted by an golden egg offering ceremony and a middle school marching band with an all-female tuba section playing 'eye of the tiger.'

I would try to describe the King but the English language is apparently unequipped to do him reverence. When I told someone I thought he was 'cool' I was told that I could be arrested. So I pretty much just stopped talking about him altogether.

This week they've been showing clips of his Majesty playing clarinet with Benny Goodman. Then Benny Goodman fined him for playing over his assigned 36 bars and upstaging him. I've still not seen any explanation of the royal audience with Elvis.

Right now they're showing footage of the royal convention -- some 25 of 28 royal families from around the world have turned up to boogie in Thailand and they are currently parading around in a greeting room in their various costumes of medals, swords, turbans and tiaras. It's good to see that trained and groomed royalty are no less awkward in their formal-wear than 13 year old children -- I swear the Duke of Norway checked his fly before entering the greeting line.

I'm trying to figure out just what the king of Luxembourg and the king of Lesotho could possibly have to talk about and the answer is probably the World Cup. I certainly haven't heard of any upcoming Free Trade Negotiations between the two.

OK, the pie-eating contest is about to start, Japan has to make up some ground after losing the sack race; though if I were to put money on it, I'd say that Swaziland is going to take the gold in the cool-whip Twister round.

Spots Macintosh

2006-06-05T13:31:00.000+07:00

I woke up yesterday morning feeling that it was much like any other morning -- hot and boring. Lifting myself from the corpse shaped crater in my mattress, I pulled my shirt off and stumbled out onto my little balcony, which is my little crow's nest from which I can survey the mood of the city crawling up towards the mountain in the distance. It was a calm day -- until a mosquito flew directly into my ear, at which point it became a bad day.

I stumbled into the shower and caught a glimpse in the bathroom mirror to discover that my body was digitized -- and poorly. I was pixilated, completely (as in completely) covered in red spots. My first response was to blame the mosquito, whose fault, upon medical consultation, it proved not to be. So for a few minutes I gazed wonderingly at my being and wondered why I must be both star-crossed and studded at the same time. Under my left nipple is something like the constellation capricorn, while above my right hip sits something that looks like the Arc d'Triomphe. Across my back, an archipelago resembling the Marshall Islands. Which makes me think that maybe this is a treasure map embedded in my genes -- it does, incidentally, already point toward my booty.

So like an albino cheetah I went through the rest of the day using the skin condition to my best advantage. Someone wanted to drag me to his suit tailor shop but when I turned my forearm over and showed him Spotsylvania he quickly backed off -- his forefingers crucifix crossed. An ex-female acquaintance of mine with whom I'd like to distance myself was equally thwarted with my warning that it was indeed very very contagious.

Anyhow, I bought an antihistamine thinking that this had something to do with any number of things in my environment that could have set me off like this, but the Zyrtec (which you can buy over the counter here along with anti-biotics and amoxicillin) didn't work.

I waited a day and woke up this morning equally spotted after having a couple of dreams about pepperoni pizza and killer 7-Up logos. I went to a clinic. There I sat in the waiting room looking around at the other covertly sick people. There they were sitting with their little secrets bubbling under their skin and on their genitals, while I was exposed. I could play guess-why-THAT-guy-is-here all I wanted, but he already knew my problem. It was as plain as the rash on my neck. But then again, he could be reasonably sure that this miscoloration was all that I had -- whereas I could take consolation in the fact that he probably had gonorhea, you can tell by the sunglasses.

I will say this for Thailand: it didn't take very long before I saw a real doctor. He poked and rubbed me, asked how I was peeing, and took my blood. It's not dengue fever, which is good. In fact, it's probably just a virus -- he prescribed water and sleep. Fair enough.

Meanwhile: $12. I'm looking forward to sending that bill in to Blue Cross. 12 goddamn dollars is all that visit cost me. And if I were a Thai citizen, the visit would have only cost me 80 cents.

That is by far the most interesting thing that has happened to me in a while, which is why I have to leave this place. So, July 2nd my flight leaves.. though I might straggle somewhere out west before I come in to DC.

"I'm so ugly, I went to the proctologist and he stuck his finger in my mouth!"

Siam Soothsayer

2006-05-24T14:34:00.000+07:00

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

No Class

2006-04-27T13:43:00.000+07:00

Last Monday I was riding my motorbike through town; I was on a street called Huay Kaew, which is a fast road that goes up into the mountains. I was just past the Central shopping mall in town when I glanced over to my right and saw something that sent a quick gasp of surprise and realization through me. In the reflection of the Import Clothing store wall-sized windows was a guy on a motorbike, with suit pants pulled up at the ankles by the acute angle of the legs in the driving position, a striped patterned shirt rolled up to the elbows, and a red silk tie flapping over the left shoulder -- holy shit, I'm a teacher.

At Will's request I've taken up a couple of classes at a small English school near his apartment. My professional get-up is the uniform of the Chiang Mai teacher-class, a collective of liberal arts students, maladjusted adolescent-minded adults, and French-Canadians. It is a unique group in that they have adjusted to a style of living in Chiang Mai that does not include frequenting the sin-traps, sticking instead to Thai-nightclubs, and having carved out a niche of assumed sophistication. I appreciate the group for the opportunity for some kind of intellectual stimulation, but scorn it for its inability to provide for me a strip-club buddy -- for that I'm better off asking my mother.

*Just a thought on strip-clubs -- I love strip-clubs and although I like seeing women squirming around in their nothing-at-alls, there is something more to the atmosphere that I can really get into. Mostly it's the perfect place for people watching, and strip-clubs are basically a who's who of the sexually and socially frustrated -- the "wrong crowd" that I have a knack for falling in with. I hope to one day own my own club and conduct my business in an upstairs office; when my Chinese business partners come to town they can meet me down at the club and we could do our arms trading while drinking Chivas and watching 'Lexus' do the crabwalk to "Hungry Eyes." Of course, I'll have to use one of the girls as a numbers runner, which inevitably gets her kidnapped -- little do I know that she is Steven Seagal's estranged niece. When he shows up he's probably going to Akido all over my hired goons and then I'll be ruined.

So my first class is a trio of 15 year olds. I was pretty nervous my first day so I brought a bandana/handkerchief with me. I was sweating like the Guidance Counselor at my old elementary school -- Mr. Bundy. He used to stand in front of an auditorium full of students and alternate between furiously mopping his forehead with his handkerchief and drinking a Diet Coke while repeating : "you kids got to learn... some self control!" Despite my manic sweating I managed to control myself and speak very very slowly, which is not easy for me to do. I also try to enforce the American way, rather than the British system which the book proffers.

We go through the lesson book which has little stories about people doing whacky things: a woman who lives on an airplane, a guy with 13 jobs, etc. I've been trying to make things a little bit more interesting than just sticking to the book allows. In a picture of a guy offering a woman some champagne I tried to encourage the students' imagination a bit:

"Do you think there's something going on between Bob and Helen? -- maybe they're a little bit more than friends?"

"Maybe Bob is trying to help Helen relax -- get in the mood?"

"Is Bob a bad man or just lonely?"

"Is this illegal?"

But they don't seem to get it and just stare at me blankly, which I remember doing to my own language teachers quite a bit. Now I get it. It doesn't get me down, I keep going through my routine and imagine that I'm Rodney Dangerfield with a tough crowd.

I'm working on a version of Hollywood Squares to play with my second class -- made up of 6 university girls -- but I don't think the game will have the same appeal without Gilbert Godfrey or Bruce Vilanch.

**Oh boy, do I have problems: My parents sent me to a child psychiatrist -- the kid couldn't help me at all!** --Rodney

Songkran Chapters 4&5: Washout

2006-04-15T23:45:00.000+07:00

Surprise surprise, the last two days of Songkran were a hell of a lot like the first three. It was wet, it was dangerous and intense in its exhaustive redundancy.

Yesterday’s low-point was definitely the ladyboy debacle. I was riding in the bed of a pickup truck driven by ‘the judge’ – the owner of my guesthouse. Our barrel of water was nearly empty and I had nothing to combat the drunk ladyboys a few trucks over. Neither car was moving due to the splash-traffic so we were being bombarded with cold water from the she-males. There were about ten of them in or around their pick-up truck. They also had remarkable tits. Thailand apparently does some good plastic surgery and seeing as there was nothing but a thin layer of white t-shirt covering these male-bags it was evident that someone had done a quality job. Anyhow, I snuck over to their truck so I could sneak attack them with their own water. But as soon as I got close to the truck they grabbed me and molested me with their enormous hands, in an iron Muay Thai grip that I couldn’t escape.

They touched me. Repeatedly.

Almost ruined my day, but hakuna mattata, I guess that’s life.
Today, was the stunning conclusion. I was still shell-shocked this morning and it took me a very long time to work up the will to go outside. Simply walking to breakfast is signing a commitment to being wet for the rest of the day. You can’t do things like buy a newspaper because it wouldn’t make it more than 3 seconds before becoming wet-pulp, which means there was nothing to know about the world except that it was a wet wild place.

So, with a friend of mine from the guesthouse, one of the travelers who came in for the week, I finally convinced myself to go out. We walked to the moat and found a beer stand in front of which we stood for a few hours King-of-the-Hilling it, Singha after Singha, spraying the truck loads of party-goers that drove by.

Eventually, towards the end of the day, we decided to go for a tuk-tuk ride and seven of us piled into a three person vehicle. The tuk-tuk, for clarification, is a three wheeled vehicle, basically a converted motorcycle with a bench on the back. Our driver had found a way to make the vehicle bounce like a low-rider on hydraulics, so as we pulled up in front of any bar with sound system, we bounced the fucker and showed off our go-go moves.

And so we said a misty-eyed goodnight to a fantastic week-long party.

Happy New Year Thailand, here’s to 2549 more.

Songkran Chapter 3: Blood in the Water

2006-04-14T11:26:00.000+07:00

I spent the third day of Songkran with my Thai friends Ball and Ying, who just graduated from Chiang Mai University. They explained to me that this used to be a gentler festival and that I should really say thank you when somebody pours water on me because that means they’re saying happy birthday; I found this emotionally difficult to execute when I got fire-hosed in the face by a fat guy dressed like Robocop.

The name of the game is redundancy. This festival is in fact the same thing every day, and the city gets wetter and wetter. But people can’t keep from going about their normal routine, so they just adjust to the fact that life is now wet. We are, for the most part, now in an aqueous world. There are muddy footprints leading into every restaurant and a warm puddle on every seat from where some completely drenched patron, tee-shirt heavy and hanging to his knees, cargo pockets sloshing full of water, once sat. Money is no longer shuffled in wallets but peeled off of soggy rolls.

The magnitude of the festival has increased. The girly bars have set up gigantic speakers and little stages so that their girls and their customers can shake their booties to club Reggae and Gasolina. There is more of a mardi gras feel to the place.

There was also a little parade yesterday, aside from the informal parade of ladyboys in pickup trucks around the moat. Different temples carried their gold Buddha statues around while the folks around splashed water and some kind of scented oil on them. These were followed by a drum and flute group who rocked out as a woman danced and twirled knives around. We were careful not to splash her with scented oil.

Meanwhile, I keep hearing this rumor that 100 people (more by now) have already died this Songkran. People do die, but I doubt that this high fatality rate is entirely true. I have seen some injuries: bruised noses, black eyes, scrapes and limps. But the thing about the festival is that people know that there is some crazy shit going on. How do you go and die when you know that there’s this much crazy shit happening? That’s crazy enough in itself.
And that’s my final thought.

Songkran Chapter 2: The Soakening

2006-04-13T01:01:00.000+07:00

The second day of the Thai new year has left me feeling totally wet, parially whacky, but mostly exhausted. I’m currently licking my wounds which include a banged up knee and a couple of fire-ant bites. After being repeatedly and relentlessly doused with 800 year old moat water I have also decided to pop a Cipro just in case some mythical Thai bacteria is unsheathing its ceremonial sword in my intestines.

I spent a couple of hours circling the moat in the back of a Tuk Tuk with a few friends from the guesthouse. I was armed with a pump action gun that quickly broke. Luckily its replacement, another pump action with five lateral squirt holes, worked just fine. In fact, with the rake of water that it sprayed I had the option of either moistening an entire group of people or, by turning the gun sideways, soaking just one from head to toe. Of course, the gun is no match for a plastic bucket full of ice water which was a real favorite among those parading around in the back of pickup trucks.

It was all out war of course. Even the child monks unarmed in their safron robes were not safe in the bed of their own truck. It’s amazing how much fun dumping water on strangers is. I never got tired of it. I even started offering some folks the choice of the blue bucket or the green bucket and then proceeded to give them both.

While walking around by the moat during my second expedition I looked out along the banks to see thousands of little plastic buckets being tossed into the water on strings and hauled back in. It was like watching a desperate and disorganized chain gang: little buckets splashing down, being pulled in, and immediately thrown into the street on whatever car, motorbike, or passerby happened to be in the range of its filthy spray. There is something mechanical and yet completely chaotic about this process -- like THE UNIVERSE.

And the Thai people, rightfully, love getting us foreigners. I was walking down the alley this morning, after being gang-soaked by the waitresses at my favorite breakfast place, when I heard some children shouting the Thai word for honky, the little squirts chased me down the alley and had me begging for mercy at the bend in the road. They ran out of water and were embarassed my tears and eventually left -- I swore revenge and dragged my soggy ass home.

Of course, the honkys get totally carried away and the doors to the macho monkey show are blown wide open. I watched as some fridgenormous Scottish guys tackled each other into the moat; when they grew tired of that, they started tossing each other’s girlfriends into the moat, guffawing and cracking open beers, tossing buckets of water into the face masks of passing motorbikes.

What was probably once a decent holiday of respect and ablution somewhere along the line got a shot to the face from a plastic water gun and became an irreverent psycho swamp party.

Songkran Chapter 1

2006-04-11T20:53:00.000+07:00

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.

Highway to the Safety Zone

2006-04-05T14:43:00.000+07:00

Yesterday I found myself soaking in the sulfurous stink of a hot-spring hot-tub in an obscure tiny Thai village off the main highway north to Chiang Rai. This was one of the spots that my buddy Billy discovered on his motorbike rides. When you're in an unknown land, turning left is as good a choice as turning right, and that's how he finds things. Another trick: satellite dishes always point south. This keeps you from getting lost, of course if you're somewhere without satellite dishes, you are probably also somewhere where people don't speak English. So, double-fucked.

We were supposed to be going on this jaunt with a few other people but they found that task of waking up before 10 am a bit too daunting and chose to rub their bleary eyes over a 1pm Mexican Breakfast at the cafe down the alley... same as last -- wait, what day is it? Anyway, it's better that way, that Canadian couple we were supposed to give rides to were some serious chunkies and I'm not sure my suspension could have handled that.

So it ended up just being the two of us.

We took the highway Northwest, the direction of the Burmese border. I'd done the trip on visa-runs in a minivan, but never out on the bike. Along the way we passed a gigantic open fire which was devouring the brambles and brush along the side of the road and throwing up enormous columns of smoke. It seemed pretty out of control and with the wind kicking up, not much end in sight. I looked at the Thai lady standing on her front yard across the street from the fire to see if she was concerned at all, but she looked back at me as if she hadn't noticed. So we drove on.

Honestly I'd be more surprised to see firemen than a fire out here. When an apartment in Will and Liz's building went ablaze the firemen showed up and stood around taking pictures with their camera phones and smoking cigarettes. A couple of tenants ended up putting it out.

Anyhow, Billy and I ended up at a tiny compound of concrete and wood structures, linked by unsteady bamboo bridges which crossed hot stink streams. We bought some ice tea at a kiosk that also sold eggs you could boil in the springs, if so inclined.

We went into separate tubs in separate rooms and boiled our own eggs... Billy kept hollering at me through the wall, telling me stories of his friends getting hustled by bar girls:

"The going rate for a girlfriend here is about 35 bucks a month, but on top of that you got to pay for her sister's baby, her families land, shit, she probably got a husband back in her village sent her down to Chiang Mai just to send some cash back."

He told me about the various fights he's been in:

"I told this big German fuck that by the time he woke up he'd think he'd been sucking Hitler's dick"

"Hitler's dick? where'd you get that from?"

"I don't know... just came to me."

After the baths we went to get massages next door. Maybe now's the time to point out that all together, this treatment cost us $3.50. The room is wide open to the farms and fields outside and we can hear cows moo while we're being massaged, a bird even flies through the door and out a window.

The massage hut is also a school that trains blind girls to give massages. Billy got the blind girl, I got the teacher. Billy is stretched out like a big white whale as a small milky-eyed Thai girl kneads him and kung-fu's his body. But even the great rub-down can't silence the man:

"See, people don't realize how little it takes to be happy. They think they need a big car, a big house. Hell, when I made 70,000 a year -- that's ON the books, who knows what all else I took in -- I thought that nothing was better than a 14 dollar steak. But while you're working, you're always working. Always thinking. Out here, I have nothing but time. Time to do whatever I want whenever I want. Guys come out here for 2 weeks -- they work their asses off just to get two weeks away from work. I live here all year, and on $560 a month from my social security. I couldn't live on that chickenshit if I was back in LA, not in any neighborhood you can go out at night in. Here I got a bike, a nice room, I can get a girl any time I want to. I live like a king."

All this time I'm being twisted into bizarre shapes and the woman is showing me with her hands that she can control the flow of blood to my heart... super, right? She pushed above my abdomen and lets a rush go into my heart -- just to prove she could have killed me if she wanted to. Then she puts my legs behind my head and steps on my eggs.

Massage time was over.

Relaxed noodle-like we take the long way back to Chiang Mai.

Damned if I don't love that motorbike, meanwhile. It's great to take those rolling country roads while screaming "Highway to the Danger Zone" into my helmet. I'm working on my fishtail now, pretty much just have to brake real hard with the back tire.

June. June and that's it. I promise.

Bar Girl's Picnic

2006-04-03T12:18:00.000+07:00

If you go out in the street tonight you're in for a big suprise
every easy girl you know is through with you awful guys

for ever whore that ever there was
is on a break tonight because
tonight's the night the bar girls have their picnic

They don't give a fuck if you're rich or not, they don't want to see your tattoo
you can't even soften them up because no one is selling booze

No alcohol on election day
so angry drunks can vote Thaksin away
today's the day the bar girls have their picnic

Yep, it was fake election day yesterday. Continuous protests have been taking place in Bangkok for the last few months to get rid of Caretaker Prime Minister Thaksin because he's kind of a greedy bastard. To make sure people voted, all restaurants and bars were closed last night. This of course put the many bar girls out of the job for a night, so they took their makeup off and had dinner together at the food stands, or strolled along the moat together and laughed at their desperate and horny clients frantically looking for a hole to plug.

And by 12 o'clock they all went to bed because they're tired little hoes

April Abandoned

2006-04-01T17:22:00.000+07:00

Chiang Mai greeted my flight from Kuala Lumpur with a dense blanket of filthy nicotine-yellow haze. The cab driver told me that they had been burning the mountain this time of year -- which I assume means clearing the underbrush. The entire city was half choked with smoke and even during daylight I couldn't see the mountains from my balcony. So we planned a camping trip to the burning mountains to get above the smoke.

From Doi Pui, which in Thai literally means Pui Mountain, Will, Liz and I looked out over the gray of the city. As the sun set, the gray turned cafe au lait creamy, and as the city lights lit one by one, it was as if watching a Polaroid picture develop, and the city slowly outlined itself -- the square of the moat, the eliptical lakes, the barren stretch of the airport. The air was cool, dark and quiet as we sat by the fire drinking tall Singha beers and smoking Dunhills. All we were missing was the harmonica to soundtrack us as we wondered whethere there were any wild tigers left in thailand; the decision that there weren't didn't stop any of us from jumping a nerve every time a stick cracked in the distance.

There has been a rapid non-tiger related evacuation of tourists and expats from Chiang Mai. Maybe called back to their Nordic homes to resume a life with pockets full of small change and responsibility. This of course means that the generations of expats without a normal world to return to, remain here and continue to soak in their own atavistic depravity. A bald guy in a sarong buys soy milk and 100 pipers scotch in an ultra-modern fluorescent-lit grocery store. Why do they dress and act this way here in Thailand? The Thai people never dress as the androgynous tatterdemalion -- the inspiration comes from somewhere else, perhaps a separate cultural force but then again, culture cannot explain such grotesque and sudden mutation.

It's the expat gene.

I'm convinced now that the gene, when active, essentially dopes the host body into a delusive state. The concept of time is lost along with that of hygiene and the ability to censor one's own use of the N-Word in the presence of those who find it terribly offensive. Honestly, I didn't think people still said that word. The gene's doping, which is chemical in nature, coincides with a release of pheremones, which help the carriers identify fellow expats: in recognition, the individual will look at one of his own with a half-nod and grim smirk, a look that says "you know everything i know, we speak the same language brother, we have no secrets, I too will have a Chang beer, later, i would fancy a bantering idiotic conversation in a British accent devoid of consonants."

Exhibit A would be the man I played pool with the other night who was about two drinks away from a wheel chair you move with your tongue. His effort to pull the cue back to take a shot would either dislodge the stick from the knuckle he was balancing on, or pull him two stumbling steps back away from the table. I couldn't understand a word he said, but when he scratched a shot, or totally miscued, he still had the ability to look at me in a cocky way that said "that is really unlike me to miss that shot" my only response was to look back at him in a way that said "do you need a bucket?" But he didn't barf. And eventually I scratched on the eight ball entirely because he left every single one of his balls on the table leaving too many obstacles. He won by losing.

Maybe that's a good expat slogan: "Be a loser and win!"

Of course, not everybody has the balls to do it.

Corporate Adventures

2006-03-16T15:05:00.000+07:00

Kuala Lumpur sounds like the name of some kind of skin disease doesn't it? I'm imagining furry cysts -- are you?

This city is almost exactly what I expected. It's gone through startling rapid cosmeticpolitan restructuring in the last 10 years or so and everything smells like it just came out of the styrofoam. Since the Formula 1 Grand Prix is beginning tomorrow, the boutique malls are having BMW showcases, a Ferrari is parked in front of a mall called Lot 10 (which the writer Zia Sardar said sounds like the name of a gravesite), and TAG Heuer is screaming about their limited edition Monaco watches. Like TAG, the city finds its glory in the successful accumulation of the best parts and elements from around the world while being, itself, not much more than an assembly plant: fancy, decorative, but without soul.

Still, there's something I like about the place, which is that it is the perfect city for corporate tourism. It's with some unhealthy pleasure that I enjoy sitting at the LaVazza coffee stand and watching the businessmen banter with eachother, each vying to be the center of attention and nobody really listening to one another. Or watching the destitute older Englishman with his sleave cuffs rolled up to the forearm, running a hand through his hair and staring wide eyed into the distance, ten feet past the end of his rope with the workaholic's variety of delerium tremens. At the skybridge between the Petronas Towers -- tallest twin towers in the world -- I spent most of my time looking at a guy on the fifty-second floor talking on his cell phone and paid little attention to the hazy half-city / half-jungle scape. How do they live this life of business? What do they think of us from the outside world?

Do your people use Wi-Fi?

My first day here I accidentally ate half a chicken. It showed up in a big bowl, much bigger than I had anticipated for the price, probably meant for a small community or the break fast for a couple of hunger strikers. As passerbys looked at my plate and then up at me: "that's right," I said, "I'm going to eat all of this." And I did.

This is also a Muslim country, Malaysia, which makes me a bit self-conscious about being Jewish AND American. I thought I was busted today when I guy stopped me in a mall and started staring at my face, floating his head around like he was peering at me from behind a boulder. He later told me he was an astrologist, numerologist, and face reader and that I was a very lucky man. "I see it in your face" he said drawing circles around his own nose, "right here." I guess my luck is as plain as the nose on my face, like my ethnicity. But he didn't mention it. He just told me that my luck was going to end and did I want to talk about it.

No. I don't want to talk about it.

Tonight, my new friend Hunch, who works at the visitor center at the Petronas towers is going to take me to a happening night club so I can see a traditional ceremony of the corporate people. It's also ladies night -- if I can find a burkha maybe I can get my free margarita.

Tomorrow it's off to the Formula 1 track to see cars go fast. I hope I'm dumb enough to appreciate it.

Friend Hunt

2006-03-05T16:33:00.000+07:00

Sadly, Nuan Pranee Guest House has been changing in the last week. Three of my friends have left. Martin and Aurora the Canadian couple have returned to the icy glacial lakes of Annapolis Nova Scotia and Parker, the cool and enigmatic California shaman is following his impulsive curiosity to Australia.

Parker played an interesting role here at the guesthouse. He had a lot of battles with the landlords. He refused to have them tile around the sink in his bathroom, as they did for every one else, which created a bizarre tension between the two parties. He was also proud of the fact that he had stolen so many towels behind the owners’ backs. Or so he thought, since the owners were fully aware and even asked me one day why Parker was always stealing towels.

We talked for about an hour before he left. He told me basically that his plan is to live in such a way that he can exist without letting anxious, guilty, or just inconvenient thoughts get in his way. To live without having to constantly worry about goals and achievements. In other words: to do nothing. To happily exist, travel, wander where his interest is keen and simply enjoy life without being bothered by the burden of ambition. He supports himself with property that he owns and rents out in Austin Texas, using the money to push himself along like a lonesome cosmic prairie weed.

The change left me pretty depressed for a few days as I realized that friends without demons (or at least with benign lazy demons) were hard to find. Every time one of the good ones leaves you know its going to be another long recruiting process for the next play pal:

"So you’re from?"

"England" (-1)

"You know anybody in Thailand?"

"Yeah I have a few Thai friends" (+1)

"How do you know them?"

"From having sex with them, mostly" (-3)

"OK here’s a scenario, it’s 10:00 in the morning..."

"Why the fuck am I up at 10 in the morning?" (-3)

"You just woke up"

"Not bloody likely" (-3)

"Well pretend you did. What’s the first thing you do?"

"Have a beer?" (-3)

So, I stick to the routines that work: swimming, coffee, writing, and now: playing dominoes with Billy and the Thai ladies down the alley. The game sounds like this: "Why you try to cheat old man?" – "Hey, no talking Thai at the table!" – "you too old to think so much old man" – "not too old to count how much money you owe me." It’s like a cross-cultural version of "Crossfire"and just as monotonous and pointless.

Luckily I have also found a new bar. It is owned by an American (+3) and called the Pirate’s Cove (+1000) it is also very close to where I live. It just opened and celebrated the event with an entire roast pig which was spitted and cooked on the sidewalk in front of the bar. My kind of place.

Recently I actually had a chance to hang out with my all-American peers. About forty people my age got together at the rooftop pool of the Hillside Condo, where one of the folks lived. It was a collection of English teachers, Peace Corps members, a Japanese map maker, international highschool students and international slackers partying like it was homecoming at Iowa State. I always had a suspicion that there was a large community of people like me living in Chiang Mai, making their own way, but the party showed the trend to be peopled en masse. There wasn’t a lot of talk about career this, and internship / fellowship that because I guess it was clear that to be invited to this party you must have sidestepped that route already.

But after figuring out with somebody that we had actually met five years ago in Princeton, the web strings came to tension. It became obvious that not only am I associating with this certain class of people right now, I’ve known them all my life, and they will be there throughout. It sort of feels like your being followed. Not in a bad menacing way; it’s more like you have a train of toilet paper stuck to the bottom of your shoe when you’ve just walked out of the men’s room: Makes you look back for a moment and realize where you’re coming from.

Or maybe I think too much like old man.

Slice of Pie

2006-03-04T14:29:00.000+07:00

Nesting. It's gotten to the point where my room actually looks like somebody lives there. On the little balcony there is an electric wok that I really only use to boil water. There is art on the walls: a photograph of Elvis with the King of Thailand from some time during the Korean War. Elvis is sitting next to the queen and has shifted in his chair so that one leg is on the queen's chair and she has shifted away from him, she looks very anxious and it makes you wonder just what Elvis is pointing out to her. Looks like he might be saying "see that! Isn't that weird? What do you call that anyway?" The king is looking at Elvis with his jaw agape. I have a desk, with two wooden statues on it. Newspapers are piling up so the eccentric paranoid shut-in hermit look is starting to suggest itself, which is the basic gist of my decorating style. And I have two plants which, unlike every other plant I've ever had, aren't dead yet. So that's a plus.

But I was able to make it out of Chiang Mai recently by taking a trip up to Pai pronounced and from now on spelled "Pie". To get to this town you have to drive on Mobius strip twisted roads that wind through the mountains. I discovered the road when I was out prowling around one day in what I thought was a secluded seldom-tourist-reached area only to accidentally turn on to a well kept hightway with a lot of white people on it. Eventually the terrain levels out and you descend into a spread out, wide valley floor. A few farms are arranged around a thing stream. The main town is nothing but a collection of long dusty quiet streets. It is more like the American Old West than Tombstone Arizona. There are a lot of old dark saloons, and a few people stopped on motorbikes at one of the three traffic lights in town. There were some greasy white people drinking coffee, talking quietly and slowly eyeing the scene. A few dogs were nosing around some garbage. I found a gusthouse witha shady palm-tree garden and a front porch which inspired lethargy. Aside from the drug rumors, I couldn't figure out why people were always talking about this place.

Then I turned the corner.

This is where I realized that Pie is actually not in Thailand, but an hour or two outside of Santa Barbara. A flock of hemp shirts and sarongs squawked around bead vendors and cappuccino shops. The dusty road was trampled flat by the soles of many a stinking Birkenstock. An upscale restaurant offered California wine and an internet shop had bean bags instead of chairs. The hippies sat around gazing through their squinty weed-shot eyes and talked about massages, crystal healing and trekking.

I sat around reading In Cold Blood in front of a convenience store and was asked 5 times in an hour for a light, twice where the bus station was, and once where someone could find condoms. There was a lot of interaction in this tiny town and it was clear that some people had no intention of ever leaving.

I was handed a pamphlet with an calendar on it:

Monday: Guided meditation to discover original nature, with Stan. (I think Stan is the one that handed it to me: a man who simply said he was from Pie, in a way that suggested he was materialized here at the age of fifty-something and had never lived in Oregon or upstate-anywhere as I'm sure he did.)

Wednesday: Reiki Share. (Reiki is a kind of healing massage... I'm sorry, I meant happy hippy touching time)
this is followed by the Spaghetti Dinner & Music Jam

Friday: International Dinner with French Chef & Music Jam
This is hippy summer camp. I thought that life in Chiang Mai was too easy, but this place can really take the cynicism and sarcasm out of you right quick. I was a real thorn in the slip n' slide here. There is also a large constituency of gorgeous women all over the age of 40. Maybe it's the vegan diets or the natural soap or the white water rafting or circular breathing, it was an apparent trend.

At night I took the motorbike out of the city a little ways. It's not much of a city and to get out of it takes about 10 minutes. It was very cold, a welcome relief, and very dark, so I went searching for a good star view. With the spread out desert land, it was easy to find a place without too much obstruction. On the other hand it was hard to find a place without wild dogs chasing you.
I stopped the bike on one hill and took the keys out of the ignition. I was gazing up at the milky way and thinking all my profound thoughts: "I wonder what E.T. is doing RIGHT now?" When a dog poked its little yellow head around the corner at me. It cocked its brow and got a big doggy smile on its face. Then it started barking its head off. Another small brown dog came up and started barking at me. I fumbled with the keys, trying to find the ignition slot in the dark. More goddamn dogs. They started walking towards me real slow, like Puppy West Side Story. My hands were shaking, I finally got the thing started and tore straight towards them, breaking up the ranks and splitting the scene as I heard gates opening and people yelling at the dogs in Thai.

I returned to my allowed and alllowed the sweet sound of drunk bantering Israelis in the courtyard lull me to sleep.

Dick Cheney's Ping Pong Show

2006-02-14T17:29:00.000+07:00

Bangkok still sort of sucks.

I just got back from the big city and have been exfoliating ever since. But if you're going to be in Bangkok its good to have a reason, because to show up without an agenda is to throw yourself into a potluck of possible debaucherous activities. Bangkok is a roulette table you are the ball, Satan the croupier, and Lady Luck is a pock-faced hooker in knee highs with a gift for ping pong.

I was there for a tattoo festival.

Hoping to get a story out of the event, billed as the 1st World Tattoo Arts Festival and Exhibition -- it's not the first, by the way, there are many like it -- I figured I'd find a story and at least hand out some of my new business cards: "Gabriel B. Z. Joselow; freelance writer, chiang mai."

The event was certainly interesting: reaching its climax when a bunch of conspicuously un-tattooed B-list celebrities paraded around on a stage and giggled and screamed as the leader of a Thai ska band asked the crowd "You guys like ska and reggae music? .... No? .... oh well!" And reaching its low point when the lights went off in the middle of the "Best Lady Tattoo" (as in tattoo of a lady not on a lady) leaving the twenty or so tattoo artists working at the time, without light.

My favorite tattoos in order:

#1 the Virgin Mary holding the hand of the Elephant God Ganesh
#2 a portrait of Leonardo DiVinci in which DiVinci's face is the face of the Taiwanese tattoo owner
#3 Electric pharaoh Slot Machine

The article turned out pretty well, although I didn't get to use my new favorite words: chthonic, mellifluous, or terraqueous even though I could have. We'll see if it gets bought.

For some reason, the neighborhood I stayed in had a lot of "Translation and Marriage License" shops: it was the wife market. I didn't get one. Meanwhile, to kill time at night, it was off to Sukumvit Road, which was once my favorite street in Bangkok. This is the street off of which the infamous Soi Cowboy resides -- the Reno, Nevada of Bangkok. It is a street with a lot of strip clubs and girly bars, and it is also lined with vendors selling knock-off goods. Interestingly, the vendors are all deaf-mutes and communicate to each other across the sidewalk with their hands. There is also a baby elephant that is paraded around on one particular corner -- I'd free him, but then I wouldn't know what to do with him.... feed him I guess.
As I was strolling around this particular night, a small, professorial, goat-like British man came up to me. He was wearing a t-shirt and shorts, but looked like he would have been more comfortable in tweed. In a slow and proper British accent he asked: "excuse me, could you tell me where I could find a go-go bar?" Pronouncing the "go" syllable slowly and securely as if he were trying to teach one how to say it. But hell, the guy asked an honest question and I didn't hesitated for a moment: "yeah, right down there, Soi 23 look for a street called Soi Cowboy, you'll find a ton of 'em." And he shuffled off towards "Bush Gardens" or "After School" any one of the themed go-go bars and probably had himself a good spot of tea and a handjob.

But once again, I am back in majestic Chiang Mai. The weather report in the newspaper had little icon of a man in a scarf and knit cap -- ie, cold -- and the temperature was 17-32 C (62-90 F) I hear it's snowing in DC and New York. Well, it's hot as Balzac here. Last night I went to my one regular bar to relax after stressing out over my tattoo story. My bargirl friends there welcomed me back from Bangkok by saying: "you look black" and "your haircut not handsome" and "where is your handsome friend?" and "why you so tired?" Good to be back.

I also read that Dick Cheney shot a 78 year old lawyer from Austin -- good for him.

2006-01-27T12:06:00.000+07:00

"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.

Tit for Tat

2006-01-16T20:08:00.000+07:00

Last week I chased down a story about the protests over the Thai -- USA Free Trade Agreement talks that were being held in Chiang Mai. But after chasing down leads, interviewing organizers, flying to Lamphun on my motorbike when I was supposed to go to Lampang, blitzkrieging a story as the internet cafe threatened to pull the plug on me -- I found that I had nobody to sell the story to. Tried a paper or two in the states, but they had, of course, already contracted somebody from Bangkok to write the piece for them. So now I have an unpublished clip.

The guy that helped me out with that story was a British fellow named Peter who showed up at the protest with me with seven bags of chili powder in his pockets to blind the police with, aspirin, and a few packets of vaseline to grease his arms with and to smear on the police helmets to block their vision.

There was no real threat though. We sat in a huddle by the doors of the Sheraton as International negoiators met inside. The cops were surrounding us, but, in the Thai way, they were smiling and chatting with each other, singing along with the protest songs, and even accepting the propoganda that the activists passed out to them -- politely folding the leaflets away. There were some pushing and shoving that we didn't see, and apparently the cops hit some HIV infected that had swum across the river to get into the Sheraton -- but after it was all over, one of the chief cops made the announcement: "we are very sorry if anybody was hurt by the police, and we will pay their medical bills if they were."

Sure they're corrupt, but only in the 200 baht speeding fine kind of way, which they only abashedly accept.

But during my rushing around and this and that, I met an Australian freelancer at a bookstore.

"Hey, so what do you do around here, Gabe?"

"well, I'm uhh, trying to become a writer, like, you know, a journalist"

"Cool, let me ask you something: Do you like snakes?"

Now I'm working for an Austrian TV producer who is doing a bit about a snake charmer in Mae Rim. I am the American student who wants to learn the art of snake handling. The grand master snake charmer, "snakeman," is a stocky little Thai man who does not speak any English -- but it is a wonder to watch him work: handling the snake deftly between his nine graceful fingers. He kisses them, milks the poison from their fangs, and battles a python in a small pool of water on a little stage as an announcer narrates the event through a tinny PA system in broken English. Yes, Thai pop music plays during the show as well.

At some point in the next couple of days I am probably going to be handling a cobra. I'm also going to work on my own story about the experience, with my Auzzie friend, and sell it off in Thailand. For some reason, I have no real fear of snakes. I was right there with them, playing with the python, staring down the cobra, no problem at all. Maybe I should be the next snakeman.

So this is my next few days. Pictures to follow.

Aside from this, I have signed on for three months at a guesthouse in the old city. This was, in retrospect, a very poor choice. Although I get a tv, DVD player, cable, refrigerator, and internet, there is a Thai disco down the street that plays horrible music until 2:30 in the morning, and a construction site right next door that begins work at 8 in the morning, which guarantees that I get no more than five hours of sleep a night. I'll either get used to it or go nocturnal ... and kill, kill, kill.

Back in Chiang Mai -- The Edge of the Abyss

2006-01-06T11:35:00.000+07:00

"I was about ready to punch Webster right out, the Evangelical prick. If you don't want me to smoke, just ask me, and I won't smoke. I'm a vegetarian, have been for 20 years, but I'll cook you up a steak if you ask me nice."

This was the Scotsman, nearly chewing off his own tongue as we spoke on his last day in Chiang Mai -- his going away party.

Next to him is Webster, who I can't figure out yet. Hates his family, seems to hate America -- I mean, if you find California to be too hardened, you've been rubbed seriously raw.

"So is the breakfast good at the Blue Diamond, Webster?"

"Yes, it is delightful. I had the fruit salad. It had oranges, apples, bananas..." Long pause, Parker goes into his thousand yard stare. Whatever his demons happen to be, they've nearly incapacitated him. He speaks robotically, his grey eyes caught on some distant object, perhaps calculating, perhaps trying to remember exactly where he was when the bus finally broke down.... "Papaya."

He broke his hip in a motorbike accident and has been confined to his room, demanding pot from his caretakers.

This is the world of the standard Chiang Mai expat that I have re-entered. Everyone has their demons, I've decided. Sometimes its as simple as sex -- when yesterday I saw a morbidly unattractive man, who looked something like fetal alcohol syndrome advanced 50 years, with a very loving and attentive Thai girl, I wasn't surprised. Thai culture doesn't bother too much with aesthetics in that way, he was treating her well, she was happy, something he couldn't get in the west. No problem.

But there are other demons, the ones that are hidden a little deeper in the back of the Irish and English bars mostly. Signs in Chiang Mai such as "do not molest street children" and "we are not an escort service" evidence the degree of the sexpat phenomenon.

Then there are the angry people. The fat black middle-aged American screaming at the attendant in an internet cafe had obviously reached the knot at the end of his rope in the States so he simply lashed it on to Chiang Mai and started back towards the other end.

It is a fascinating place that waffles between being a kind of Bohemian, intellectual refuge, laced with a million excellent used bookstores -- where a variety of translations of Homer can be found, thankfully -- but it is also a stomping ground for the perpetually depraved, those sucking the lees at the bottom of the cask.

On another topic: funny signs!!

I drove by a kennel, pet-sitting kind of place that advertised with a big carefully made and illuminated sign: "your pets are in our custodian!"

Well, can he take them out, please?

So I'll be sticking around this joint for a while. Got myself a wordprocessor and a motorbike, just need a house and a girlfriend and I'm all set.. Though a job would be nice too.

updated my Webshots page -- deciding that Flickr sucks -- so if anyone is interested in some pics: http://community.webshots.com/user/allstargangstabiotch

But Honestly...

2005-12-28T12:10:00.000+07:00

My own blog is officially behind a firewall and I cannot view it, at least not in Vietnam.

This is part of my current frustration with this country. Traveling alone, I am constantly being watched, sized up. It is paralyzing to know that every time I go outside someone is going to see me as a walking wallet and do their best to get some money out of me.

So as Lizzy, my friend in Cambodia, said "it ain't all sunshine and Buddhism out here." Being white in a place where nationality is indicated by race can be tiring.

The other day, in Hue, I went into a place called the Camel Cafe. They gave me a menu which was entirely in English I ordered, in Vietnamese, Ca Phe Su'a, (coffee with milk). While they weren't looking I found a Vietnamese menu and saw that the coffee was priced 1000 dong less, which is about 2.5 cents -- nothing. Maybe it was low blood-sugar, or maybe I was just looking for a fight, but I pointed it out to them when they brought the bill, charging me the English price.

"Why is the price different here?" pointing to the Vietnamese menu.

"This is Vietnamese menu."

"So? It's the same coffee"

"For Vietnamese people."

"So I pay more because I'm a foreigner?"

There was some discussion and eventually they gave me the Vietnamese price, 9000 dong. I handed them a 10,000 dong bill and told them to keep the change.

In Hue, I think I was also nearly hustled into an arranged marriage. While eating dinner at a little guesthouse, a twenty year old Vietnamese guy started talking to me. He was nice enough but his English was terrible, and I would soon become the victim of a terrible miscommunication.

Telling me he had some friends in town, he suggested that we go out for a cup of coffee or a beer somewhere and meet up with them. He knew some girls too, maybe they would join us. I said "fine." It seemed like a good way to kill the few hours between dinner and bed time.
But the next thing I know, I'm sitting at the kid's house, on a leather couch across from him and his parents, next to a girl, who is not the kid's sister but lives in his house. She will not look at me, but the father, an old tough guy with a fresh wound under his eye that looked like he had been raked with a fork, eyed me up and down, not smiling. There was no way I could face this as regular ol' gabe joselow so I tried a variety of different personas. As I switched from tough guy, to dandy, to seventeenth century British lawyer, to latin-scholar, I went through a variety of facial expressions; I tried a frown, a stern but understanding nod, a smile -- just to see if I could get an agreeable reaction from the parents.

Nothing worked. And it didn't matter what I said since they didn't speak English. So, in a very calm voice and with a suave smile I said, "homo sum, nil humani me et alienum puto." Finally got a smirk out of the father.

It turned out, however, that the kid was trying to convince his parents that this girl should come to Hanoi with me -- which I didn't want.

"Maybe you come back, three or four days, get coffee, she go to Hanoi with you."

"I don't want this. "

"OK, she go and maybe girlfriend, then go to English school, no problem."

The situation was very strange, and I did have to bite my lip a bit to keep from laughing out loud at the whole thing. It seemed like the girl and the kid were arguing with each other, but he would keep saying to me: "she say you very handsome."

So who knows what that was all about.

But that was Hue, a horrible little city near the DMZ, which no, I did not want to take a tour of. Now I'm in Hanoi which is a special kind of city. It's the only city in Vietnam that is still divided into different merchant districts, at least in the Old Quarter where I stay. Each street has a different trade: I live on Hardware street, just before it turns into Chinese medicine street, and around the corner from bamboo road. It is a complete maze here and easy to get lost. Now, to walk around, I just choose one street and walk straight down one side and straight back on the other.

It can't be that big, but it feels enormous. The sidewalks are crowded with people frying chicken and noodles. Motorbikes block the path elsewhere. It's like being in New York except that nobody speaks English -- so it's exactly like being in New York. (Did I use that line already?) It is also very French still. Men with Ho Chi Minh beards in turtlenecks and berets go ambling around or flying by on motorbikes. This afternoon while strolling around the lake, an older Vietnamese guy said "bonjour" to me. We spoke in French for a little while as we walked, it was exciting for me to try my high-school French out, and he was a sweet old guy.

I'll try to make the rest of the day about getting some photos of this place, I like it here.

Friday I fly out to Bangkok. I'm tired of bussing around, I'm tired of a different hotel and unfamiliar people every night so I'm skipping Laos for now and going back to Thailand. I'll meet up with Will, Liz and my friend Keith who happens to be flying in. I'll also be trying to get some work. Soon I should have a better idea of what the next 1-6 months will be like.

Electric Jesus

2005-12-26T08:20:00.000+07:00

In the spirit of doing things that make me uncomfortable, which is how I ended up in Southeast Asia in the first place, I went to a midnight mass at a church in Hue, Vietnam last night. This whole scheme started when I was eating lunch at this little cafe near my horrible little hotel. I found refuge from the sleazy cyclo drivers, who circle the block like sharks and won't take no or fuck-off for answer (though screaming gibberish and smacking myself in the face seems to work), in a place that serves terrible food and plays great music. Eating my slime and listening to BB King, the owner and I got to talking and eventually she invited me to church with her. I agreed -- never letting her in on my dark secret.

The church was teeming with people who were busy taking pictures of eachother in front of a rock. The normal assortment of food vendors camped out on the street with fry pots bubbling with mysterious wonder. There were even a few Buddhist monks in the mix, checking out the scene -- I tried to get their attention so i could say, "hey, me too, buddy -- not catholic, yeah!" thinking we could start a little club or giggle and throw paper airplanes throughout the service together. Didn't work out.

The church was built by French people in the 1960s and I think it shows. The interior, which is sort of like a droopy teapot, is decorated with a lot of acute pastel rainbow triangles. There are some mosaics of the same ilk, even a jesus with sideburns or two. The walls are painted a bright blue and everything is illumintated either with strips of neon lights or multi-color low-wat lightbulbs.

I sat next to my friend in a pew (that's what you call 'em right?) and we watched children act out the story of the creation. The kids that were trees did a good job of swaying in the breeze and giving Eve the apple; the kid that was the sun started off pretty well, but he kind of gave up on hopping around and waving his arms halfway through.

Apparently religious services are a good time for more Vietnamese pop music and everybody started doing the electric slide to a viet-pop version of some Christmas carol or other.

Every so often, when I asked my friend what was going on -- ie, who is the kid with the Yankees hat supposed to be? She would say something like, "Elizabeth, Mary's cousin, remember?"
"oh her, yeah... she looks different!"
"Do they do like this in America?"
"Uhh, yeah ... oh yeah, definitely. Only its bigger and there are more bells and, uhh, we have real Arabs play the wisemen, their beards look better than that kid's."

The crib was brought out next ... and then the extension cord. The next thing I know, the priests are carrying around a glowing neon-haloed Jesus while an altar boy follows behind with a massive spool of extension cord -- like the cable boy who follows a screaming coach around the sidelines at a football game.

When the priests carried the Jesus up to a gigantic diorama of Bethlehem, I made my exit -- but not before I could get a few pictures. So now I know the true meaning of Christmas and I'll stick to eating Chinese food; or, as the case was today, Vietnamese.

Meanwhile, I can't access my own blog or anybody else's on Blogspot, maybe Vietnam has some block on it, because I think they do things like that -- the newspapers are hilarious for that reason -- so I hope y'all can get through and if you're leaving me messages, well, thanks!

Moto Viet

2005-12-20T17:17:00.000+07:00

Well, here I am in Hoi An, having spent the last five days straddling a Vietnamese man named Yang as we rode his motorcycle from Da Lat, through the Central Highlands of Vietnam to this fairly touristy little town.
Da Lat, where I met Yang, my tour guide, is the government-appointed flower capital of Vietnam, so the flowers are all very beautiful and efficient. We arranged this five-day tour which I wanted very much to center around coffee, seeing as this area is the prime coffee growing area of Vietnam.

Coffee #1; outside a Pagoda in Da Lat which had a neon buddha and a dragon made of old French beer bottles.

"a robust and hearty blend which whispered in lofty plumes of rosewood."

After coffee #1 we had tea #1 which was an artichoke tea that advertises itself as a diuretic; so naturally we went to a waterfall after drinking it -- you can imagine how that went.

Coffee #2; about 2 hours outside of Da Lat, at the house of a coffee farming couple who, in 1987, moved to the area (Nam Ban) from Hanoi along with 90% of the other inhabitants as part of a communist economic recovery project between the provinces. We found the house in search of a rice-wine still, which was evidenced by a smoking chimney.

"Rich diesel tones yield to softer acorn aspirations amidst a sea of copper filings"

after coffee #2 we saw a flower farm, a silk factory and a mushroom farm, rolling fields of coffee terraced up the sides of the misty mountains, and elephant waterfall, all of which sounds like some kind of alice in wonderland thing -- just how far down the rabbit hole were we willing to go? Near elephant waterfall was a gigantic statue of happy buddha. Inside the statue, some monks were eating lunch and I noticed that the skylight and buddha's belly button were one in the same.

Coffee #3; at a longhouse in an ethnic minority village. We saw a couple of these minority villages; the funny thing about these villages is that when my pale face is walking around them, I'm the minority -- and actually, the way people stared or laughed or simply greeted me made me feel better about visiting the place, since their reactions were more natural and they weren't trying to sell me anything. I had my coffee by the lake which was swollen beyond its normal size and had swallowed up some of the tables outside the little cafe where I was sitting.

"a medley of earthtones confused by hazelnut's shadowy hand"

Coffee #4; the next morning in the minority village. We woke up to the sound of a thousand roosters crowing a thousand times. There was a barnyard outside our house, pigs snorting around, chickens clucking with little chicks following them. The weather was perfect as Yang and I prepared for day 2 on the road.

"brooding and quirky"

Coffee #5; that night at the next longhouse where I spent much of my time talking to a monkey who lived in a very small cage. I brought him rice and he threw his beer can toy at me.
I conspired to free him but my efforts were thwarted by the ever conservative Yang who wouldn't let me do things like free the monkey or wear my pants inside out (which sound like metaphors for the same thing ... don't they?) Here is also where I found out that even though they grow a lot of cofee in this region -- which is true as you can tell by the fields and fields of it, the carpets of beans drying out on the side of the road -- they don't actually roast it anywhere near here. So, despite all of my little descriptions of the coffee, it was probably all just Trung Nguyen, Myheco, or G7 coffee -- the three major Vietnames companies.

"disapointing and stale, gray with the pallor of whithered vanity and unmeaning dreams"

Coffee #6; in a gazebo which overlooked a waterfall, the weather is perfect. We are on our way to Kon Tum, little town by the mountains, by way of a tiny town, four houses long, where the central concern is cock-fighting. Here we saw a group of toothless men throw two birds at each other in the middle of a ring made of motorbikes. This was not a legitimate fight, just a practice round. The birds would be strapped with razors for the real deal. Here they just ruffled each other's feathers a bit.

"a flirtatious aroma combined with a gossipy glue-flavor glows with sandalwood jealousy."

The trip was cold and rainy after that point, though there were some great mountain views. There was also much karaoke singing at night, seems that Take Me Home Country Roads is pretty popular out here, though nobody is really sure what West Virginia is.

Children waved at us. We saw a battlefield or two; some of the hills are still a bit bald from the defoliants used in the war. In Kon Tum we ate something that Yang could only describe as "a porcupine without quills" so my best guess is some kind of wiesel. I Also had Kangaroo in Saigon, so add those to the list.

In one town, sometime after coffee #8, we stopped to stretch our legs. Within five minutes of doing so, I had a girlfriend who had introduced me to her father and some of her 16 brothers and sisters. We had a little rice wine but I politely refused the plate of pig intestines.
The trip ended after we rode a good deal of the Ho Chi Minh trail, which twisted and turned through the compact and cold mountains that separate the highlands from the lowlands and the dry season from the rainy. So now its raining and it won't stop until February.

To Hanoi!

Ride the Snake

2005-12-13T18:29:00.000+07:00

Good morning beard
Originally uploaded by Gabe Joselow.

Saigon... shit.

I'm still only in Saigon.

Every time I think I'm going towake up back in the jungle.

Of Marx and Minh

2005-12-11T12:55:00.000+07:00

On peaceful, sunset-perfect Sam Mountain, in Chau Doc, Vietnam -- a town which crowds a bend of the Mekong River -- I found myself simultaneously in the most beautiful surroundings, and the most uncomfortable situation. In other words, it happened again; I met some folks that I thought would be normal, maybe good for a drink and a conversation, and they turned out to be completely nuts. All I know is that I made plans with this British / South African couple to go to a place called the Bamboo Bar, on the second floor of glitzy hotel in Chau Doc. Turns out the guy wants to watch The Matrix instead and the next thing I know these two are fighting and I hear the words "Fine! If you want to go get drinks with your American, go ahead!"

Thus furthering my future as a sociopath: all set to move to Montana, grow a big beard and a little garden, eat what I can shoot, write letters to the "govment" which accuse the ""Jew run media" of ruining my life, and call my new independent nation "Lobstertonia" -- I've got the flag all figured out.

I hightailed it to Cam Tho. Now, when I decided to go to Cam Tho I had no idea that there was only one thing to do there, which is, go to the floating market. I thought of the town as just another small stop in the Mekong Delta where I could mess around, take a picture of the giant tin-man "Uncle Ho" statue and proceed merrily on my way. But no. Instead, when I arrived at my guest house, I was immediately harassed about this floating market thing by a man who spoke English incredibly quickly as he pointed to a grubby, laminated, hand-drawn map detailing the floating market trip:

"you leave 5 in the morning, watch sunrise, go to market, very busy, go to another market, see fruit orchard, very nice monkey bridge. 15 dollar."
"uhh, no thanks, I don't think I want to go to the floating market."
"ok, ok, for you, since you are guest at this house, 10 dollar."
"no, it's not the money, I just don't think this is my thing, not into it. Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm going to go to the bathroom."

Which I did. He was gone when I came back to my room, but 5 minutes later: knock knock. It was a goddamn intervention! Four people came to my door.

"Why you no go to market? You want to go, just four hours."

I should explain something here. There are two reasons that I don't want to go to the floating market:

#1 As much as I'm hassled to buy things on the street (and I hate things) by every single person who passes me, I can only imagine what I would face, stranded in a dinghy, by myself, in the middle of a floating market. Great, I'm buying things while I'm on a boat. (mom, guess what?? I'm calling you from an airplane!!; It's a bowl and it's bread!; a potato-powered clock!!??)

#2 I hate being pressured. Their insistence only fueled my resistance. No, I''m not going. Fuck 'em.

"Look, it's just not my thing alright?"
"just four hour, please, you pay 9 dollar"
"look, why is this so hard for you to understand -- no market!"
"but, all tourists go to floating market"
"yeah, well."

I actually liked Cam Tho town. (Cam Tho races ... doo dah doo dah) The town had a good flow to it, with a nice promenade of sorts by the river, and a floating karaoke barge which I like to imagine pirating other ships on the Mekong, forcing their captives to sing "Hotel California" at knife point.

With no one to know and nothing to do, I ended up playing pool with the bell hop of a nice hotel -- we became friends and now he wants me to invite him to the wedding (?)

But I bought a ticket for Saigon and left in the morning. On my way out, the owner of my guest house took me aside and assured me that the floating market was in fact a ripoff.

Here I am in Saigon, refusing to call it Ho Chi Minh City, though I was greeted with giant billboard depicting a bust of Marx and a bust of Minh in heroic profile. There are gold stars and sickle and hammers everywhere. The economy seems to be pretty sharp here too, they've introduced a lot of private businesses into the city -- very few of which are American.

The best thing here so far was Reunification Palace -- formerly Presidential Palace and at some point Independence Palace. If Elvis had been the president of South Vietnam in the 60's, this is what his Palace / Command Center would look like. Stuffed tiger in the shag carpeted office; barrel shaped bar in the gambling-centered game room; private movie theater; and an indoor garden with a waterfall.

I'll be sticking around Saigon for a while, very much enjoying this city as I re-read Michael Herr's Dispatches and telling people "no thank you" every five goddamn minutes.

Yes, I Will Do the Opposite

2005-12-06T18:54:00.000+07:00

I ate some snake. First I played with it a little bit, then I ate it. The skin was really rubbery, hard to get through, but the meat underneath was tasty. In the morning I ate a frog. It was also quite tasty. After that I had a cricket which tasted like a peanut. So for better or for worse there are a lot of things that I like about Cambodia.

Phnom Pehn is as hard to like as it is to pronounce -- but I'm getting the hang of it.

My first night here, I met up with my college friend Lizzy and we went to the Foreign Correspondents Club. This club is situated in a French styled building by the Tonle Sap (river). Sitting by a railing at the top, listening to the tinklings of light acid jazz, you really feel imperial. Like some colonial field officer who has returned from the frontier to join his gentleman friends for a snifter of brandy. Here I met an American woman who has been living in Bangkok for 2 years and was traveling to Phnom Pehn on business -- she is an editor for a travel magazine publishing group. We talked for a bit and I told her I was a writer and all of that and she suggested that I could try to write something on Phnom Pehn. Something positive and culturally sensitive. This is like the seven-ten split of writing and pushes even the limits of creative non-fiction.

Phnom Pehn, to say the least, is a lot closer to Baghdad than it is to Zurich on the Mercer list of best places to live. To write a positive piece about the place seems like a real challenge. As far as I can tell, people really only come here as a stopping point between Vietnam (or Thailand) and Angkor Wat. So aside from me, the only people that seem to enjoy this city are drug addicts and sexual predators.

So I started taking notes and think that I might come up with a kind of story on the educational benefits of catastrophe tourism. The most interesting thing about this city is its sad and tragic history. The city is impressive in the perspective of the Killing Fields. Without seeing those, I would not be able to appreciate the seemingly small progressive steps this place has made. And, like going to the Foreign Correspondents Club, you have a much better time enjoying your personal luxuries here after you've been coughing on Diesel fumes and dust all day.

Meanwhile, Cambodian people have been extremely nice in the city. The best night I had was hanging out in front of the Royal Palace with my guide's friends joking around and cheersing our beers every six seconds. And if there is one thing I've noticed it's that they are all very positive: by which I mean affirmative: by which I mean, if you ask for a menu, the server will say "yes" and not bring it to you. "No ice in my beer please," "yes," plink...plink... Or, try asking a moto driver if he knows how to get to, say, independence monument, he will say "yes, yes" and drive you in whatever direction you are facing, then say back to you "you know?" slowly pull over and shrug his shoulders. From what I can figure, you have a 50% chance of someone actually doing what you ask them and 50% that they will do the opposite.

Another thing that really gets you down about the city are the number of beggars and street children. The kids are so young and they are very sassy with their English. Very cute and I try to help out a few a day but just can't help everyone. Then there are the boys sniffing glue outside the pharmacies, the saddest sight of all. They stumble around with these fishbowl eyes and it really is difficult to take buuuuut good for the catastrophe tourist to see.

Oh, and if my accounts of Cambodian street people is not enough for you, you can always read Nikki Sixx's thoughts: http://www.nikkisixx.net/Graveyard/

Education leads to job creation? Brilliant Nikki! Why didn't we think of that in the first place, well we can save the whole damn country now can't we? Nevermind the fact that the executive branch is too corrupt to function and that every intellectual the country had was murdered in the 70s or that electricity is luxury. The economy sucks; if there was a market for naked children, open fires and herds of sheep rooting around the gutter outside your guesthouse, Cambodia would have it cornered! But at least you always know when things get bad you can count on Motley Crue: a good name for an NGO too.

Aww golly, now I've got myself all political -- another 5 minute expert on Cambodia. Anyhow, I'm leaving with or without a story. Maybe before I go Lizzy and I will see another Filipino, rock-cover band, they seem to be in abundance.

Its been dandy, but its off on the early boat down the Mekong to Ho Chi Minh City... I've been waiting a long time for this.

Fido wins big -- takes the bus

2005-11-30T16:35:00.000+07:00

I woke up in Bangkok to this horrible wailing. It was the PA system outside my hotel room which plays Thai songs at 8 in the morning. The first time I stayed in Bangkok this struck me as weird. Why they would play a song, that sounds surprisingly like my Bar Mitvah passage, that loud at that time of day seemed bizarre. But then I turned off my faculties of reason and began to understand Bangkok with a more "wtf" mindset.
"Oh," it struck me, "of course! Why WOULDN'T they be playing the Mexican hat dance [and they were] at 8:10 in the morning! What a fool I am!"

My traveling companion is now a middle aged Iranian / Swedish man. I was a little concerned about him at first because when I met him he was refusing to pay a tuk-tuk driver a price that I had paid for a ride from the train station to the hotel we both ended up at in Aranyapathet, on the Thai - Cambodia border. He's turned out to actually be a fairly good companion, mainly because he doesn't drink, and he's Scrooge-careful with his money. He's better than my last companions who were drunks; it was hard to fight their boozy demands and put up with their redundancy. The new guy is still obnoxious, however, and I aint crying no tears when I finally get rid of him.

I've discovered that the name "Gabriel" is very difficult for people to say here, and Gabe often becomes "Gave" "Gab" or "Gay" which I don't much cotton to (not that there's anything wrong with that). So I've taken on some names that I thought would be easier to pronounce. The new names also have new identities, which I think they posses inherently. The one I'm currently using is Fido Peterson: He owns a sugar refinery and was recently voted one of the top 15 (well, 15th) most eligible local bachelors by The Baltimorian Magazine. Every year he hosts a charity gala in which he auctions off one of his Rolls Royce's for the benefit of a Shriner Children's Hospital. When some Willy Wonka comparisons evolved into unwarranted accusations of pedophilia, Fido left the country in search of the perfect sugar cane. Of course, traveling to Cambodia does not relieve the public's doubts about the dubious nature of his character.

Gregory Fink: Former child piano prodigy. Had to end his career after severe adolescent weight gain caused him to lose ability in his hands due to poorer circulation (he also developed diabetes); he had to end his piano playing career, and now he is exploring the world enjoying the new life that stomach stapling has brought him.

Charlie Orchid: manages a Finnish rock group called "Centerfuge"

Laramie Block: anthropologist

Jack Lingo: we all know what he does.

So Cambodia is great. I crossed the border yesterday, which was not such a big problem. Immediately upon crossing over you see two massive casinos. My first thought was, "gee, I thought Cambodia was supposed to be so undeveloped ... Well, I'm an idiot." But immediately behind these casinos, is the world of busted streets, ragged vendors and, the number one sign that you're in the third world, wheel barrows stacked 15 feet high with 100 pound burlap sacks full of God-knows, lumbering down the street on suffering tires with any number of people riding along.

It wasn't my plan or intention, but with some time to kill before my bus to Siem Reap, my Iranian and I went to one of the casinos. The casino was mostly for Thai people and money was exchanged in Baht. We went to a 200 baht ($5) minimum bet black-jack table. I had an amazing streak of luck and walked away with about 1400 ($40) in winnings. The next thing I know I'm sitting at a casino buffet, in Cambodia, with a pocketful of money, and I couldn't help but feel a little guilty. It didn't seem right to be at an all-you-can-eat, wasting food in this country. But my winnings did pay for my visa, or my ticket to angkor wat, or those sculptures I bought in Thailand so I can always spend it well.

The bus ride from Poipet (Cambodian border town) to Siem Reap was unbelievably rough. The roads were misshapen to say the least and I was bounced around like a damn pinball for 5 hours. The way it was moving was like riding on a cheap claymation bus, or the Philadelphia experiment. There are a lot of people living by the side of the road in little stilt houses, often near some lake or pool of water: I like to think that maybe they were once riding the same bus that I was on just decided to stop where they were rather than continue on that turbulent ride: "You know what? Screw it. I'll just live here, ok? "

We were all much relieved to arrive in this guest house in Siem Reap. This place is truly great. When we got off the bus we were greeted by a dozen young Cambodian guys who live at the guest house as workers and who you hire to drive you around Angkor Wat. They are also really a lot of fun. I have bonded with some of them over WWE wrestling, which is popular around here. I don't know THAT much about wrestling, but since all else they got on TV is them foreign shows, I'm happy to watch some monsters throw each other around a ring. (Ric Flaya: Natura boy!!)

Went out to a nightclub last night. Somehow ended up on some kind of platform, dancing with some girl. I told her that she danced like it was her job. Turned out it was her job so I stopped dancing with her. Apparently, any girl that you meet in a bar works there. I imagined myself asking the bartender "This girl I talk to --I must pay?" and decided that I should probably just lay low in this place. The poor girls, my friend explained to me, go out to make money, the rich girls are not allowed to go out at all. It's a sad sight and I was unfortunately, and unwittingly, taken to a place called "Hollywood Massage;" the women there are very beautiful, but its a turn-off when they are all sitting on a set of velvet bleachers with numbers pinned to their chests. I let my traveling companion do his thing and got the hell out of there.

Went to Angkor Wat today. For some reason we left at 5 in the morning -- I think so we could watch the sun rise over the main temple. NOT WORTH IT. But the temples are certainly worth it. What can I say about them though: they're ancient ruins, you can climb all over them -- no ropes or anything stopping you, and it's in a beautiful cool forest where I saw a monkey on the side of the road -- he looked like Clint Eastwood.

I should be here in the ol' Siem Reap for another couple of days, and then I'm off to Phnom Pehn -- the capital. Cambodia is special. I like it very much.

Purple Rain (to be continued...)

2005-11-26T15:13:00.000+07:00

I've been in Ko Tao for a number of days now. The sea between Ko Samui and Ko Tao was especially turbulent the day that I left, which produced a scene of absolute horror inside the ferry. As the ship careened off of white-capped waves, the ship's crew walked down the aisles handing out plastic bags: which is not a good sign. The entire cabin was suddenly transformed into a high school girl's bathroom at lunch time the week before prom -- barf city. Of course, this bulemia en-masse could have been triggered by the movie Be Cool, which they were showing, just as easily as by the heaving seas -- sorry, bad word choice.

To escape the chunk bunk I went outside, on top of the mighty vessel, where I was joined by my French-Canadian friend Jean-Paul, who stood at the railing laughing like some deranged sea captain, howling into the froth and foam which exploded over the deck. The Gorton's fisherman after too many freeze-dried fishsticks. Soon, other French people showed up and we were all smiling through the salt and grime of the ocean, a far better option than braving the wretched (sorry again) passenger compartment below.

Arrived in Ko Tao and found an amazing place to stay. It has electricity and everything. You learn a bit more about yourself on a trip like this than perhaps you would like to know. First of all, I have become a lot more familiar with the functions and byproducts of my body. See, the toilets here don't flush like regular toilets, they require you to dump bucketfuls of water down into them. Every day, well, to be honest, every 2-3 days, I must battle my toilet with great torrents of water, force-feeding it that which I choose to offer.

Moving away from waste management for a moment, I have learned a lot about my musical tastes. Absolutely suffering without music, I went and bought a little CD player. CDs are cheap enough, about $2 for a copy, but I don't want to carry too many around with me, so I basically had to ask myself, "if you were stranded on a desert island and could only bring 5 cds, what would they be?" With my limited options I ended up with 5 greatest hits cds:

Prince
Pearl Jam
Peter Gabriel
Manu Chao
and John Denver

I don't know how John Denver snuck in there, but I only listen to it when I clean my gun and shave my legs.

Diving was just as fantastic and amazing as I thought it would be. I ended up signing up for lessons on a very motivated impulse -- something which is rare for me, someone who takes 20 minutes to decide which grocery line to enter before eventually deciding not to buy anything at all -- so I followed that rabbit down its little hole.

My instructor was a former Portuguese MD, or, current Portuguese, former MD. His accent sounded enough like Jacques Cousteau and he looked enough like my friend Angelo to make me trust him. The other two people in my class were a British couple, some of the nicest people I've met on this trip, though there was a bit of a miscommunication when I said that my wetsuit didn't provide much ball room: "ballroom dancing?" the girl said. "No. A different kind of ball room ... he he."

My underwater experience was spectacular. Go into the woods for 30 minutes and you're lucky to see chipmunk; you certainly won't see a mountain lion tackling a deer, two rams locking horns, or a teddy bear picnic. But the underwater world is teeming with the most fascinating and bizarre life forms I've ever seen. When I first swam through a school of zebra striped fish, I was certain that I had entered an imaginary puppet world, or that the Nitrogen Narcosis had kicked in early.

By far my favorite aquatic creatures were the little flower-like things that grow on large coral spheres. These little green red and blue handkerchiefs would wave at you as you floated and bubbled past, when you moved your hand over them, they immediately ducked into their little puppet holes.

Goddamn, I'd love to talk more about this but the internet connection here has wiped way a good 2/3 of this post so I'll have to continue it later. My apologies for not spell checking either, I'm lucky to get this thing up at all.

Pontiac GTO

2005-11-18T12:25:00.000+07:00

Here I find myself in Koh Samui, an island in the gulf of Thailand, eating dinner with a Scotsman, a French Canadian and a Swede. Somebody mentions that they had met a guy in Phuket who owned a gorgeous GTO, someone else asked who had made it, I said: "Pontiac" the Scott said, "oh yeah, Puntiac" The French Canadian: "Ponne-iac?" Swede: "ya, Ponchiak." A strange little moment that, but one of the things I do enjoy about traveling this way.

I'm staying currently at a nice beach side resort which is costing me very little. The water is calm, the sun is hot, the view is amazing and I have my own bathroom, which is by far the greatest luxury I could ever hope for. There is a beachside deck where I eat my meals and watch middle-aged European men wrap speedos around their fat asses and wallow out into the the sea, bobbing about like big white otters. Others lounge like proud little Caesars, as gorgeous, dark skinned Thai girls massage and pedicure their feet. They parade up and down the beach, with their blotchy sunburns, their eyes squinting, their brows furrowed straight up and through their receding hairlines, sipping at straws dipped in cold coconuts, living the great pudgy life. Hours of entertainment.

Much better than the damn Full Moon Party which I warn all to stay away from.

This is a dark circus of a rave on a beach at Koh Phan Ngan, a neighboring island. Westerners come and paint themselves like dayglo clowns and dance under blacklights to a menagerie of DJs that come from all over the world to perform at the beach side clubs. Sounds like fun, BUT it is an orgy of debauchery and it destroys what is probably a gorgeous beach as the surf is polluted with bottles and other such refuse. By the time I left, around 2 am, there were bodies littering the beach, passed out, wrapped around bottles or around equally sedated lovers. There are stories of stabbings and of death that make the whole thing seem a savage nightmare. Though there were some firedancers, which was actually worth seeing.

No, I enjoy reading Crime and Punishment as the slow waves clap softly against the beach and as another great soft European gentleman splashes gently about in his swim cap and goggles, his missus, spread out like dough upon a reclining chair, as the scent of coconut oil wafts easily off of her.

2005-11-13T14:03:00.000+07:00

I woke up extremely hungover. I wrote something down like "Australian = devil" Sin Laundry (a combination of remember the sin lantern from the night before and remember to pick up my laundry) and Elephant Camp! (underlined). Rohan, the Australian devil, had told us the day before about an Elephant camp about forty minutes outside of town. Hungover, sunburned, unable to shave or shower (because of some water problem at my guest house) and wearing the same clothes as the night before (on account the laundry issue) I found myself motorbiking north past Mae Rin to a friggin' Elephant Camp with Liz, Carson and Rohan.
The place really was amazing though. This was the type of thing that would never in the states: elephants simply walk around this giant reservation mostly unattended and you go up and feed them bananas and bamboo and touch their babies and rub their trunks and let them cover you in snot. It is fantastic.
Each elephant has one trainer, or caretaker, who owns it, cleans it, trains it, feeds it and gosh-darn loves it. At 1:30 they parade the elephants around in a little variety show. They play harmonicas, they dance around, they play soccer and they paint. It's amazing to watch them paint -- something I knew they did, but was still impressed to see. They don't all paint the same way, they have different personalities: one elephant paints in long straight lines, another paints interweaving bands of color, another paints blotchy trees and flowers (they really do paint trees) and one of them was just smacking big dots all over his canvas. Might have to buy myself some elephant art before I go.

After the elephant camp we hung around Will and Liz's guesthouse a bit with Anh and the gang. Here I met another ex-pat named Billy who was celebrating his 63rd birthday and poured us Sangsum and coke and talked our ears off for a few hours. He had been living in Chiang Mai about 7 months, trying to make the most of his $580 a month pension -- in LA, he would live like a mole, in Thailand like a bank president.
Billy on social security: "hell, you drop dead at 55, those motherfuckers [the govm't] think that they just won the big one"
Billy on women: "my father always told me, man, why eat raisins when the grapes are ripe on the vine."
Billy on doing business with banks: "they don't want to hear about how your hunchback brother straightened up, just give us your goddman money, motherfucker!"
Billy on horse racing: "people always ask me for inside tips and think that I must be rollin' but what they don't know is that for every 3 times I might win a buck I must have broke my ass at the window 8 or 9 times."

Yowza.

Chuck D

2005-11-13T13:25:00.000+07:00

A few days ago, Will, Liz, and Carson -- a girl who works with Will and Liz at NES -- took the motorbikes about an hour and a half north of Chiang Mai to Srilanna national park. The ride took us through a few dirty highway towns, banana plantations, rolling misty hills, dusty farm towns and a shrine or two, leaving us at dusk by Eakachai (sp.) lake. We showed up just as the few inhabitants of the area were closing down their tiny market, though a few low voices carried on in a dark bar over a game of checkers in a half-submerged bar off the bank of the lake. We had time for a Sangsum and soda as we waited for a boat to our floating cabin.
Our captain showed up inexplicably out of breath and extremely apologetic, but also found that he had time for a quick drink before we shot off across the dark lake in a longboat -- a long, thin thing which is driven and steered by a tiny propeller extended into the water by a long rudder.
Our floating guesthouse, was at the end of a tiny floating village which had another bar, and even a karaoke machine which was turned off when we arrived, but found itself rocking in full disco-fury at about 7 in the morning. The only other guests in the village were a few old crocodiles, old ex-pats who take up with young thai women. The three or four of these guys were sitting around a table with a bottle of whiskey a jug of wine and a woman for each of them, who smiled and laughed. When I asked them what they were doing there, as in if there was any hiking, fishing etc., one of them, a grizzled, tooth deprived, Brit answered: "we're Thai, this is what we do." I excused myself and walked away as they chattered and guffawed like old pirates knocking the glass bottoms of jugs and bottles on their little wood table.
We sat outside our house on our floating deck and listened to the lake lap at the boards. The air was clean, the water was cold, it was refreshing to get away from the smog and grime of Chiang Mai, which is only a third that of Bangkok -- but good to know that you can escape it all pretty easily by motorbike and find something off the map. In the morning we ate our banana pancake breakfast, swam, paddled around, and got a great view of the lake and the misty green mountains surrounding. In the afternoon, we headed on back.

That evening, I met up with an Australian dude I had met on the train to Chiang Mai. We went out that night, with Will, Liz and Carson and set out to find a lantern to set on fire: there is a festival coming up in Chiang Mai and this is the time of year when you can see a ton of these lanterns flying up in the air, like hot air balloons, only to crash somewhere you can't see them and probably set somebody's house on fire. This city, in some ways, seems like it's run by children. There is a big pretend moat around, there are markets everywhere, and when the festivals come around, everybody tries to blow up as much stuff as they can. Every night there are firecrackers going off somewhere. As the festival goes on they start lighting bigger firecrackers, and then they start throwing what I think our bombs, then cannons: it's absurdly rauccus and awesome.
Anyhow, I got my lantern and wrote Chuck D. on it. The Thai word for 'cheers' sounds something like Chuck D., so everytime we drink we end up drinking to Chuck, and Flava Flav, and eventually Ol'Dirty Bastard and any other rapper we can think of. Strange. I lit my lantern and watched my sins float away. I watched as my lantern lit assunder as a burning ember detached from the bounds of earth to alight into the ether of the night sky to compete with the glow and heat of Mars and try the limits of heaven. Actually, it just sort of lit up and drifted over a roof top and I have no idea where it went or what it eventually destroyed.
That night, my Australian friend (Rohan), Carson and I walked around until we found a bar in a van. Clearly, someone had driven this bar into an alley, parked, opened the windows and put seats around it. Every once in a while as we sat there we had to stand up to let a car pass by us. We ended up drinking a few Maekong whiskeys and chatted for a while. We watched as a bar girl(van bar girl I guess) flirted with a pair of Finnish headbangers who would not respond when I screamed Iron Maiden lyrics at them -- so fuck 'em. The bar girl later confided in Carson, telling her that she hates her job, she's 22, and her boyfriend, an English or Italian guy or something, had just broken up with her when he went back home. This seems to be the story of the city: some western guy comes around throws some cash and gets himself a nice Thai girlfriend, goes back to his country and lets her run the limit of his attention span -- he ditches her and never sees the wreckage.
We carried on at the bar for a while, before stumbling over to Thae Pae Gate where we sat perched on the wall that surrounds the city, drinking Chang beer now. Literally straddling the boundary between the old and new city I waxed philosophical on the various paradoxes between traditional Chiang Mai culture and the invading west, even came up with a metaphor or two (lanterns as something or other): but I was pretty drunk so, meh -- fuck it.

Chiang Mai C'est Chuette Ca

2005-11-09T11:25:00.000+07:00

Now, thanks to Ploi, a 25 year old Thai girl I met, who lives in France most of the year, I am speaking and thinking primarily in French. She speaks English too, but it is sometimes easier to parlez en francais. The problem is that now I associate speaking French with speaking to Thai people, so I find myself pointing to food and saying "et ca," "un petit peu." Essentially, in my tiny American brain it's one foreign language or another, I guess.
So I got my motorbike, which I immediately fell off of -- splayed out in front of some jerky British guy who kept asking me if the bike was alright. I'm better on it now, but if I can, I make Ploi drive me around. Yesterday, we went up into the mountains a bit to a waterfall where about a dozen tattooed Thai teenagers were jumping from a ledge into a pool of water beneath the falls. When we showed up, they immediately peer pressured us into jumping with them. We weren't going to but hey, peer pressure is a bitch -- and it doesn't end in middle school.

That night, Ploi accompanied me to a Muay Thai boxing match. The event always starts with the really low weight class, which also happens to be the youngest fighters -- 10-13 years old. They were the best fighters of the night. Very composed and intense, but something about Muay Thai makes it feel removed or above brutality, it is very professional, but viciously intense. For one: there are drums, cymbals and flutes playing during the fight. The boxers time their rhythm to the drums, which speed up as the rounds go on. I'm not going to say it's more like a dance than a fight, because it's not. It's a fight. An awesome bloody fight, which is fought mostly with knees and elbows, kicks to the side.

Later that night we went to a bar with Anh -- Will's landlord, who we've all become friend with and who has the filthiest mouth I've ever heard (If I have pussy I let you fuck me no problem. Will, your cock smell like pussy, I have banana for your ass .. .and so on, and so on.) Anyhow, we ended up at a club called Spicy which is whiteboy central. It is a rather upscale place (which means the drinks cost about a dollar) in a dark disco-gloom a thousand Thai girls flutter around every goofy white guy they can find. We happened to run in to one of the Thai boxers there, having a beer after his fight (which he won). His name is Apple, he is very very nice, so we did everything we could to find him a white girl for the night (as he expressed interest). But alas, we struck out. I'm considering doing an article on Muay Thai, and will try to find him again, to use him as a source. I may also be able to contact one of the major promoters.

Chiang Mai Nights

2005-11-06T13:15:00.000+07:00

Last night I met up with Will and Liz, my friends out here in the CM. We had plans to meet Will's boss and director of NES, which is the language school where Will and Liz teach. All three of us piled on to Will's motorbike and hauled ass around the ancient moat which surrounds the perfectly square, temple filled Ancient City. Will -- who I once lost on a subway car in New York only to find that he had somehow found his way back to Ohio, and not the previous stop -- is actually one hell of a motorbiker. He knew his way around the city surprisingly well and we zipped in between cars in the lawless melee that is Thai driving. Now I want a bike, I' m getting one soon (take that, mom).
We met his boss and a couple of other workers from NES at an amazing restaurant. It was Thai chic -- the waitresses were all gorgeous, skinny, Thai girls who were incredible tall, or so I thought until I noticed they were all in 6 inch tall Go-Go boots. We drank and ate well, mostly unidentifiable meats, something tubular -- ie, intestinal, and something animal shaped that I was asked to carve. I announced that the meat still had marks from where the jockey was hitting it which went over surprisingly, or unsettlingly well with my hosts. They then dared me to eat some of the insects that street vendors were selling outside (cockroaches, crickets, maggots) -- I agreed but nothing (that I remember) came of it. Maybe tonight!
One of the teachers is a middle-aged black guy; apparently it is difficult for black men to get jobs teaching English, but since David, the director, is more interested in having a diverse, against the grain, overall: weird, staff than having a bunch of snotty English guys or PHDs. In fact David (from Texas) hates English guys and everyone teaching there is American... and weird. Anyhow, this teacher has a Thai wife and lives in a gated community that is mostly for westerners. He has taught his wife to cook western style food and he lives his life in as American a fashion as possible. It is strange that he would want to live and work out here, when he seems to have no interest in the existing culture. This is the weird thing about this place that I'm still trying to figure out.
Today for example, like yesterday, I had the best cappucino I've ever had. I love this little kitchen where they serve it. The furniture is all wood, there are a million plants, the Thai musac version of Hotel California plays gently and it is wide open to the street. On one hand, I'm drinking cappucino and listening to the Eagles -- my experience is that of a tourist . But all the while I'm drinking coffee, there is the sound and smell of frying egg rolls. The greasy sputtering and popping, tiny explosions of golden eggroll smell, interrupted by the steamy hiss of meat being spread across a hot pan. It all exists simultaneously.

Anyway, the chic bar had a live karaoke act; you can pick a song and have a live band accompany you. But these people singing were clearly professionals and all Thai. They were damn good. My favorite song was Smooth Opelator. Yep.
Inspired, we headed off to a different Karaoke bar. Walking in, we passed by a group of 15 bar girls, preening and giggling amongst themselves, smiling in a very special kind of way. One of them would later accompany us in the private Karaoke room, run the machine, and pour drinks for us. We became very drunk singing Billy Joel, Elton John, Led Zeppelin and of course some Elvis. The night was a blast and as we piled into David's car afterwards he offered me a job.

I told him I'd think about it.

12 Hours Off

2005-11-06T12:50:00.000+07:00

There is alot to say, I really don't know where to begin -- so I guess I'll give the beginning a shot:

long plane ride -- everything that could go wrong did; no matter, made it to Bangkok eventually.

Being in Bangkok felt like I had never left the airplane. Instead of the whitewash din of 747 engines, the city has a constant, monotonous gray shriek about it: on account of the traffic. It is large and dirty, sweaty and chaotic. The only refuge is Lumphini park, which is something like Central Park in its size and purpose. Here I watched Kimono dragons(or what looked like them) slip in and out of green lagoons and watched the crowd of joggers traipsing through.
While reading in the much desired shade of a tree, by the banks of the lagoon, a Thai man sat down next to me and we proceeded to talk for about an hour. Here's the thing -- Alone in the park, unfamiliar and infamously seedy city, foreigner who doesn't know how to say "I need an adult -- all the signs set my paranoid neruosis into swing. But Thailand is 12 hours different from America in so many ways (titular sentence!) . It's just AM and PM -- the apperance is the same, the essence is way off. This guy was just friendly. He turned out to be a professor at the University in Bangkok: a professor of linguistics, of all things. We talked about symantics and language and whatnot and life and all that stuff: basically it was a welcome friend in a hostile place.

Off to Chiang Mai.

Boarded a train at 7:40pm arrived in CM at 11:30am. It was running a bit slow.

Made friends with Swiss girls who were sitting nearby. A few Singha beers and we were close as toast. We , coincedentally, ended up staying at the same guesthouse in Chiang Mai -- a place called Julie. It is some kind of bizarre hippie bohemian retreat run by a Swiss guy (there's a lot of 'em out here ... why not, I say). There is a large "chill out" area with a gigantic pool table that has tiny little pool balls and skinny little sticks -- it's like some kind of torture playing on that thing.
There's quite a bit of chilling out in CM. It is really pale-face town -- we're called Fawrangs around here -- so I've dubbed the place Fawrang Mai... beacuse I'm VERY FUNNY. It looks like the Volkswaggon Van broke down here twenty years ago and the hippies extended their prodding new agey fingers out and took the place over one yoga studio at a time. I even saw a restaurant advertising "Authentic Thai Food" -- I can't imagine anything more authentically Thai, then a restaurant in fucking Thailand for God's sake!
But this was all really just a first impression and it mostly had to do with the area i'm staying in. For every restaurant that advertises American breakfast, another offers a menu that is unreadable and unedible. There is a bizarre harmony here between Western influence and Thai fortitude. In a way it's like the Tucson of Thailand -- artificial culture is only a distraction from the genuine funkiness.