Oneway East

Darwin

2011-12-08T13:43:00.000-08:00

Proud daddy, even though she's not doing anything much here. Being a baby. Being cute. This one's mostly for my parents.

Airbox/Darwin

2011-11-26T11:59:00.000-08:00

Hey all. Haven't written in a bit; been busy with two big projects.

One is my daughter. I have one now. She's cute. She's loud. She's little. Darwin Jane Guiney. About 3 months old now.

Aint she cute? Big adjustment. I feel like a bona fide grownup now. No more pretending. Whole new deal since Alex quit her job to be a mom and I now have Responsibility.

The other big deal this last year is a new business venture I'm trying. I've invented a lighting device, an inflatable softbox or diffuser that fits on the popular on-camera light, the Litepanel Miniplus. Tried and true on thousands of reality shows and documentaries worldwide. The Litepanel is convenient, but not the most flattering of lights, and my device makes it much softer and more flattering but without adding any weight, being inflatable plastic. Check it out. It's at Airboxlights.com.

I'm picking away at making more different sizes that fit other sizes of Litepanel, such as the popular Micropro and the even more popular 1x1 model.

This is it:

Anyway, that's enough plugging for my new product. Oh wait, one more thing- besides Airboxlights.com, there's also my new twitter feed of lighting tips, opinions, and reviews- @airboxlights.
https://twitter.com/?lang=en&logged_out=1#!/search/airboxlights

Experiencing frustrations with trying to start a business, with the myriad necessary steps that it takes, at the same time as I have to step up my earnings significantly from my regular day job as a gaffer and electrician. This adulthood thing is no joke.

I started this blog when I was going walkabout around southeast asia. I was going walkabout because I knew I was going to get to this point before too long, where I had a wife and a kid and a bunch of responsibility. The concept of going wandering on my own to explore and spending a whole pile of my savings at this point is completely laughable. Even the idea of going to Burning Man again seems far from certain. Have I gotten boring? Is this boring? This is just normal. There does seem to be an idea that the only things that are interesting are stereotypically "young" activities, like "adventures". Maybe that's my preconception.

I'm a little obsessed with PEak Oil/Peak everything/looming economic collapse. More on that later.

Tom

career

2010-11-30T04:00:00.000-08:00

The piece of advice I received the other day that stuck with me the most seems obvious in retrospect. Doesn't most good advice?

"As a freelancer, you have to consider hustling up work to be part of your job. Ten hours a week, you should be making phone calls and going to meetings".
A far cry from what we freelance lighting techs have come to consider normal. There's this combination of self-effacement and status-consciousness that riddles the culture of film freelancers. The idea is that you don't want to appear to need the work, it will make you look desperate or not in demand. I'm starting to think that that's a mask for shyness or inertia or complacency

After 13 years in the lighting business in New York, avowedly as a stepping stone to becoming a full-time DP, I sitll only shoot occasionally. Perhaps I could have hustled a little more? Just tell people what you want. The worst that can happen is they say no, which they probably will, but don't take it personally.

Had a chat recently with Peter Chernin who used to run News Corp. Liberal Arts grads, take heart. He was an English major and ending up running News Corp.

The Burn

2010-09-12T12:35:00.000-07:00

It's time to put the Burn to bed. It has been a daily project in my life for much of this year. It's finally over. Decompressing. Planting my feet out here in the default world again. So what was it? Why so much?

Burning Man is a liberation festival. It's a fashion show, a different way of thinking, a debauch, a whirlwind, a production, a gathering, a celebration.

Big picture, it's different from other festivals because there's no commerce, no telecommunications, and relatively little litter.

Small picture, my camp was a intense gathering of some of my closest friends and family, in contact most of every day for a week.

Micro picture, the core values radical self-reliance and freedom of expression resonate powerfully with me.

back out to the big picture, it's just one week out of the year, yes, but I still reckon its worth putting the effort into it. I've been to a lot of kind of lame events in the city, and Burning Man does not fail you that way. You know its going promise what it delivers. A sure thing is worth something.

Career

2010-05-12T03:56:00.000-07:00

Hm. Seeing a way out makes the walls seem more confining. Up until now, I've never been able to imagine a clear route to doing anything other than the movie biz; it's all I'm skilled at. The thought of jumping ship and starting over completely in another field has always felt abhorrent, so I put a brave face on it and enjoyed the good parts of this career. I've always enjoyed the freedom of being freelance, I love the constant stream of new people, I like periodic travel jobs, I like the occasional rigging problems that I have to solve. But. Overall, much of what I do in the lighting end of the movie and tv business is not challenging, is not interesting, is not socially redeeming, is not all that great. Yesterday an infomercial, today an interview with a goole exec, Friday reality tv, next week the Playboy channel. This is why I bailed out in 2006 and went traveling. The earnings called me back. Keep in mind, it's not as though I'm getting rich. Decent, comfortable, middle class money, but I'm not getting rich.

The source of the sudden new career anxiety is this: I'm in discussion with my mother in law about joining her company and eventually taking it over. She wants to retire, and pass her company to one of her children, or the next best thing. She runs three centers for speech, language, and occupational therapy in California.

It's a little later now, I decided not to do it. Why switch from one thing I'm only halfway interested in to something else I'm only halfway interested, but years back in experience? Would that really be better? I might get restless there too. I toured the operation for a week. It's all female employees and a lot of people with speech problems. Not convinced that' the right environment for me.

Gathering

2010-04-27T06:58:00.000-07:00

The maelstrom is over now, but it was pretty good while it lasted. 4 days, lots of people and partying. Sometimes you need a good excuse for everyone to get together. A node. Way back in the fall, Jalal heard about Hot Chip going on tour and bought a bunch of tickets. Katie and Patrick came from Oakland, Kendall, Jalal and Libby came from Boston, Erika drove up from DC. Our house was the hive center. A bit of a slumber party, everything soft we owned spread out on the rugs as bedding. A pretty long weekend. Getting dressed up at our house, then the concert, then a gay bar, then back to our house where we set up lights and did a photo shoot of Katie's new line of hats. It's a nice feeling when everyone makes the effort to get there. We have awesome friends. I have done well by this marriage, friend-wise. There was a point during the concert when I just needed to squat down and rest, and my friends formed a stockade of bodies around me to protect me from the crush of the crowd. They're pretty awesome.

Arm

2010-04-17T21:37:00.000-07:00

I'm laid up. Shoulder surgery. Voluntary? I guess so. Not really, when they say, "it's fine now but in three years it'll be complete shit and you won't be able to lift your arm." In so many words. So I'm recovering. Torn Labrum, Superior Labrum anterior- posterior, full tear of rotator cuff, sub-acromial spurring, bursal impingement and tendinitis. Got it all fixed up. PT now, an hour twice a day, still can't lift my right hand as high as my shoulder.

So one of the good things about this enforced long-term downtime is that I've been catching up on my favorite hobbies, and learning a little something: I'm happiest when I'm working with my hands. It's a shame, no one pays anyone o be a craftsman anymore, bu yes, I like Doing. That's how I got into the whole Art world that i later abandoned: I liked drawing when I was a kid, and therefore I ended up studying ARt, which got all complicated, and it has to be so deep, and it means something about society or culture or politics... Wait, find me the 20 year old who has something really insightful to say about the world. Please, do. Ergo: disillusionment. Career in film. But now, I delve deep into my "craft" (not Art) projects, and i love them, and it doesn't matter if they say anything to anyone about anything. I'm just doing them. All week I'veebeen buzzing along on making two space angel helmets for costumes for Alex and me, obviously for burning man, but for whatever costume party in between or after. I've discovered LEDs and soldering. Combining what I know from work with my crafty interests. Put pink LEDs in Alex' helmet so they rake her cheekbones in a flattering way.

A tired dog is a happy dog.

Tom

Harvest

2009-08-04T11:26:00.000-07:00

It is a new and wonderful feeling for me, of holding food that I grew still warm from the sun in my hand. I love going down into my garden and squatting amongst the rampant greens, the wandering squash vines, the upstretched cornstalks, the wandering tomato branches, poking and prodding at the growing shapes, frowning over insect damage, cupping the reddening tomatoes in my hand.

We've already finished the lettuce crop, but now we are harvesting corn and tomatoes every few days, and we've got all the basil and rosemary that we can use. The zucchini, and cucumbers haven't fruited yet, but there's one little nubbin of a winter squash that's ripening now. There are two yellow peppers that are ust hanging out, waiting until figure they're ripe. Since I'm a beginner, I really don't know when things are ready. It's a little hard to tell. They're not necessarily the same varieties that you buy at teh supermarket, so I don't exactly know what they're supposed to look like and feel like when they're ready.

My downstairs neighbors are the ones who have access to the yard, but early this spring we were chatting about our shared interest in organic gardening, and they said, "you know, we're really only going to use half of it. The weedpatch on the right? Have your way with it." And we were off.

My tubs are chaotic and wild, the plants reaching out in every direction, hungry for more space and sun. There's a massive native population of bindweed, also known as Morning Glories, that are constantly reaching up and twining around each other and anything else they can reach, but fortunately, their roots are not established inside my tubs. My plants are doing wonderfully.

We're using these tubs called "earthboxes", which is just a plastic tub with a perforated extra floor in it that serves as a water reservoir. You cut the bottom off of a second tub and set the bottom piece upside down into the bottom of your first tub. Now you have an elevated floor in your first tub. Into this new floor, drill a bunch of holes so water can pass up and down. In the corner of the raised floor, drill a big hole that will accommodate a 1 1/2" PVC pipe. Now around the side walls of the main tub, drill a belt of holes. These are overflow holes so that when you fill the tub with water, you cannot overfill it, and the overflow will run out these side holes. Fill it up with nice dirt that's got lots of compost and manure in it, and you're finished. They work wonderfully. You don't have to water anywhere near as often, and your plants are assured a steady water supply. This is particularly good if you're growing something that's water-intensive such as tomatoes.

This is the same tub pictured above when it started, on April 30. It's pretty marvelous seeing your plants go from dirt and seeds to verdant explosion.

And in May:

Something keeps eating my peas and beans, I'm not sure what. It turns the leaves into a lacy latticework of veins, eating all the soft leaf tissue between the veins. Anyone know what that is?

Reality

2009-05-14T21:04:00.000-07:00

I do much of my work in reality television. I have very mixed feelings about this. I pretty much hate the product, by and large. I think I've worked on two shows that I might enjoy watching. "Can't Get a Date" certainly, and possibly, "The Apprentice". I make at least half of my income in reality television. It's hard to walk away from that. And they're never my shows. I never have my heart in the product, I just light them, so I don't feel like I'm selling myself out completely.

But is this what I'm capable of? Lighting silly, vapid, shallow reality TV?

The thing about it is how little reality there is to it. The actors are real people, who aren't reading scripted lines, but all of reality is heavily, "produced". In court, they would call that leading the witness. Write a plausible story for the selected cast members, and induce them to act it out and talk about it. The only thing unscripted is the dialogue.

I met a guy today at the restaurant where we were shooting who went on a rant about how stupid the contestants sounded. He told me that a lawyer friend of his was preparing a class-action suit against some of the networks for making America into a stupider place.

It's us. We're the ones buying it. Watching the shows, giving them the ratings response that keeps on churning them out, keeping me gainfully employed, paying for my books and my New Yorker subscription and all the other things that make me feel superior to the Reality-watching masses.

How is watching silly girls talk about boys, clothes, and nightclubs that compelling to listen to? It just boggles the mind.

But I enjoy my craft. I like trying to make things look nice, in a way that accomodates multiple camera angles and still works. I like my income. I like lots of the people I work with.

Sigh.

2009-03-08T12:16:00.000-07:00

Feeling a drought of work, but more than that, wondering when I'll move up in my field. Calling my basic work strategy into question. Work, know people, be recognized for my ability, promoted thusly. Represent my interest in advancement when possible. Dont miss an opportunity. Wait. I am unsure how to promote myself more.
For those of you who dont know, i'm a lighting technician who's trying to become a director of photography. If I look at it, my strategy isn't really working all that well. Ten years into new York, and I'm not yet where I want to be professionally.
Not to say Ive achieved nothing, not at all. But.

Isaac Jaronski, 1974-2008

2008-09-24T20:49:00.000-07:00

I remember walking in long ovals around the schoolyard during recess, parsing the metaphysics of vorpal swords and the difference between the astral and ethereal planes.
I remember his intense fullblue eyes.
I remember his attic room in Charlestown, where there was the very advanced NEC computer that took those huge 7” square floppies that held a whole meg of data.
I remember his 9.6 baud volksmodem that we could use to play Rogue on the Harvard computer.
I remember helping him and his stepdad build shelves all day at that apartment on Mass ave, with the idea that with the scraps we were going to build some sort of starbase.
I remember that not working out.
I remember his focus, his fullbore absolute focus that he could bring to bear on one of his projects.
I remember he kind of smelled in his early years.
I remember my sister held that opinion of both of us.
I remember walking with him and Teddy back from karate class in Southie, breaking bottles on the train tracks.
I remember his speech mannerisms, a funny way he had of hiding his mouth with his hand sometimes.
I remember wrestling with him in my parents’ library, and my dad getting mad at us for making too much ruckus.
I remember sitting in the front seat of the school bus together every day, nattering about all sorts of things.
I remember him walking everywhere.
I remember that time we ate E together, and the resulting outpouring of historical confessions.
I remember wacky Ronnie, the bus driver, saying that I had Isaac’s batteries, that until I got on the bus, Isaac was stone silent.
I remember being ashamed of cutting him in public in front of the cool kids.
I remember the games we made up with paper and pencil, the space battles we’d fight by pressing the tips of our pencils down on the bows of our ships on the paper and flicking pencil laserbeams out toward each others’ ships.
I remember his drawings, how many and how clever his starships and wizards were.
I remember his drawing of a spaceship that looked like a bulldog with its clever hinged jaw, and how I tried to copy that jaw so many times later.
I remember his voice, so well.
I remember his performance in the play in 5th grade; he was the only one who could act.
I remember his home run he kicked in 6th grade, earning him the nickname for a while, "Master Blaster".
I remember his overwhelming self-consciousness.
I remember how he reforged his body.
I remember that amazing 3-d plexiglass chessboard we built, with his stepdad's help.
I remember the paint job we put on all 90 of the miniature pieces.
I remember him getting pissy with me for getting pissy with him about eating messily.
I remember his dogged persistence.
I remember his rational quest for spiritual knowledge.
I remember hearing horrible news, that he was in the hospital, and that it wasn't the first time.
I remember him getting a little too far into character during a game of Champions, hollering "Commie!!"
I remember his stories about the hippies back in Eugene where he started out.
I remember the rosy picture he painted of those early years.
I remember him telling me that he thought he had broken something in his brain during a course of intensive transcendental meditation, and that he couldn't remember things that well anymore.
I remember him pooh-poohing my admonitions about the school water fountains.
I remember he said, "if there's something toxic in there, I figure I'm immune to it by now."
I remember bringing him with me to that rave in connecticut.
I remember us getting kicked out of our half-dead ride and figuring out how to get back from New haven at noon on a Sunday.
I remember hearing that he was getting a bit better and was living in a group home.
I remember crying with his mother outside the church.

I remember Isaac.

(credit due to Joe Brainerd for the form of this post.)

honeymoon

2008-09-24T20:48:00.001-07:00

Oaxaca, mexico. Alex and I loafed on the beach for most of august. Learned the rudiments of surfing. Smoked lots of cheap grass and got super tan. Again. scads of photos on my facebook page.

wedding

2008-09-24T20:47:00.001-07:00

got married to Alex. Most fun wedding ever. See scads of photos on facebook page.

Tango

2008-04-26T09:58:00.000-07:00

Another trip. Buenos Aires, Argentina. Trips are more engaging for me when I have a mission. Alex and I picked a fairly logical one in Argentina: learn to tango. Found ourselves a teacher and have had a private lesson every day.

Here's the dirt on tango. It's all about balance and posture. This is how you tell your partner what you are about to do. It's a very gendered dance, in that the man is completely the lead and largely determines what's going to happen. The two of you stand and embrace and are touching at both hands, the chest and shoulder area, and sometimes the cheekbone. Those points of contact are where all of the communication happens. That is how tango dancers seem to be in such unbelievable synchronicity, to the point of appearing rehearsed, even though tango is always improvised. The man shifts the woman's weight to one foot or the other, leaving one foot free to move, and thus indicates which foot the two of them will move next. There are all kinds of variations, but the basic principle is that both of you can only move your free, unweighted foot, and so you do, and by pushing with your chest and your two hands, you indicate which direction you want her to go. Not that it's easy for the woman, but it's harder for the man. One added level of complication is that you have a very limited field of view. Your face is right next to your partners', and you're looking straight ahead, so you can only see one wedge of crowded dancefloor off to your left, and you can't bump into people. They don't appreciate that. In our final lesson today, what Andres was teaching us is some techniques to navigate a crowded dancefloor gracefully. Andres was amazing. He was such a firm, precise lead, Alex never had any doubt as to what she was supposed to do and thus looked great.

But it's lots of fun. It's unlike any other kind of dancing I've ever done. The milongas (tango dance halls) seem like some weird throwback to another time.
The formalism, the elegance, the old men, the belle-epoque decor, and of course the music, which conjures images of an alcoholic grinder-monkey performing laments in front of a greek chorus in facepaint. To me. Somewhat. It's nice.

I can't imagine how people eat this much excellent beef on a regular basis. I don't need to eat steak for a long while I think.

We're going to continue back in new york. We'll strut our stuff at the wedding. You'll see. Having just studied tango for six days, our learning curve has been pretty steep, but we're going to need to keep working on it in new york.

Tango shoes: aren't they fantastic? Those are the pair that I bought for Alex, modeled by the same. What's odd about women's tango shoes is they look like the most impractical taxi shoes imaginable, but they're actually designed with athletic performance in mind. Heels built to take some heavy use, with arch support.

This is a couple doing a solo at a milonga we went to.

the Work

2008-03-04T19:22:00.000-08:00

Cinematography. My chosen path. Lately been doing a fair amount of it, thankfully. Or...? The kind of things I've been shooting have been ultra-low budget bottom of the barrel kinds of things. You might think that in the absence of many of the resources that constitute "production value", your creative process might be freed up to innovate in some ways. That would only hold true if the project you were on was not trying to simulate the high production value of everything we see on tv and all that.

I like being the DP. It's a buzz for sure- taking pictures to tell a story, with some people to help you do it. You tell everyone what to do. It's all up to you. spotlight focus. Yes I like it. But it's exhausting. Especially on little tiny shoot like the one I did this weekend, called, "The Bird Tribes." I was the only professional on the set. The director assembled a group of quite talented people really, great costumes, art direction, all that, but not tons of pro set experience. On jobs like that, you have to think for everyone! It's pretty brutal. A totality.

In america, anyone can make a movie. And so many people want to. And because people need training on their way up to the majors, anyone can get semi-pros or better to work long hours for free. IT's a little kooky.

dome

2007-10-15T19:47:00.000-07:00

My dome got me a wife. Can't say that about many geodesic domes. See, The week before Burning Man, I was at Alex's parents' house in California, working my ass off building a dome in the backyard to bring with us to the desert. That was the first time I spent any time with her parents, and I think it made the proper impression, showing them I knew how to bust my ass and make something, and not just something, a shelter for me and their daughter.

See, when we got back from the desert, we said, "there's something we want to tell you guys."

Her mom wasn't sold at first, but her dad was pretty much behind me all the way.. Which I appreciated. And I think a lot of that had to do with having seen me get shit done in the backyard. So this dome got me hitched.

California

2007-08-25T20:56:00.000-07:00

Mobile, briefly. In perhaps the new way. With a defined beginning and end. Anyway, I'm in California. At Alex's parents house, without her right now, Perhaps an opportunity to get to know her family.For them: New but serious boyfriend. Who is he?

Working obsessively on the Burning Man prep. The dome is built and furnished, supplies are gotten, meals have been cooked, bikes have been fixed, tasks have been completed. I'm outside of my normal parameters reducing my shirk-opportunity resulting in tremendous productiveness. It's cool, but it's a tiny bit of a pain in my ass. Want escapes. But it's satisfying working towards a goal like that. There is a deadline. I'm so like my parents, taking advantage of "vacation time" to work. They must think I'm a workaholic. Or there was the talk about me having been in a boys-with-ADHD study. Unknown whether I was the control or not, but I certainly seem it sometimes. The occasional hyperfocus- that's also ADHD. That's how I've been behaving, working constantly on the prep for Burning Man. Such an endeavor! But feeling like it'll be worth it. And the process itself is it's own reward.

California has always been this sometime promised land. The golden hills of california. two centuries of dreaming towards california. But it's nice here- it seems so civilized. Like the engineering of livability is most advanced here. Although expensive. But so's new york. maybe someday.

resume

2007-04-09T14:42:00.000-07:00

It's been a while since I've been back, over fourmonths now. A long time. It's flying. Do you remember how I described so many of those languid days on Ko Pha Ngan? It's the opposite now. I said at first that I was not ready to come back, when the topic of coming home for the holidays arose. When I say I didn't want to come back for that reason, don't mistake my meaning that I only wished to live in that carefree way. Quite the opposite. I felt that that carefree lifestyle was a vanishing natural resource, that I would no longer be able to do that again once I was back in the states, the window would close on taking advantage of what opportunities only exist there.

Now I'm here. Since early January my world has become very goal-oriented. Work. Career. Girlfriend. These things. I'm always bustling and busy, but I like it. The memories of lolling about thinking, "Oh, what shall I do today?" are distant. I'm trying to chase down shooting jobs, to someday make the step up properly, busy with the endless list of little things that need to be done, busy with just being at work, busy making a life with my amazing girlfriend. I'm goddamn busy.

Two images: my bedroom at the Sarisa on Chaloklum Bay, shortly before my departure, and my bedroom here in New York City.

New York things: The guy mumbling and cursing farther down the subway car: is he an up-and-coming rapper or an enthusiastic schizophrenic?

Closer

2006-12-19T21:07:00.000-08:00

Life in New York. Almost like I didn't leave. Perhaps that's not what one might want from a long-term wander? I went away to get some perspective perhaps, but mostly because I felt stagnant in New York. I was just riding along... it's so easy to do that. Just do what you do. My first day of work was great; I felt like, "This is what I do, this is where I belong." MY second day of work I felt like, "Here I am again. Yet another day at work, another day older.

So am I saying I didn't get anywhere with this trip? Hmmm.

I'm at work on a makeup commercial right now. I still like what I do, but it's still not necessarily going anywhere.

Work

2006-12-08T00:25:00.000-08:00

This blog was about asian travels, but there is room for footnotes and afterthoughts.

At work today, Rick asked me if it was a drag to be back at work. I replied that no, I was pretty happy to be working again. I belong here. On set, moving shit around. If I'm in charge, I tell someone else to do it. If I'm not, I do it myself. New York. Film sets. It's become my naturalized habitat. I am happy to be back here, even though the frost is eating into my bones, that pitiless cold devoid of moisture that quietly passes through your clothing and surrounds you and drains you.

This afternoon, I would've said, "and the cold's not bothering me much!" But then night fell.

I found things to do in Asia, but here there's stuff I just have to do. Which is partly why I left, because all I did was the stuff I had to do. Just making a living isn't enough. Not for me in any case.

Return

2006-12-06T17:56:00.000-08:00

Perhaps this was the point. I was so dead sick of New York when I left, but now all of a sudden, being back, it feels like a world of promise. So much happening compared to the little island. So many different kinds of people everywhere. Largely getting along, it seems, perhaps by ignoring, but nonetheless. There isn't a binary structure apparent everywhere, of Thai/Farang. IT's just a horrendously chaotic mix of people doing their thing.

I love the fresh set of eyes you get, having been away.

A girl described to me how to make your own silkscreens. I'd been wondering about that.

The enthusiasm of the moment won't last forever, probably just a brief period, but I'll be listening.

Belief

2006-12-03T09:06:00.000-08:00

Some people believe some rather outlandish stuff. I can listen with an open mind to just about anything. I accept that western science does not know everything. Thatis a fact. But if an idea cannot be subjected to the methods of proof of the scientific method, then I really can't go too far with it. Case in point is something from a conversation I had wih a westerner who's been studying Buddhism and eastern philosophy and all sorts of other related topics in Thailand for the past year and a half. He was telling me of a study that he read about or heard about or something like that using some device which "amplifies vibrations up to 50 million times." Ok. Great. Now he was telling me that this chap amplified the "vibrations" of plants and metals and other inanimate objects with this device and found that they behaved with human characteristics, such as a plant shying away in pain from being cut, or a pair of scissors "fatigueing" after long use, and then after a period of inertia recovering their "normal" vibration. When he really lost me was when he was saying that applying chloroform to a piece of tin caused its vibrations to go completely inert for a while, as if it was losing consciousness. I don't know exactly how it works, but I know it acts on the human central nervous system. Tin has no central nervous system. Why would it have any effect whatsoever? And on what sort of "vibrations" are we talking? It just struck me as a massive pile of hokum. When in those situations, I generally nod politely and say, "hmm, never heard that before" or something to that effect. Unless I'm in a boisterous mood and I try to take the person to task a little bit. Asking obnoxious questions like, "What kind of vibration? Can this be measured?"

Or even better is when new age folks start talking about "energy". Hoo don't get me started there. What kind of energy? What is this "universal energy" we're talking about? The second I hear the term "energy" in some contexts, I start to switch off. Maybe it's a difference of definitions. And truth does tend to be rather subjective.

I also can't argue that I've never felt something which I would call energy, such as the feeling of a place or a person. I usually attribute that kind of thing to an aggregation of nonverbal cues, all the information we gather without realizing it consciously. All the little things, like subtle body language and pheromones.

Another conversation with the same guy was about really advanced yogis who have mastered their awareness of the world to such an extent that they can pass their hand through solid matter. The idea being that since atoms are mostly composed of empty space, then it's theoretically possible for two solid objects to pass through each other without making contact. And the idea is that with advanced enough awareness of one's own body, one can basically control ever molecule with one's mind. Ok. I'm listening. I would love to see it demonstrated.

I don't know quite what to do with some of these ideas that a great number of people believe that seem quite fantastic to me. Such as the fakirs who walk on hot coals and the Rifa'i Sufis who pierce their faces with daggers while entranced and emerge completely unmarked. What does one do with these stories? Have these acts been demonstrated, observed by non-believers? How much is really possible, the stories of the people who go without food, living on air or energy or something, apparently through strength of ther spiritual convictions?

I remain a skeptic, but I know there's stuff I don't know.

commonplaces

2006-12-03T08:46:00.000-08:00

You are whatever you say you are

I have some fascination with mermaids. Maybe it's because I'm fascinated by things that don't exist?

Context changes everything?

SEx doesn't have to be what I used to think it was

You don't just have to do one thing. But one thing you can rely on to make you some loot is worthwhile

How many careers can you have?

Dailyness

2006-11-25T01:49:00.000-08:00

So it's back to my routine here. This trip has been less about traveling and more about living someplace else for a while. Although I'm leaving back to the states shortly, it's even tended towards something more like a "real" life. I do some work every day on one of my various projects, I have dinner with my friends, we hang out for a while, maybe watch a movie, something like that, occasionally go for a night out on the lash. It's become strangely normal. The people here are the people I think of as my friends, with all of them at home being the ones who are sort of on hold. Not a bad thing to have friends all over.

Lots of little projects on the cooker:

The woman at the travel agency asked me to think about designing a t-shirt for her company.

There's an online travel mag who's interested in an article for longer-term expats in Laos.

The Myanmar photo project never got finished; that's still on the list

The Lao book, of course, is the longest term one. Working with some of the material I have, I've got some at home, I'll have to go back later. And I have a bunch of leads in the US at this point as well. No shortage of things to do there.

Photos photos photos. But this one wanes the more familiar a place gets. Don't bring my camera around with me that much. That's why it's time to move again.

Drawing a lot, mostly t-shirt designs. Someday I'll have to decide if I want to actually try to make a go of it. Location-specific t-shirts and accessories. Mostly consisting of a cool graphic. So spending some time with Photoshop and Illustrator.

These on top of the huge heap of in-progress projects I've gathered over the years.

So other than the lack of financial sustainability to this life I've got out here, it's a life. Surprisingly normal. New kinds of familiarity that I've settled into. Oddly enough, going back to New York is the Big Exciting Thing on the immediate horizon, the big change.

It hasn't quite gotten to the point where the familiarity becoomes a curse, the way it was before I left. The gray dailyness that just goes on and on.

And I'm almost fully healed up from that last run-in with the bandits. Our bodies are wonderfully resilient. Only sign after a while are a few marks, just another story that you tell when some one sees you with your shirt off and says, "what's this from?"

But I guess some of us have more marks than others.

Hideous

2006-11-22T00:28:00.000-08:00

Disgusting but not painful.

Bandits

2006-11-21T01:03:00.000-08:00

So I wasn't going to write this, because my poor parents will worry about their reckless lunatic of a son, but here we are. That's the situation. Worry not. I always come out basically ok.

I would have told them eventually anyway, and now that I'm mostly healed up, it seems more okay to talk about it.

First date at the hospital, second date at the police station.

My stitches are due out today. A week ago, I was the victim of a violent crime, completely contrary to my expectations of what happens in Thailand. Daisy and I were driving home from a party on my bike, then all of a sudden there was another bike way too close, way too close, they're going to hit us, what the fuck is happening, I'm being sucked towards the hostile bike, sucked hard, almost felt like a sudden sharp crosswind, then we were down, dragging and skidding. Looked up, the guy on the back of the other bike had white shirt with a collar, a standard shortish haircut, part on the left. Dark blue Honda Dream. They smoothly arced away across the bridge and vanished. Check the injuries. How bad are you? What hurts? Where else? Everything moving okay? How deep are they? Check self. Right ankle protrusion: deep gouge, the bone's okay. It moves fine. Knee and calf: a lot of roadrash, one pretty deep one on the part that sticks out the most. Right hip: not too bad, but bleeding. Right elbow: that one's pretty bad, a little bit of ragged tissue hanging. Everything moves normally. Right shoulder: bit of a scooped-out deep gouge on the bony tip, roadrash on my triceps and forearm. Daisy's hand and forearm got a number of scrapes, but nothing as bad as mine. I think the pedals of the bike acted as a fulcrum point and the front of the bike where I was was pushed down whereas the back lifted up, so she was kind of clear of most of it. That's good; scars don't look as good on girls as they do on guys.

"They were trying to take my bag..." They dragged us down with her bag. What idiots. Did they even look? See that the bag was over her head and shoulder? Did they see that the strap was four inches wide, not going to break? Callous vicious thugs, who don't mind really hurting people to take a little bit of money. There was nothing even in the bag. 500 baht maybe.

When you're hurt and going into shock, you feel like you're freezing, even in the tropics. I curled up and bled on her bed until I got warm enough to drive us to the hospital. four stitches in my elbow. That's all. Nothing too serious. We got off relatively easy.

There's a distinct system of local enforcement here. Everyone knows each other. Most people figure they were off-islanders, maybe high on yaabaa.
Yaa: drug
baa: crazy
ie methamphetamine. Makes you a bit crazy. Not the normal process of thinking things through from beginning to end, cause and effect, consequences. I don't know though; I've tried speed and you still have to be a shitty person already to do something so callous as drag someone off a motorbike to take their money. Drugs or no drugs, if you do that you're missing something. Young men.

Perhaps a byproduct of the negative cultural exchange I've written about before. In heavily touristed areas, it's perhaps easy to dehumanize the visitors, that they're all rich idiots, they're not people like us, they don't matter. So what if they die or go to the hospital? They're rich. Fuck'em.

Funnily, I've heard so many bad stories about corrupt Thai cops it didn't even occur to me to call them. The detective said, maybe we could have got them if you called us right away. At the police station the next day, the detective was really excellent. Did a great job of coaxing out what little bit of detail we could recall. He was very professional and very concerned. An attitude of, " I will not tolerate this kind of shit in my district, I promise to try to protect you better in the future." We drove back through all the relevant places to examine the scene, try to jog our memories a little bit. What we came up with is the thieves must have picked up on us at the 7-11 where we stopped. There were a few guys outside, but I confess I didn't pay much attention.

Be more alert at night. Carry your bag on your belly, not your back, sandwiching it between your two bodies. Strap on one shoulder, and don't keep too much in it. Things we learn the hard way.

But we're okay. Daisy's gone away now, we're both mostly healed up.

So since the attack I've been trying harder to be more outgoing and friendly to all the Thai folks I talk to, speak more thai, be more present. You are a person and I am a person. Let's treat each other like that. Would you do something like that to a family member? Someone from your town? Of course not.

Same goes for all the vile stories I've heard about Indian men and their treatment of western women. The ceaseless and aggressive staring, even nastiness like groping and attacking. Disgusting stories, like a girl who fell asleep on the beach in a swimsuit, and woke up to see two men standing next to her and masturbating. There must be an "US-Them" disconnect. Would you dream of doing something like that to your sister? Your neighbor's wife? The woman who runs the shop down the street? Of course not. Incidentally, the penalty for rape is execution, but notwithstanding. It happens. It must be an extremely sexually repressed culture.

C'est la vie. All is well. I'm coming home soon.

Taxes

2006-11-12T03:31:00.000-08:00

Here's an example of your taxes hard at work during the late sixties:

From a USAF helicopter pilot.

"We were getting ready to start our afternoon poker game, and I said, "you know, maybe I can get a bunch of girls down here for a party." And one of them, there was two colonels, they were sort of the Godfathers of the base. One of them was the senior officer of the group that was training the Vietnamese in A1-Es and helicopters. The other colonel was just a supply guy, that got tapped to come to Vietnam. Don’t care what your rank is, you’re in the captains job. So we were sittin there and they were saying bull, with some other words. And I said, no really, I can, I just need a couple of helicopters. Maybe three. And the colonel said, who wants a bunch of Vietnamese girls? And I said, no no, these are American girls, secretaries, from Saigon. And he says, yeah, I got those helicopters, I’ll just get those from the Vietnamese General; you can’t really do this! And I says, can you? And he says, I’ll let you know at noon tomorrow! So I got on the telephone, I got ahold of this bureau where these girls were at, and says,
"would y’all like to come down to Ban Touei?"
"Oh yeah! We never been to an Air Force base!"
"How many girls? I gotta line up the helicopters."
"A helicopter flight! Oh boy! That’s really great!"
"How many girls? And they said, we can probably get thirty."

Ok. We laid the date on, the Colonel got permission from the General to get three of the Vietnamese helicopters, but no Vietnamese pilots, we had to fly them ourselves. So I got a couple extra pilots who pretended to be crew chiefs, for each one of the helicopters, put em in a white jacket from the officers club; we had four bottles of champagne for each helicopter, flew up to Saigon. We had worked with the Navy, because the Navy river patrol boat headquarters was just outside of Ban Touei, on the Rok chia river. So we had LST, they had a full Admiral. We invited them to come to the club to partake in the fun! And they in turn had arranged the bus from Saigon to pick up the girls from the headquarters in Saigon when they got off work on Saturday at noon, brought em directly to the Vietnamese operations center, at Ton Sanut, and the helicopters were sitting there waiting. The bus pulls up, the girls pile out and jump into the choppers, the champagne popped, and off we went for Ban Touei. In H-34 helicopters, Sikorskys. Short flight. Got down there, big party on Saturday night, Sunday about noon, some of the girls got rides in A-1E Skyraiders, others got river patrol boat rides… The A-1E Skyraider was loaded with 100lb bombs that had been in the club all night, with people writing messages on them. It was just called a demo, but there happened to be a free-fire island right there; anything you saw there was fair target. They were loaded. The girls on the boats, out on the river, the Navy had packed some beautiful picnic lunches for each boat, and there was no enlisted men on board that day, not one. A buncha air force pilots, a buncha girls and a picnic lunch. And we just cruising up and down the river, opposite this island, letting the girls take turns with the .50-cal machine guns. They A-1Es come in, drop bombs, with both of us on the river, had our picnic lunch, then come back to Saigon that afternoon.

It does sound like fun, but completely screwed up. Existing in the odd ethical vacuum of a war.

Do you have any idea how much fuel helicopters consume? Or A-1E Skyraiders? Or how much .50 cal ammo costs? Hmmm.

Jim was a great guy, great stories, but there are some moral gray areas about using a huge amount of taxpayer money to have a party with some girls. Hey, if someone else's paying, I'll show up to the party.

Shirts

2006-11-12T03:29:00.000-08:00

Sold my first T-shirt yesterday, shortly after I picked them up from the printer.

biz

2006-11-07T20:07:00.000-08:00

I have started a brand-new business. Capitalized at 64$. Not requiring much maintenance. In case that exorbitant sum of money it took to start it didn't tip you off. T-shirts, to be sold at a tshirt boutique in the den of iniquity known as Haad Rin, home of the Bucket.

A bucket is the party drug of choice around here. It's a little plastic sand pail, hold about a quart I reckon, usually containing a pint of hooch, a can of coke, and two bottles of Red Bull. Noted for the effectiveness-to-price ratio. Featured item in my first design.

WP

2006-10-27T22:28:00.000-07:00

Does anyone recall that silly debate on NPR this winter, some lefty groups attacking the military for using white phosphorus in Iraq?
listen here:
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5019073

The contention from the anti-military groups was that white phosphorus, or "willy-peter" or "WP" is a chemical weapon, and therefore in contradiction of some anti-chemical weapons act from Geneva. The counterpoint from the military was that WP is used primarily to obscure, distract, and confuse, and therefore is not a chemical weapon and is perfectly legal. It was a complete charade. Sure, it's a chemical weapon in that it's made of chemicals, but then again so are cordite and TNT. IT's not a chemical in the sense of mustard gas. Thinking of this debate, I was asking Preecha Nitsisupha, or "Spotlight" about it. It's a ferocious incediary that will burn the meat off of your bones even underwater.

begin transcript, Preecha Nitsisupha, one of the Thai F.A.Gs fighting for the Americans in Laos. FAGS are the guys who run deep into Indian Territory to find the enemy and call in airstrikes.

PN:
"When they outside and they coming, maybe we have like, white phosphorus bomb or 500 lb. or 1000lb bomb, and they ask us what, we have to recommend them what they use. If the [enemy] people in the bunker or in the concentrations, we have to use the white phosphorus bomb because they not allowed for napalm.
“White phosphorus, it burns. If it hit you, they will go and cut the body. Yes hot. It burn you. It can burn the glass and the metal and whatever, it burn everything. So the thing that protect you, you have to get the [???] off of you, you have to cut it off, because it will not [afford shelter?]. Yes, it keep going .”

“Napalm not allowed. We don’t use. We mostly use the white phosphorus. So if the enemy concentrate or something, we use this. It burst in the air, before it hit the ground. It hit a big area. You see a lot of smoke. It burn the grass and everything. That will be a lot of, there will be a lot of wounded troops afterwards.”

...the killing in the town, everything is coming down. If that time is overrun[battle with the Vietnamese T-34s on skyline ridge he previously described], Skyline [ridge, overlooking the American/Hmong HQ Long Tieng] coming back, everybody would have to go. We lost the position for sure. When the tank coming, how you fight? They come booumm and pak! Afraid. And not only tank coming, believe me. A lot of people would be following. Vietnamese people. Not just tank coming, tank coming you know, they are follow by. So that night we can hold the position. And when that is turned, we can counter them back. After that they, the next couple days, we had the b52 coming, and we destroy almost two GMs. 335 and 148 or something? One GM is three battalion. One battalion for our side, about 450 or 500. For them should be the same. So they are get injuried, killed, and cannot find replacement, so they have to start to withdraw. And then we more attack. Put more heavy on the bomb. Made a lot of airstrikes, a lot. Almost every day,… before when I am in the position, make every day, for the enemy, counterfire and shoot at, incoming something, and we have to request… at least every day.
[Were they PL or Vietnamese?]
“North vietnamese. Lao only a little bit. They just only support, not the fighter. The fighter are Vietnamese. “
“Vietnam who is control everything. Pathet Lao is just, not too many. Support. Vietnamese they put at that time about sixty thousand. At first we did not know when we coming back. Even when I am in position one thing we did not know, the troops, they coming, the enemy, how they coming. But before they coming, go outside, they come back later and maybe we can see them, then they shoot, and can not going out of the bunker. At first I make a try outside, outside the bunker, and after when they shooting.

end transcript:

The whole WP discussion last november was such a silly contest of semantics. Is it a chemical? Yes yes it's evil, no no we just use the smoke from it to hide our movements. Sure, the smoke from burning steel and meat and sand and plastic. What irritated me about the debate was that everybody knew already what was going on, and they were trying to find legal grounds to either attack or justify the war in Iraq. It's a war. It's nasty. Weapons are designed and used to kill as many people as possible.

The trouble with these stupid modern wars between the first world and the third world is they can't be won. There's two different sets of rules. The first world feels that it must set some example of nobility and proper behavior when fighting. The third world has very few resources compared to us, so they weapon they choose is "by ay means necessary."

The only way to win a war is by the old rules, the rules used by the old empires. Kill everyone, burn it all down, enslave who's left, and then, your enemy will no longer be able to fight back. That's the only way. Otherwise, you'll end up in a quagmire until the political will runs out in the country which values its lives more. There's no room for these rules in war, and since we must behave in this way, respecting human life and so on and so forth, why bother fighting? How's that go, "the only thin in the middle of the road is yellow lines and dead armadilloes"? What a stupid waste.

Of course there are complexities to it, but honestly, we haven't won a war since World War two. After the horror of which, new rules were established. I wonder if the framers of those rules had the idea of making war impossible in the formation of those rules.

Stars

2006-10-26T00:53:00.000-07:00

Daughter

2006-10-25T02:29:00.000-07:00

One more nutty story for you folks. I do live my own life, sure, but tales from daydream island aren't necessarily as interesting as some of these old war stories.

John, flight mechanic based in Nakhon Phanom AFB in Thailand during the period.

begin transcription:

“ I had this hooch boy, his name was Rawin. He was 15 yrs old, and he lived in a little Lao-type… I think he was probably Phu Tai, you know, hill tribe. And I gave him my second pair or combat boots, because my first pair was tough enough for my feet. Only there for a year, certainly not going to wear out two pairs. So after I gave him the boots, he kept telling me that his father was village chief, so a couple days later the next line is that his father wants me to come to the village. Well, you know that’s nice, but I got no way to go there, but the kid keeps pestering me, so eventually I get this other kid, we were both buck sergeants at the time, three-stripers you know. So we get in this jeep with the kid, you know, and we got there, and to him, the Americans are coming! They had the old big feast routine, they had,… The first thing that happened when we realized that things weren’t what we thought they were going to be, when they had a thai boxing ring set up. And these people are sitting on benches and rows, raised elevated platforms and… This tiger soldier was there. And they were having a lot of matches, the soldier was smoking butts. So he had his M16 on, and we walk over, and the monkey fucked off his butt, and he says, “You brave GI. Many Thai communists here.”
Well, I hadn’t read the reports, the counterinsurgency reports, but it was shocking enough to me. So we go back and sit down. The other kid says to me, “Look at me. I really want you to not turn around and look at everybody, because; as soon as I told him of course he turns around and looks at everybody. And then in the meantime these guys are getting ready to do the Thai boxing. I’d never seen Thai boxing except like on TV or something. But these guys wrapped rags around their hands, around their legs above the knee. And do you know why? They put liquid candlewax on top of the rags, and then they put broken glass on it. And I’m sittin there like, this is their culture, this is, hmm… So one guy starts winning, and the other guy starts losing, and then all of a sudden he starts winning, and the other guy starts losing, and he gets him right up into the corner here, in this corner, and we’re sitting here. We’re in like the third row or something, and I can see that this guys definitely lost, his eyes glaze over, and the other guy keeps shoving his knees up into his lungs, blam! Blam! Blam! That often, and then all of a sudden he backs up and the guy falls right onto his face, face forward, and there’s a pool of blood half the size of this table. And then they pick up his feet, they didn’t even pick him up they just pick up his feet and drag him off. They musta killed him. And I’m thinking, Jesus, they’re doing this because I’m here? They killed a dude in a fight because I gave a kid a pair of shoes. So then we go in to have dinner with the old man, of course Lao style villages, they raise them up on sticks. So we’re up in there, and I don’t speak any thai, you know, a couple phrases, and the kid speaks pidgin English because he cleans the hooch. So he’s the interpreter, and it’s rough. Well then I find out why the old man invited me to the village in the first place. He tells me through his son, we’ve got this bottle of, this old whiskey bottle. And it’s got rice in the bottom about this thick. And they made homemade style rice wine out of it. And I’m sitting there watching this fly go in and out of the bottle, you know, and we’re eating this water buffalo, and no matter how small a piece you took, it seemed like there was a bone chip in it. So, they went and got dessert, I don’t know, you have to ask somebody here who’s Lao or Thai from Issan, but they had these little woven baskets. They get these woven baskets, and they dig it up out of the red earth. You ever had this? I’ve never seen this before, but I know that you eat what they give you. But they pull the top off the basket, I look in the basket, and it looks like somebody’s dirty old softball. But it’s rice, that’s been fermented. And the outside of the rice is just a crust, a brown ball of grey, and they take their fingers and stick them in and rip it off, and inside it was all turned into a white paste. Fermented. What I got out of the kid is they bury it for a certain length of time. We couldn’t figure out what the hell he was saying about how long, but I got this feeling from looking at it that it had been in there for quite a while. So I’m eating that, and I figure if I don’t get the runs from eating this shit, nothing’s gonna get me. But it tasted pretty good! And after that, that was dessert, the old man, through the pidgin English translation of his kid, he‘s giving me one of his daughters. And I don’t know for sure that that’s the exact translation. It was either that, or… but she was mine. There was no doubt about that. And I figured, well hell, I can’t take he r back to the base. I had heard, that if I took her out of the village, they wouldn’t let her back. I knew that. So I figured ok, better come up with an answer that saves face real quick. When you’re in those situations, you think pretty fast, you know, so I said, ’thank you very much, well I, uh, I’ll be back for her, I have to prepare a place for her to sleep. So then the old man figures I’m really gonna… Well he picked me because I gave the boots to the kid. And he wanted somebody to find a way to get his daughter over to the land of milk and honey where the streets are paved with gold. Of course he loves the kid, it’s just, westerners think ‘he gave the kid away, he doesn’t give a shit bout his kid, but no, I i he loved his daughter and wanted her to have a better life. So either way I can’t say, ‘no no, I can’t do this’ so… So things went ok after that. I mean, we left, and we got maybe fifty yards down the road and then floored the goddamn jeep to get the hell out of there. For three weeks, I was telling Rawin why I couldn’t keep his sister. And he couldn’t get it, he just couldn’t get it. So I’m working in the message center and the phone rings. It’s the guard out at the gate. So the village chief and the boys with their old flintlock weapons, they had brought her. Because I didn’t come back, they had brought her. They had my name from the hooch boy, so he got ahold of me, and wanted know…evidently, he must have called the wing to find out where I was working. Right in the office, the phone rings, ‘what do you want me to do?’ And I said, tell them I went home! So I didn’t go off the base for about two months after that."

Wow. Not really that much to do with my topic, but still. To have someone killed in your honor and then be given someone's fifteen-year old daughter, and to be unable to refuse politely.

A guy I know in Laos, he avoids big communal get-togethers in Laos. Not his cup of tea, so to speak. He's Lao, but he finds all the requirements of manners and face to be oppressive, particularly the continuously-circling cup of Lao-lao (rice moonshine) that you cannot refuse in politeness. Everybody gets sloshed off of this rotgut, and he's not a drinker at all. So he avoids these things. I believe many of your have had the good fortune to sample the Lao-lao that I brought back to New York last time I was in Laos. Mmmm. Cheap rotgut. My favorite.

I wonder if I could mix that stuff into the fuel from my motorbike. It's certainly flammable, and much cheaper than gasoline.

A bottle of cheap whiskey I brought back from Myanmar was dubbed "Burmese Two-Stroke" by the group of us, since it's good for cleaning out the buildup in your bike.

IVS

2006-10-25T02:04:00.000-07:00

Something from an old International Voluntary Service member, an interesting chap I met at the old soldiers reunion. The final thought is not particularly encouraging to a young fella trying a new thing, just because he wants to.

Think midwestern farm accent while reading this transcription. Kansas farmboy.

Begin transcription:

Well, what happened after I left Laos and went back to the united states?” Anti-waaar! What are you doin? What are you doin over in Laos?”
“Well, I taught’e to raise pigs.”
“Oh. Okay”
They didn’t give a shit.. So most of them just went into a cave. And said,
“I dunno anything about Laos.” And even I told them anything, they’d say,
“Oh! You’re part of the Waaar! You’re one of those sonsabitches.” But whatever. But what did, what all of Vietnam come back to the US was all about.
“You work for the military, you work for the war. You’re one of them.” And so, I had friends, they’d even, didn’t want to talk about it for ten years. Where you been? Whatd’ya been doin? And so, the post Vietnam, you didn’t talk about it. Two of these people that I knew of that spent a lot of time in Vang Pao’s area, if you may… And they said,
“I’ve been back, people spit on me. They didn’t want to hear about it, so I forgot about it.” They didn’t wanna talk about it. They just went into a cave, and said, I don’t wanna talk to you about it. You don’t wanna hear about it? I don’t wanna talk about it. It’s starting to kind of come out. Some of these people are saying maybe it’s ok to talk about it. I can think of any number of people, they were, take your pick, they were AID, they were IVS, they were USIS; a lot of those people just kinda said,
“You don’t wanna talk about it? Lets go onto something else. How’s your kids? How’s your wife? And so, you know, my part was the same thing.”
“How was Laos?”
“Oh! I did such and such…” And they said,
“Did you see the game last night? The Yankees were loving it! The Dodgers are losing!” Whatever. And I would argue that they’re still saying it. People are saying to me when I go home, I say, Oh I spent some time in Laos. But they don’t give a shit. So I guess my response to you is maybe, nobody gives a shit so why talk about it? And my question is who’s gonna buy your book? Who’s gonna read it?

End transcrition

Perhaps Larry's right; perhaps nobody gives a shit. No one gave a shit when it was current, according to him. We've got new wars. We've got lots of dramatic international intrigue on these days. Will anyone want to know about a little forgotten war up in the mountains of Southeast Asia? We'll see. In any case, I do.

Species

2006-10-21T21:54:00.000-07:00

More species that I've named here:

Goddamned carrion flies. Can't keep them off of any broken skin. Tiny little bastards resembling fruit flies. I don't think they do anything, but it looks really nasty. Flies clustering at your wounds. I'm almost fully healed up, but there's one particularly deep gouge that's hanging around. And bacteria breed brilliantly in the tropics. Love those antibiotics. Hippies are always warning you against them, saying they screw up your system. Possible, but on balance? How much harm do they really do?

Brown Fish Eagle: Looks just like a Bald Eagle, frequents the river delta between Ranong, Thailand and Kawthaung, Myanmar, cruising over the rubber-stamp visa charade offices in the river.

Waistcoat Heron: similar shape to a Black-Crowned Night Heron from home, but it's body is brown on the back and body, white everywhere else. Looks like they're wearing a tweed vest.

Black-winged Heron: looks just like a Snowy Egret or Cattle Egret in non-breeding plumage(all-white small heron), but it has all-black primaries on it's wings, making for a striking imprint.

Screamer Beetle: About an inch long, but you never see them. Just the casting from a molt, stuck to a treetrunk, as if they're so loud they jumped out of their skins. You hear them ringing through the forest, a high-pitched electronic sounding whine, much louder and higher than that of a Cicada.

I think I mentioned the Walking Myna and the Talking Myna last time I posted on this topic, way back when. The walkers fill the same niche as Robins, also being about the same time. The talkers are all-black with a yellow wattle, and you've prehaps seen these in pet stores.

White-fronted tern: these resemble Forster's Terns in that they have a white patch at the very front of their black cap, but they're a bit smaller. Close to the coast they follow your boat and relentlessly plunge into your wake. Odd thing about them is sometimes when they catch something, they streak away immediately, as if taking the food somewhere else, even though I don't think it's nesting season.

Coconut Ape: They don't behave like this in the wild I don't think, but you see these on the end of a long leash scurrying up a coconut palm to knock them down for their owner, or sometimes you see them perched in the basket of a motorbike as it cruises past you. That I like. Sometimes you see little fluffy house dogs in the same position.

Luminescent Scorpion: At a party, it is a really bizarre sight. Scorpions invisible in the dark, but fluorescent under blacklight.

Ghost Crab: about two inches across, completely sand-colored. Recognizable especially by their sharp turreted eyes which stick up about an inch above the body of the crab. They dig deep burrows in the sand and sometimes jsut stick their turrets up above the surface to keep an eye out.

Blackrock crabs: Only visible when they leap off of the rocks into the ocean at your approach. Very well camouflaged for algae-covered rocks.

Reticulated Boxfish: They're shaped like a wedge you'd use to split logs, with an almost completely squared-off head. Patterned in black and beige almost like a python. About nine inches long.

Blue Dart: a tiny minnow-sized fish, but such a shimmering bright shade of iridescent blue that they're quite visible even when the water's cloudy.

Cleaner Minnow: Maybe more than one species. They go for scabs and soft parts of your body, nibbling in a way that's sometimes quite cheeky.

Bearded Kingfisher: This one's lovely. They've got a russet beard that extends down their chest under their heavy spearfishing bill,and when they fly or show you their back you see the brilliant iridescent blue wings and back. Such a bright shiny blue.

Piebald Osprey: They're much like the ospreys we've got in the states, same behavior, crook-armed dihedral flight silhouette, ragged fingertips, but they're much patchier in their mix of brown and white, notably with a white spot at the base of their tail.

Pilots

2006-10-21T21:41:00.000-07:00

Stuff from my interviews of the old soldiers that may not make it into the book:

From a CASI(Continental Air Services International) a contract subsidiary of Continental Airlines, working for the CIA and USAID in Southeast Asia during the troubled times) pilot, refutations of rumors about the activities of pilots over Laos:

"You know about airmailing? You don't know what airmailing is? You sit on the drop door and…[take a dump out the door, or in its nastier expression chuck a prisoner out the door as an interrogation method for prisoner #2 who got to stay int he plane.] We didn’t do it. No. No unconventional ordnance. We did not do it."

"I remember we carried some kind of hybrid pig one time. It had a disease, like that one that eats you out, you know the flesh-eating virus, and it was eating at the carcass. We were just carrying it to fix it! It was a special hybrid. We had to take it to the vet. I mean, it was expensive! They brought it all the way from the states, and it caught some kind of disease, a virus. I mean, it was a big goddamn pig. A big white pig."

From an Air America Pilot:

"The people, when they send you down there, there was a radio operation there, and every flight, was monitored by the White House. And when we went out of there, same number on the back of the airplane, another C-123 would take off in Vientiane and cross into Thailand, in case they lost the engine, they’d drop the load in the jungle somewhere."

Injustice

2006-10-21T21:34:00.000-07:00

There's a peculiar breed of justice here in Thailand, perhaps due to the intersection of large foreign economies with a smaller local one. Here are some stories I've heard that are rather unpleasant.

A Swedish friend of Carl's was sitting on his motorbike with the engine running, not moving. A young Thai guy whistled down the street on his, not looking where he was going, smashed full force into the Swede's rear. Nasty wreck. Injuries, motorbike damage all around. The poice show up, take a brief look around, and say to the unconscious Swede's girlfriend, "You pay."
"What? We weren't even moving!"
"You pay." The idea is that the Thai guy has no money, and the foreigner can always get money from somewhere, some magic fountain of cash that only flows in faraway places. It got worse. The man's bill's at the hospital added up to over 400,000 baht, due to numerous procedures necessary for the collapsed lung and the rest of it, and each procedure would not begin until the cash had been presented. So the girlfriend basically took up residence at the ATM at the hospital. This all took quite a long time, so needless to say their visas ran out. The girlfriend eventually took two letters from the hospital explaining their overstay and their inability to make a border run over to the immigration office. The bureaucrat behind the desk accepted the letter on behalf of the man, but to the girlfriend, they said, "No. You go. Go to a border." Her arguments notwithstanding that it was only her continuous presence at the hospital that was enabling her man to be treated, banging her head on a hardhearted wall of bureaucracy, he left in tears. I don't know what she did after that.

It's about the money. It's about the money, and not in a long-term sense. How horrible is that? Much worse than the shitbag cab driver who claimed that I had hit his particular waterpipe, when I was standing there covered in sand and blood under a geyser. Far worse than that.

Here's another awful one, also about motorbikes, also about money.

Justin was riding in Phuket, and doesn't recall what happened. What seems to be clear is some farmers found him on the road and pried the motorbike out of him where it had penetrated him, like the kickstand impaling his calf muscle. At this point what seems to have happened is the local town boss, something like the mayor of Phuket, had run him over while drunk in his big SUV, and then kept on moving. When Justin was at the hospital, apparently word got back to the town boss, so he sent one of his guys around to inform the friends of the still-unconscious man that he expected to be paid 40,000 baht (~1000$) for the damage to his SUV.

Last horror story.

Three friends, one Thai and two foreign, got busted smoking a joint. The bribes demanded were as follows. Mr. Thailand, kick down two grand (baht). Mr. France, we'll take 40 grand. Oh, Mr. Belgium with the loud mouth, You owe us sixty grand.

And that's the way it is. If you're a foreigner, you're expected to apologize with legal tender. It makes you a little cranky, stories like this.

I wonder what would have happenned if any of the parties in question said, ok, let's settle this properly. LEt's put this on the record, I'll get myself a Thai lawyer and we'll see how it pans out.

The fear is that speaking up for yourself could land you in worse trouble, since our rights are somewhat limited in a foreign place with its own logic of justice.

It's not all bad; A, who runs my guesthouse, has complained to me about the too-common greed and shortsightedness common amongst here people in touristed areas. She says, "yes, I love my people, but sometimes I hate them. So stupid sometimes!"

Regarding long-term foreign residents and tourists, an analogy to a cow might work. We see that the cow is drying up a bit. Rather than doing things like massaging the udder and beefing up the feeed for a bit with measures such as more generous visa policies and greater protection under the law, what seems to get done more often is measures like cutting open the udder to see if perhaps there's a little more milk hidden away in there somewhere. Lots of the laws enacted under the now-departed Thaksin fit that description. There are many many foreigners living here, working here, contributing their skills and cash to the economy, yet Thaksin was constantly finding ways to facilitate squeezing ever-more money out of them. Cracking down on loopholes enabling them to own businesses and homes, things like that. I know it's not just about squeeze, it's about keeping Thailand Thai, but it seems like that sometimes.

The logical explanation is that most of the folks around here have been living hand-to-mouth for such a long time, long-range planning is just not really part of the mentality. For many.

This will come home to roost, I think. Once Vietnam opens up further, and if they make things a bit easierm then Thailand will start losing its growing expat population. Vietnam's got just as many beaches, just as many pretty girls, the food's just as good, it's just harder to go there at this time.

The mentality is just so different from what we're used to in the west! Building for the future is not really part of the thought process. Building for cheap for now. I've got enough today. But what about tomorrow when there's no trees left, or fish left, or expats left, because you sucked too much money out of them in the short term? Um...

Glass houses: we've already developed, we've already savaged our natural resources, but I think we've learned a bit. Can't you take the good and bypass the bad, learn from our mistakes?

Sigh.

Renew

2006-10-14T20:25:00.000-07:00

I've healed up, gotten out into my own place, and am working again. At last. Fortunately, I have the luxury to be able to lag until the urge strikes to work. Not forever. Just for now.

Optimism about a self-powered project is a funny thing. Comes and goes. Can't predict when or why. This time, I thin I'm generally cheered up by a few different things. I'm pretty much healed up, with one oozy exception. I moved out on my own and have much more contact with strangers than I did. And paradoxically, paying attention to America has made me more excited about being here, largely through some lively correspondences with friends back home started while I was convalescing in a place with full-time internet. The monsoon rains are in full force here, but when they're not, it's gorgeous. I'm living on the beach. That's my view when you step out my door of my little bungalow.

A, the woman who runs my guesthouse said something funny to me when we were hanging out yesterday. She was telling me about what kind of guys she likes. She said, "I want him fat, balding, and starting to get old. That way he can't cheat on me." Fair enough. Her previous marriage didn't go so brilliantly I guess.

convalescence

2006-10-10T13:21:00.000-07:00

Can't shave hairy scabs. So you end up looking even worse than you are.

Fear not, I only looked like this for a couple of days.

I will come back to America someday. Can't see making a life here.

I sit, therefore I heal. Faster.

Always have a vice, a retreat, a bugbear. trick is switching up the bugbear
away from what you actually want to get done.

Humbled

2006-10-06T05:13:00.000-07:00

In so many Hollywood movies, people get thrown off a cliff, shot, hit by cars or some other serious injury, then they just pick themselves up, grunt a few times, and keep on running or fighting or whatever hazardous activity they were just doing. The reason that bothers me is because I know it doesn't work that way. You are out of the race when you get racked up. I know this. I've been injured so many times that I know what it's like. Like today for instance; I've barely been able to move around I'm so beat up by the spill I took on my motorbike this morning. Rear wheel fishtailed out from under me on a sandy corner, tried to control it, couldn't, went down. My legs took the worst of it, my left one losing a bit of skin on the asphalt, my right getting a good whack off of the bike. It's really not so bad; I wasn't going too fast. But nonetheless, I got smacked around like a rag doll by the impact, and my joints are so stiff and sore that I can barely hobble around. Nothing's broken, just a bit of skin, but hell. I have been brought low. Reminds you a bit, getting banged up once in a while. Reminds you that yes, I too can fuck up badly. Also humbling is being dependent on one's kind friends to fetch food and water and other necessities while I'm laid up.

Interesting sidestory: during the skid, my left footrest hit a hose that was just at the surface. A jet of water conveniently came hissing out so I could clean up my wounds. Silver lining. A taxi pickup truck pulled over, and starting saying that it was his water pipe and that I ought to pay him for the damage. Sure. Right. Your hose. And you happened to be driving by at the exact moment this foreigner nailed it. No problem. Don't worry about it, don't ask me how I am. Just see an opportunity to scam someone to make a few baht and go for it. Try this one: go fuck yourself.

Another instance of degraded social relations between Thais and foreigners in touristy areas. I'm sure many of them have seen things here that give them no cause to see tourists as anything but cash fountains, but still. I thought that was in poor taste. Sven helped pick me up and dust me off and away we went. Wait, so I guess that contradicts what I wrote previously. I did just grunt and get up and resume. Just later, after things stiffened up that I've become totally decommissioned.

I am alive and well, although my various bits damn well hurt. And I'm getting a bike with tires less bald. That is, once I'm up to riding again in a day or two.

Daydream

2006-09-29T01:14:00.000-07:00

Back to Ko Pha Ngan, what my sister described once as, "the island that exists only in daydreams." Taking a work-and-play retreat. Frankly hadn't gotten much done lately except for the reunion. Brought my computer though, I'll be doing some work with the material I've got when I'm not enjoying seeing my old friends again or the little tropical island paradise. It breathes happiness into your soul, getting out of places like Bangkok and Vientiane, back to the jungle, the sky, the sun, and the sounds: the constant humming vibrating backdrop to everything, the grunting lizards, the whistling birds, the crking frogs, the insects, the insects, the insects. I missed all those sounds when I left the first time, three months ago now, hard to believe as it is. Widget,the ugliest puppy in the world has grown up into a reasonably ugly dog, but not a contender for the title. So she's doing better. Unfortunately not the same story for two of my favorite dogs, who were killed by cars in my absence.

Off to cook a feast for my friends.

love to all from daydream island. Tom

Reunion

2006-09-24T22:33:00.000-07:00

Tidbits galore from the reunion. Acronyms gone mad, stories that only seem absurd outside of their original context of a quiet but nasty flareup of the Cold War.

One acronym that seemed particularly odd was the one given to the Thais and Hmong who had to do one of the most dangerous jobs imaginable. They ran around on foot behind the very hot and hostile front lines, finding enemy positions and calling in airstrikes practically on top of themselves. If that was your job, you were called a "FAG". Forward Air Group.

The reunion itself:
Forty or fifty old soldiers getting back together in a hotel meeting room for three days, from about ten in the morning til a bit past midnight. Interesting process getting people used to the idea of a stranger wanting to hear their stories. Certainly a bit of an exclusive club of which I was not a member, but it went fairly well. This club is composed of everyone who were involved in the second Indochina war, but mostly the non-Vietnam parts. As it was explained to me, there are all kinds of Vietnam vet groups, but they snub the guys from the other areas a bit sometimes. Here, there were mostly guys from Laos and Cambodia. Air America pilots were the biggest group present, then a bunch of the Thai volunteers/mercenaries, lots of USAID and IVS guys, lots of kickers and flight techs, Filipinos who were brought in to train the Lao, and a few guys who were around in the Cambodia days, one of the Raven FACs, some intel guys, but it was hard to tell who did that. Not many US military guys; but as it was explained to me, their tours were shorter so they didn't get as close as the Air America guys and aid workers.

The group who put it together was the TLC (Thailand-Laos-Cambo"dia) Brotherhood, a group of vets who do humanitarian aid work in Thailand and Laos "In memory of our brothers who didn't come home".

Caught a bit of shit for admitting my voting record. Certainly an occasion where I agree with the statement that no good can ever come of talking politics. Which I ordinarily think is bullshit, but in this case I had a clear agenda and essential to said agenda was earning the trust of these guys so they'd tell me their stories. Being a journalist with a lefty voting record isn't usually helpful in a roomful of soldiers. It does vary though; in one little discussion there was a gentleman who made two remarks on the topic. The first was that, "I hope that the state of American civil discourse has not fallen so far that we can't buy each other drinks!", and also "I agreed with this guy in his first term, but he really lost me in his second term." Not a knee-jerk single-issue voter.

So many interesting stories, but I haven't transcribed the ten hours of tape yet.

Coup

2006-09-19T18:00:00.000-07:00

Wow, interesting morning. Arrive in Bangkok early AM just in time for a beer and a coup, but not in that order. Um....

Callback

2006-09-18T08:08:00.000-07:00

One little bright note the other day- I was sitting bullshitting with Howard and my phone rang. Someone witha Lao accent said, "Is this Mr. Tom?" I said sure, who's this? He said, "I am Manophet's student. You paid for my education. I called to sya thank you very much."

Wow. Who knew. I donated a few hundred bucks to my friend's school up in Phonsavanh a couple of years ago because he had several students who couldn't afford the tuition. It's a private english school. So the proof is there before you: The student called me and spoke to me in decent English to thank me for paying for his English-language education. It worked. He speaks English. I'll meet him when I go up to Xieng Khouang/Phonsavanh in early October.

That was nice.

Lonelyhearts

2006-09-18T07:33:00.000-07:00

There's a regular event around here. Howard and I are walking back late at night to the Phet Phim, our guuesthouse, and invariably we hear a motorbike cruising up behind us. Then we make a quick bet whether it's gay boys, hookers, or ladyboys coming to try and pick us up. Without fail, I tell you. Every time. At least one of the three groups, members of the Vientiane latenight lonelyhearts club. Although one night we were coming home late enough that we heard the throb of the giant monastery drums and the sonorous chanting from inside the walls of the Wat. Pictures to follow shortly. 4 AM is the beginning of the day for the monks.

Waste

2006-09-18T04:03:00.000-07:00

Got to get out of Vientiane for a bit. My productivity and motivation have sunk like a stone since I got back from Xepone, haven't really gotten much done. And I've come to accept that the government is by and large useless in setting stuff up for me. I've been sitting here for weeks, waiting for a few intervies that they said were in the immediate offing. But no dice. Fine. Whatever. Going to Bangkok tomorrow night to buy a laptop and to attend a three-day reunion of old Second Indochina War vets from all venues, Americans, Vietnamee, Lao, Thais, CIA, you name it. Who knows who'll be there. Certainly worth my time and my 1000 Baht. And after that I'm going to go for a little breather to Ko Pha Ngan to see my friends again, bring my laptop, do a some work in the day whnI'm not snorkelling or hiking or swimming or going out to the Village of the Damned at night. Sorry, Haad Rin is half village of the Damned, half Confederacy of Dunces. It'll be a laugh. I miss my friends. I need a change of scene. My motivation was unstoppable for quite a while, but... I don't know. Something happened. I figure it'll return after a break.

Funny thing happens out here wandering, something kind of based on the solitary traveling experience. You're looking for company much of the time, and then sometimes you find some and you get sucked into it, your own agenda getting subsumed into that of whatever little group you;ve joined. Then periodically your own needs reassert themselves forcefully and you bounce out suddenly. Howard and I are both leaving Lao. He's my roommate here. It's time to go for both of us. He's been here 2 1/2 months, I've been here 2. Time to go, at least for a little bit.

Cheers.

Vacation

2006-09-10T21:57:00.000-07:00

Took a weekend completely off. But nothing seems to have happened in my absence. An American vacation-hanging out with an American in my guesthouse. But it makes sens- motivation to work was flagging after my intensive session in Xepone on the Ho Chi Minh Trail. So now, theoretically recovered from that burst of waning motivation and back to it.

Heading to Bangkok on the 20th- there's a reunion of old sodiers from the entire second indochina war theater of you-name it, a bunch of old men getting back together to get drunk and tell stories. And excellent opportunity for me tp pick up some stories. Buy a computer in Bangkok, then I might take a little retreat to Ko Pha Ngan to see my friends and work and catch up. I do miss my friends. Wanting some regular familiarity is somewhat normal, I think. These temporary social pods that form are entirely deliberate: solo travelers looking for some stuff in common, some company.

Trail

2006-09-07T01:29:00.000-07:00

I just got back from a week on the old Ho Chi Minh Trail. Thing is, there was no trail. The trail was more of a concept, an agreement between the Lao government and the North Vietnamese government. The Lao revolution got military support and financial assistance from the Vietnamese, and the Vietnamese got untrammeled access and logistical support from the Lao. There was no one specific road, with green signs saying, "Ho Chi Minh Trail exit 23". It was a web of paths and roads and villages and foxholes and tunnels and caves and jungles and ponds and paddies. The US really tried, really tried so hard to interrupt the flow of goodies down this network. Dropped a lot of bombs.

That's one of the reasons I was there, I was out following a bomb disposal team for a week. Learned a lot; I guess I know a lot of the basics of demining now. Saw a lot of hardware and an unbelievable amount of scrap. You have to wade through mountains of fragments and tidbits to find and neutralize the still-active munitions out there. The deminers work hard. I sweated a lot; I wasn't even digging or working, just watching and shooting. What's the translation from Celsius to Fahrenheit? I don't know, but I know now that 41 degrees is furnace-hot and it's so moist that you could be sandwiched in a boxer's armpit.

Wanna see some bombs? Here. Look. The little one's a BLU-26 bomblet with the exterior skin rusted away, just showing you the casing of ballbearings that spray everywhere when it explodes. The big ones are 500-lb MK-83 general purpose bombs. They make a big crater, except when the fuse fails and they lie buried deep in the dirt. Still active; you wouldn't want to bang on the silver bit with a hammer, that would be rash, but you can kick the side of it and nothing happens.

UXO(unexploded ordnance) isn't like landmines; it doesn't tend to go off unless you molest it with a bit of fervor, such by digging a hole or plowing a field.

What really blew me away was the scale. The volume of shrapnel that the detectors find is immense. but each little squeal of the detector has to be treated with the same care as if it were a live bomb. Think about it: imagine a little bomb the size of your fist, coated in ball bearings. When it explodes, those several hundred ballbearings go everywhere. And this little bomb is one of 500 that came out of the same cluster shell, one of four shells dropped by that Phantom, that Phantom being one of the four Phantoms flying that bombing mission, that mission being one of 580,000 flown. So they weren't all Phantoms, they weren't all BLU-26 cluster bombs, etc. etc. But you get the idea. There's a lot of scrap metal making it difficult to pick out the shit that didn;t go off and is still there. Oh- there's a bunch of crap left over from the ground fighting oo, not to mention the odd nail or piece of wire that someone might have lost at some point. In any case, it's a pain in the ass, it's semi-dangerous, it's hot and nasty, and there are bugs crawling on you. And some annoying journalist taking your photo.

I'm very grateful to the guys who brought me with; I understand it can be annoying to have a non-worker on a work site. I'm doing a little publicity blurb for them, and I shot some stuff for them that they needed for their own purposes. It's the least I could do.

Valves

2006-08-29T03:04:00.000-07:00

Whoops.

What I learned today is that individual water lines, such as one to a faucet, do not have individual shutoff valves. How I learned this is by bumping into the blue PVC faucet poking out of the wall in my bathroom, the one that's about knee height that fills up the flush bucket. So I whacked it with the plastic tub where I was washing my clothes. Not that hard, but still, I whacked it. And, well, yeah, it's made of blue PVC and it's held together with something like airplane glue. And, yeah, I guess it just kind of broke off, pretty much right where the pipe comes out of the wall. And I suppose a bit of water came out, rather a lot actually, rather quickly. So I had to get Grumpy to switch off the pump that pressurizes the water for the whole building. Grumpy's unfriendly at the best of times; I hesitate to think of the reception I'll get when I return chez moi this evening.

I should have listened to Peter's old italian super. Don' tucca da' walves. Simple as that.

Got an audience with the head monk of the whole country today. Sounds pretty fancy, but it was only so-so. But one great image for the ever-growing series of reenactment photos I'm going to stage: Lao script written in charcoal on tree bark as the monks continued their teachings in the forest when buildings became unavailable, mid-war.

Also, at the ever-productive Hash House Harriers (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hash_House_Harriers) run, the father-in-law of one of the runners is an old soldier who might be willing to do an interview. Spent some time talking to him througha translator to pave the way last night, then making an official request today. Things go tranquilo in Laoland. Not so big on the rushing into things around here, they aren't.

So as I said, I've realized that a portrait photo of a person you interview only goes so far. Meaning they're quite boring much of the time, except in cases where someone is just really striking looking, like Mr. Phouvieng here. Hence, historical reenactment in the offing. That I'm thinking like it's a documentary only makes sense, since that's actually what I'm more qualified to do.

Mr. Phouvieng, Phonsavanh, Xieng Khouang Province, Lao PDR, August 2004

Tidbits

2006-08-26T22:43:00.000-07:00

Little details of late:

Had to physically push a guy away from me, a drunk Lao guy claiming to not be gay, yet he was pawing at me so aggressively and not listening to my verbal rebuffs that I had to shove him away from me. Saw him a few days later and told him he's really got to get a grip on that. If you're gay, admit it and deal with it. It's not that homophobic a country. He's lucky I'm not some people I know; he would have been spitting out teeth. Nonetheless, it pissed me off.

Some time ago, I met a guy from the west who's been traveling and living in Asia with no passport or papers for years. Latenight bellycrawls and fast breaks and bribes have been his methods of border crossing. Wow. That sounds challenging. As to why? I don't exactly know. It got stolen at some point, and then it has proven difficult to get a new one I guess? Talk about off the grid. That's all the way off. Traveling invisibly.

Progress report: it is happening, albeit slowly. Interesting interview with the Minister of Propaganda, sorry, the Director-General of the Press Office. The government guys are proving extremely inefficient at getting me any interviews. Fine. Saves me money. Except I need them to get me some of them. It will be more difficult to get interviews with old soldiers etc. without their assistance. But they're clearly operating on Lao time. One of the guys at the office is kind of creepy. A hard military bearing to him, fairly unfriendly, when he looks at you his glittering little eyes seem to be sizing you up for sale. He seems fixated on when I am going to go upcountry, when I'll have to spend some real money. Even though in my application letter I said I'd be working mostly in Vientiane, and there was a possibility I would want to go upcountry at some point. The DG was actually quite personable, but can't say as much for one of his underlings.

Read a story about a really scummy Thai cop milking some Hmong refugees as hard as he can.
http://www.hmongihrw.org/?cat=13 Point of reference for the story: 4000 Baht= about 100$

More runs with the Harriers. More leads. Leaving Vientiane on Wednesday, heading down to the south. Need time.

Hope this book doesn't suck.

Onward bravely,
affectionately yours,
Tom

Harriers

2006-08-21T08:22:00.000-07:00

So I must mention the Hash House Harriers now. It's a group that's active in every major city on the globe. They get together and go on a treasure hunt/jog/walk once a week, then they have dinner and drink a bunchof beer. It's a an excellent networking forum. I've met a bunch of people, Lao and foreign, all of them interesting. And it's exercise. And it's fun. Except they make you sit in a bucket of ice cubes from time to time. But if any of you are in Asia at any point, they're everywhere. I think even in New York. You can make a lot of contacts, for whatever your purposes are. They suit mine fine. I met the woman with the interesting family history there, and an old English geezer who's been here since 1962, and a US Navy guy who's working on finding the remains of the MIA plane-got-shot-down guys. All fun and useful folks. So check out the Hash House Harriers.

The name comes from the original run back in 1938 in Malaysia, where they gathered at a greasy spoon, otherwise known as a "Hash house". Nothing to do with THC.

Skype

2006-08-20T06:56:00.000-07:00

I signed up for Skype, so if any of you are enabled thusly, I'm down to chitchat.

Skype is a free phonecalls-via-internet program which enables two people, both of whom have the skype software loaded on their computer, to talk for free through teir computer microphones/speakers/webcams. Go to http://www.skype.com/ for the actual details. NEver done it yet, but it seems easy. Hey skype-already-done it people, send me a note so we can chat.

T

Serious

2006-08-18T05:48:00.000-07:00

It's funny, people seem to take me more seriously than I take myself. Having gotten other people involved now and having spent a bunch of dough, I guess I've got to make it happen.

But I suppose it doesn't cost people a dime to say, "Yes, it serves our interests to not obstruct what you are spending only your own time and money on. Carry on."

Stay the course. Be brave.

Legit

2006-08-17T22:31:00.000-07:00

I am now an officially permitted journalist in the Lao People's Democratic Republic.

All that stuff in Lao typed all over my badge. I don't know what it means. Maybe it says, "Do not trust this man. Do not allow him in your house. Do not leave him alone with your daughters.

The officials at the Press Office are being reasonably cool about it, that I don't have to pay my fee on non-interview days. But still, time to go beat up my bank account, comparatiively speaking to what I've been spending. More money for transpo, since I have to carry my minder around, the daily fee, and gifts to grease the wheels. Maybe just buying a case of wine now is a good idea, save a few bucks per bottle. I have to hire an interpreter too, unless I can get someone to do it for me for free. Yeah, no problem. People love donating their skills for free to people from the wealthiest country in the world.

A new one for me, last night: Haggling over the price of a whore on behalf of a friend because I can speak more Lao than he.

Puu-ying haa ngaan: "working girls". Not exactly my cup of tea, but hey. Gotta help a brother out.

Expensive!

My pal Ryan is in J-school and he's been giving me some helpful tips on all this crap. Have a gander at his at http://www.ryansholin.com/. Hey. Another grip/electric guy gone wordy. We lost him on the notorious New Mexico Ratner Job some years back. He met a girl. He went West. He got a new career. Hey. They even pay him to write. Who knew that a guy that good with a wrench and with knuckles so calloused from dragging on the ground knew how to type.

Gummint

2006-08-17T06:44:00.000-07:00

The good part about beng accredited here is it might let me get some stuff that I might have a hard time getting otherwise. The bard part is it's pricey. 100 clams to get registered, then 20$ a day per day of work, plus paying the expenses of my government minder if we're outside of Vientiane. So I made it sound like that's all I'm really doing at this point, just research and interviews in Vientiane.

I've had a good afternoon with and American Vietnam vet who's spent lots of time floating around southeast Asia and is now working on his Ph. D. in international development. I do admire folks who pick their education back up much later in life when they decide it's important again.
"When I got there, it was like, I was in high school three months ago! I went straight from reform school to Fort. Campbell, Kentucky for basic, then to Fort Lee, then jump school in Georgia, then from there I went straight to Vietnam. I turned nineten in Vietnam."
re: hairy moments that stuck with him, like scary firefights out on Long-Range Recon Patrol (Lurps)
"You piss your pants. You lose, you know, you lose all compassion for life. You really, really become so scared that you're totally concerned about life. But at the same time, you dn't give a fuck about life. It's kind of an oxymoron type thing. You worry about your mates, you worry about dying, but at the same time you think only about self preservation; you're going to do anyhting you have to do to stay alive. and there's not really no hate or animosity, there becomes that after you see a few of your friends die, and then it becomes, well, fuck it, but when you go there, when I went there, I didn't even know what Vietnam was!"

Bo pen yang

2006-08-15T04:33:00.000-07:00

A guy from the UNDP responded to an email from me and says he'll try to help me get press credentials. We met this morning. He's interested in me doing a good job, because increased exposure of the UXO problem and the whole Lao history in America would be a good thing for them. He oversees the technical details of UXO Lao, and they've decided they need more knowledge of this in America. America is the land of funding. He says they get a lot of media students who want to do a little project of some sort as part of their studies, but adult americans trying write a book is much less common. So he called me and we met up.

Not to make too big a deal of it, but it was encouraging. He's not in the government, who will be a bit less receptive than he of the UNDP, but nonetheless, it's nice to have someone who's at such an influential organization somewhat on my side.

It feels a bit pressureful. Now that I've said that I'm writing a book, I really have to deliver. It can't suck. It has to get done. I have to do a good job.

One little frustration is that I haven't got much photgraphic support. I'm gathering mountains of background information, some of it quotable, but 'm not getting the meat on the table so to speak. It'll happen. But I guess its a good thing. The more I know, the more depth in which I can describe things and tell stories. Or provide commentary to personal stories. The heart of what I'm doing has to be the personal anecdotes and excellent photographs to illustrate them. And they will come, but it's going to take a while.

Hey wait, I thought ressearching and writing a book was supposed to be a walk in the park!! This is total bullshit! Why didn't people tell me it was this much work? What a pile of crap.

It's funny how few photographs I've taken, since this is ostensibly supposed ot be heavy on the pictures.

Aah, then there's the fun part, actually trying to get something published. Ha ha. A fight for another day.

Lesson on dealing with the way things work here from a local friend of mine, a former government employee: "You have to be very, very patient. Things may not go the way you want them to, or the way you think they should. Tell people who you are, where you're going, and what you want and perhaps they'll be helpful. If you are not open, then no."
He is the second guy I've met who resigned, partly because it was time to retire, but partly out of frustration with the slow, mellow, lackadaisical, and not particularly efficient way this place works. The phrase in Lao that says so much about th country is, "Bo pen yang". It means roughly, "No problem! No worries! Insh'allah! Don't worry about it! No biggie!" All of that rolled into one. They've got it much easier than their goal-oriented neighbors the Vietnamese. The Vietnamese have twenty times the population density of Laos. In Laos, you don't have to struggle too hard. It's not so hard. Just take it easy. The Vietnamese have always been subjected to a greater adaptive pressure than the Lao, and thus, they kick ass. They're tough and efficient. The Lao are much more Bo Pen Yang.

Is this blog getting totally boring? Writing about writing aaaagh! Schoolboy navelgazing! "Talked to a guy. Bla bla. Ok read some stuff. Bla bla. Went looking for some dude, but he wasn't there or wouldn't talk. Bla bla bla." I don't know, for me, it's everything that this trip is about at this point.

Cheers
T

Story

2006-08-14T03:48:00.000-07:00

The afternoon was at least as productive. Chatting with a friend of mine who grew up in Saravane town in the south, I learned the fantastic story of how Saravane was a boomtown like Deadwood back in the sixties. There was a group of American officers and advisors stationed there, recruiting and hiring a local ethnic mnnority to be spotters and spies for them. These men made a huge amount of money. They'd come back to town after their short tours in the forest and go absolutely hog-wild. Undreamed-of sums of money being thrown about like confetti.

I can't tell you all the fun details because the book won't be a surprise then.

I don't blog on the shitty days where I feel like I'm not getting anywhere, the days when I can't summon the gumption to just go talk to people, the days I can't make it happen or the days I feel like I don't have any ideas. But I'm making progress. I'm getting stuff done. It's going to take some time.

My god I wish I had brought a digital voice recorder!! My hand was about to fall off I was writing so fast. And you miss things when you're writing as fast as you're listening.

Acceptance

2006-08-14T03:11:00.000-07:00

Great day! First, in the morning, an organization has accepted my request to shadow one of their UXO clearance teams for a week in September. They're ex-military, so our meeting this morning was actually a bit intimidating. I sort of wished I was a little better prepared with more questions and had read their website in more than a cursory fashion. At least I got a haircut yesterday and wore a clean collared shirt. But nonetheless, they're willing to take me, which is quite exciting. Sort of a breakthrough, since I've been here in Vientiane requesting something of the sort for over a week.
I may be speaking a lot of French. The supervisor whose team I'll be following is French or French Swiss, I believe. But that's alright. I've been speaking at least a little French every day, as well as learning a bit more Lao. My brain starts to swim with words after a while.
The expedition will be out in the weeds in Savannakhet province. He showed me some satellite maps covered in webs of red dots of varying concentrations. This is data they've been given by the US embassy, each dot indicating an airstrike from the sixties and seventies, accompanied by what the aircraft was, how many, on what date, what the target was, what ordnance, class of ordnance, how many bombs each aircraft was carrying, and a bomb damage assessment. It gives them a decent idea of what to expect where. This web of dots indicates where the Air Force thought that the Ho Chi Minh trail was, or else where there was heavy fighting. In some places you see a line of dots in a row where no road, river or village lies, and those places tend to be where the NVA/PL forces were pushing a trail through to attack some target, and the bombardment record marks this trail. In some places, the web is so dense no white is showing. Frightening, really, to see how dense the bombing was. Millions of dollars a day worth of bombs in the sixties. Good thing we showed those bastards. We sure showed 'em.
Nobody freak out; I'm not going to get blown up. They really know what they're doing. And I'm not doing the actual work, just shadowing. The foreign experts train, teach, and supervise, and local recruits do the work. The idea is that the local teams become self-sufficient in relatively short order.
This will be an opportunity to get some excellent photographs of areas and people directly affected by the war. I'll be able to meet some folks and interview them. And UXO clearance is one of the biggest ongoing effects of our war here.
I like this UXO clearance team; they're non-nonsense, goal-oriented, and I have no doubt, efficient. The military will do that for you.
In any case, I was flattered that they took me on so easily after I sent them a letter and my CV. One thing he inquired about is how I spoke French. Maybe my resume just seemed pretty good, or at least to indicate that I wouldn't be a hindrance.

Work

2006-08-10T04:33:00.000-07:00

Bustle bustle. That's what my days are like here. I've discovered that communist governments have lots of red tape. Lots. That's a newsflash, now isn't it? Who knew? Anyway. Trying to operate legitimately in cooperation with aid agencies could be a quite promising source of material, but it's also a pain in the ass.

I ought to see if I can make a deal with this internet joint, since I spend so many hours in here. See if I can geta price break. I mean, come on, it's 6000 kip per hour(that's 60 cents). You'd think that they could cut their best customer some slack. Oh wait- the little rugrats playing video games are actually the best customers.

I was chatting yesterday with a man who grew up here who lit up when I told him I was from Boston. He said he had an English teacher once for one term in 1964 who he said must rank as one of the best of the best teachers ever. This teacher had eighty students in his class, and only one failed. Impressive, no?

That one semester of English provided Mr. D with a solid enough foundation to continue on to learn English as well as he knows it now, which is quite. I think we sat talking for over three hours yesterday. This teacher's name was Lou Setti. He was 32 in 1964, so that would make him 74 years old now. If I can find that guy, he might have a few stories for me, having been a non-spy American working in Saravane in 1964.

Saravane is one of the southern provinces on what was once know as the Ho Chi Minh trail. Heavily bombed, of course. Not quite as heavily as Attapeu, which borders on both Cambodia and Vietnam(lucky them!), but still fairly thoroughly. There were a stack of spies running around in that area at the time, mostly military advisers recruiting the local ethnic minorities, mostly the Ka in that area, to fight against the Pathet Lao/NVA alliance.

Tidbits: The Vietnamese are still paying back their arms loans to the Soviets and the Chinese. The guns weren't free, even in the name of fighting off the capitalist imperialist swine.

Mr. D (the chap I was talking to) was a teacher of engineering, electronics, and technical measurement for seventeen years here following the war. He quit when he finally lost his faith in the government here, that the socialist ideals had become a complete farce. He really believed in socialism for a little while after the war was over, but when Kaysone Phomvihane retired, it all went the way of a tin-pot autocracy.

He's an ardent fan of the French educational system under which he came up, finding it superior to what he calls the more modular American system. He said the French have a more linear sequential system of education, where you have to learn things in more of an order, and each thing builds on what has come before. I told him I didn't agree comletely, that sum of information that is out there is too great to approach it in that Renaissance-man fashion, that you have to break things down somewhat into units or else you'll get lost, but in any case. I do agree that interrelating subjects and creating a solid foundation seem to be a better way to do it than the more Cartesian fashion that we're familiar with from the traditional US education. Incidentally, he has nothing but respect for the Vietnamese educational system. HE said that after the wars, the Lao threw out the baby with the bathwater, but the Vietnamese kept the best of the French colonial educational traditions.

I like Vietnamese sandwiches. They taste good.

Back to work.

Affiliation

2006-08-08T23:49:00.000-07:00

It would be very useful for me to bve affiliated with some some of organization to be able to put on an air of legitimacy when I'm approaching organizations to talk. Anyone got any ideas of some sort of journalistic enterprise that would let me use their name, basically calling me an occasional non-staff contributing journalist. Or something like that that wouldn't cost them anything.

Any ideas?

I'm finding it fairly difficult to get affiliated with an organization that would be helpful to my research and photography. It's like Mr. Viengsavanh said to me; people are not likely to be willing to help unless you're attached to some organization that seems legitimate. Um, ok.

My Lao phone number is 5047329.
to call from the US:
011-856- 5047329

There is an odd prefix saystem that might tip you up. Here, to call from a landline to a mobile, you dial 020 + the number. From a mobile to a mobile here, thee's no prefix. So perhaps you'll have to dial 011-856-020-5047329. Or perhaps not. I'm not sure exactly, having not tried it myself.

This is a link I found for cheap calling cards to call here:
http://www.enjoyprepaid.com/enjoyprepaid/jsp/plan/planselection.jsp?AFFN=708472684&from_country=1&to_country=538

Leads

2006-08-08T07:00:00.000-07:00

So I've spent the last few days bustling around Vientiane on my bicycle looking for various NGOs. The information I got from the internet is all total shite. Not one correct phone number, except for maybe one, but they didn't speak english at that one. Erm. Ok. Remembering bits of the Lao I used to know, learning more every day. I've got to learn this language if Im going ot get stuff done, but it's unlikely to be able to learn enough to do what I want ot do in my timeframe. But my timeframe remains indefinite. Much more indefinite since I got here. I was feeling so purposeless and adrift before I got here. But I've got a project here. Today was wonderfull productive. At breakfast I met a girl who's half Hmong, half Lao, but raised in Chicago. She's going to forward a list of my questions to her mum and dad and siblings, who grew up here during the troubles. They're in Chi-town, so a proper interview will have to wait. But they might have stories I need. It seems like a good lead.

I've put together a very long to-do list for here, what photos I need, who I need to find to talk to. While hunting around at an expired address for MAG (Mines advisory group) I met a chap who was incredibly helpful. Mr. Manivong Viengsavanh was born here, but educated in the Soviet Union, graduate of the class of 1980. A retired agricultural engineer who speaks perfect French, excellent English and decent Chinese and Russian who says he can't get to sleep at night without reading for a while. Showed me some excellent books, nineteenth-century french travelogues from the explorers of the area. It was so refreshing to meet a scholarly intellectual! It gets so depressing, seeing everyone just watchig TV all the time. The last one was the man in Bagan, Myanmar, who's earned the moniker, "Mr. Universe", because he knows so damn much about so many things. Mr Universe ( aka U Thaung Lwin) schooled me on Theravada Buddhism. Seems there might be as many contradictions in buddhism as in Catholicism. Mmm, well, not quite. But many.

In any case. Mr. Viengsavanh advised me to get attached to some organization so that the government gives me a certain degree of trust, since some of my areas of inquiry remain sensitive topics. In addition, he underlines the importance of making some local friends in order to have introductions to people whose stories I want. People will be less willing to trust me if I'm just coming in from the cold. He approved of my plan to volunteer for MAG, or UXO Lao, or NSA, or CARE international. He thought that would be a smart way to get a toehold towards gathering the material I want.

I can't tell you how thrilled I am to have more of a project to do. Honestly, I was really running out of patience with the backpacker bum life. I was up to here with Thailand.

Mmm. Beerlao. The best beer in Southeast Asia. And at seventy cents a bottle(22.5 fl. oz.) you can't go too far wrong. Siobhan and I had a pretty good laugh the first day or two here. We had a brilliant meal at one of the nice French restaurants by Nam Phou fountain, only spoiled by the bunny-boiler. Then Siobhan and I went out to a Lao nightclub. The kids are much better dancers than the last time I was here. How much this town has come up in two years! So much more money! On the CIA world factbook, it's only a notch or two above Burma, but it's really worlds apart. Three cheers for slightly less dysfnctional government.

Did you all see Fatal Attraction? That's the reference. A bunny-boiler is a woman who's gone off the rails obsessed with someone, to the point of danger. I'm watching my back now, looking over my shoulder. I hear the door open behind me, and I jump.

I've been a cad, but this woman's temper is really out of hand. This is the one I spoke of before in an earlier post, the one who punched me in the face in a jealous rage. A jealous rage inspired by the event of my spending more time with my friends than with her. She just kept on popping up wherever I was. Ko pha ngan, then on the boat leaving KPN, then in bangkok, then here in Vientiane! After yet another vituperative and hyperbolically insulting email, she said she was leaving the country to get away from me. Ok.

The lecture that Sven gave me after my drama with the French girl of whom I was quite fond was, "you're not going to fall in love out here. Everything's too transient. Don't set yourself up for disappointment." I guess the Englishwoman didn't catch that speech. But she really behaved badly on so many occasions. Screaming in public is a real no-no in Asian cultures. As well as throwing a handful of torn-up photographs. Hoo-ee. Live and learn. Watch out for bunnyboilers.

I doubt there will be any drama remotely resembling that again. I'm here to work on my book, not to party. Enough of that.

I must say, I'm so thrilled to be back in Lao. I feel so much more comfortable here, I'm concentrating hard on my book, I've got lots to do, I'm less preoccupied with the anomie and aimlessness that had been plagueing me since halfway through Myanmar, and it's lovely here. The people are so nice and mellow, the negative cultural exchange of Thailand is largely gone, life is good, the food is great, the beer is cheap and good, and what else can I say? I've got loads of work to do.

I'm surrounded by wee Lao lads playing some video game. Uh.... The West is coming fast.

Vientiane

2006-08-06T03:37:00.000-07:00

I'm back. Feels good to be back here. It's grown up so much in two years! It's still the dusty little provincial capital it's always been, but so many new posh little bars and restaurants. Still completely dwarfed by giant cities like Bangkok and Rangoon, but the money is starting to flow here.

Siobhan's here, a good friend who I met here two years ago who happens to be back at the same time. We've been having a good laugh. Tomorrow I'm going to get to work again, start making a plan for what material I need to gather here and figure out hopw to get it. I'm thinking of volunteering for some NGO for a while as a means of getting reacquainted and inserted into the culture here. Trying to remember to speak what little bit of Lao I once knew.

Happy to be back in Laos. My patience for backpacker loafing has worn thin. For now.

New poll that I'll also be conducting: "Now, why exactly are you traveling? And don't give me any of that, 'I want to experience foreign cultures' crap. Of course that's part of it; now give me the real answer. " Without being rude of course. And, in return, I'm certain I'll be required to answer the same question in return.

Tolerance

2006-08-04T00:05:00.000-07:00

I wonder, sometimes, about when two culturally different groups interact closely, whether it reinforces or counteracts cultural prejudices. The conventional wisom is that experience and education are they key to tolerance. But there are countless examples ofthe opposite happening. American media culture seeping into the Muslim world being one obvious, if rather blunt example. But that's not really people, that's commerce and money. Perhaps better examples are the classic struggles of new immigrant communities. But then again, the American notion of the cure to those ills is greater integration and less isolation.
The immediate example that presents itself is certain travelers in Southeast Asia. Travelers being loud, insensitive and dismissive of the "tourist servant class" and on the flipside, the locals developing a very colored view of the foreign visitors. Also just thinking of some of my experiences here. Little stupid things that you find yourself judging. Like, why do almost none of the Thais read? Much of the time, the folks who work in guesthouses have nothing to do, and they sit around watching TV or napping. That's my cultural background, finding it morally superior to read than to watch TV, That a tradition of intellectual engagement is more valuable than one of seeking passive entertainment. Funny to hear from an American, I'm sure.

That's my idea of a negative cultureal exchange. Like the little boy I wrote about some time ago, sitting with his dad, watching my friends and I dance well past dawn, well-caned, waiting for the party to end so they could pick up the litter of the beach. They see us as degenerates who never work. We see them as our servants. Post-colonial colonialism. Unequally-matched economies. What to do? Thats globalization. We want the cheap products and labor, they want the economic development. Sigh.

Asian

2006-08-02T02:28:00.000-07:00

So I've been trying to figure out what is the primary motive force that pulls all these westerners out to Asia. Maybe it's obvious; People want several things. They want to party for cheap, they want to "experience a different culture", albeit in the limited fashion of interacting with guesthouse staff and taxi drivers, they want to see some natural beauty and historical architecture. Those seems to be the most common motives, but not at all the only ones. I would be insulting myself and my peers if I said that.

Funny thing about absorbing another culture is that there's a massive barrier to most of us: We don't speak the language. We can't understand what locals say to each other, other than what basics are communicated by body language and expression and activity. So how much are we absorbing? How much of what I've learned about Thailand even comes from Thais, rather than filtered through layers of foreigner hearsay? Not knocking that avenue, there is gold in them thar hills, what stories we farangs tell each other in cafes and curbsides, but it's not a primary source.

It's a drag being so dependent on foreigners to speak my language and being unable to speak theirs. I know so little Thai.

Held

2006-08-02T00:50:00.000-07:00

Held up in Bangkok a little longer. At Hua Lamphong Station last night, the nice people in uniforms told me that Chiang Mai was flooded, so you can't get there at the moment. Sat and pondered what trains were going where that evening, wondering, "Cambodia? Laos? Wherever shall I go?" Then realized I needed to get prepped before I went to Laos. Got a cab. Got a room. Rereading my old notes and interviews, reading articles on the web, getting my brain back around the topic. Getting ready to resume working on my book. Tired of being a drifting expat without enough purpose.

I have been feeling out of sorts, like "what the hell am I doing here?" Tired of Thailand. Some internal wrangling going on about the future of this voyage. Looking forward to trying to learn and achieve something. I was certainly learning in Myanmar, but that was a very difficult country. Not that Lao is that much easier, but I've got so much more background there. Time to go.

One thing that was so challenging about Myanmar was the isolation. There's a regular push-pull in my travelling world between the need for western company and the need to flee them to regain self-determination. I was a happy guest in many ways at my friend's house where I've been staying these ten days, but I was not making all my own choices, making sure to be doing right by myself. In some ways, one could consider it an argument in favor of selfishness, to not get attached to people so that you can determine your own course, but then the flip side is you've got to go find people with whom to chat. Or maybe it just means get a job.

It's just as well that Chiang Mai was blocked. So I'm here in the backpacker ghetto, where there are cheap computer resources and lodging, doing what I tought I might do up there. Parking my butt in front of a computer.

Cheers all.

T

irony

2006-07-30T10:42:00.000-07:00

One little tidbit about the State PEeace and Development council's policies: July 19 is Martyr's Day, a memorial for Bogyoke Aung San, the power-player who managed the use the japanese to kick out the brits, then bring the brits back to kick out the japanese, all while keeping the 109 ethnicities of Myanmar united. He was assasinated shortly after he achieved independence and consolidated the country. In any case, July 19, the anniversary of his assassination, is the only day of the year that his mausoleum is open for viewing. My cabbie and I pulled up at noon on the 19th, but lo, there we beheld a barbed-wire barrier accompanied by guards who told us, "No, this is closed today."

Football

2006-07-25T21:01:00.000-07:00

Out in the hills somewhere between Kalaw and Nyaungshwe, we spent the night in a monastery in a little Pa-O (Black Karen) village. Said monastery seemed to be the social heart of the village, and at night people would gather there because there as nothing else to do and there was a TV and limited electricity there. Unfortunately for us, since we'd been hiking for about eight hours that day and we were beat and just wanted to sleep. Lucky for us, the World Cup came on at half past midnight, so in come the people, on comes the TV, loud is the volume. It was all in the one great hall of the monastery. There was no escaping the volume. No why was the volume even important? I believe it was being broadcast in English, which no one in the village speaks. Hm... Also strange because rural Myanmar people are completely diurnal. Farming and no electricity does dictate that. I guess it was a special occasion.

Scum

2006-07-25T20:43:00.000-07:00

Not to go on about it, but Yangon is really the filthiest city I've ever been in. There's a layer of scum on the floor and mold on the walls and nothing's been fixed in forty years.

I'm currently in Bangkok getting one of my lenses repaired and getting some visas to go to Laos and Vietnam. All is well. Bangkok is incredibly cosmopolitan compared to Yangon.

Justine

2006-07-24T23:55:00.000-07:00

A few quotes from a book I finished recently

"Unaware that their mother city was dying, the living still sat there in the open street,like caryatids supporting the darkness, the pains of futurity upon their very eyelids."

"there is no pain compared to that of loving a woman who makes her body accessible to one and yet who is incapableof delivering her true self-becaues she does not know where to find it."

"...and gradually his voice ran down likea time-piece overcome by the weight of seconds."

"a graceful silver-haired man whose austere features had always seemed to me to demand a violin under them in order to set them off."

"I feel as if heaven lay close upon the earth and I between them both, breathing through the eye of a needle."

"By the way, she's not a Marxist as yet, simply a work-mystic..."

all from "Justine", one quarter of "The Alexandria Quartet", by Lawrence Durrell.

Eats

2006-07-24T22:48:00.000-07:00

When you're in a strange place making friends and meeting people, much of your activities end up revolving around food. It's some of the essential glue of human social interaction. And when you don't know what else to do, you can always snack. A charming little bit of Myanmar society is the teashop. You sit down at a little table on a little kindergarten-sized stool. There is always a pitcher of weak Chinese tea on the table and a few little cups in a bowl of water when you sit, and then shortly after you sit and order a cup of myanmar tea (strong black tea with sweetened condensed milk), several plates of little snacks appear at your table. Little somosas, bits of fried dough that resemble crullers, small cubes of sweetened and flavored sticky rice, discs of fried dough stuffed with sweetened black beans, sometimes packaged pastries, oily fried springrolls, squares of eggy custard, things like that. It varies from place to place. At first your reaction is what the christ am I going to do with all this food, but then you get used to the idea that you don't pay for what you don't eat. It's easy to meet people in the teashops, especially because you stick out like a fart in an elevator. I drew a few portraits of strangers in some, men playing chess or watching television being good subjects. (The hand as gotten very rusty!) It's a nicer way to approach someone and record their image than simply taking a picture. Plus, if you've put in the effort already, they're usually happy to have you shoot their picture. The teashops and the temples are the centers of Myanmar social life. There are bars here and there, but as far as I can tell, the only people who can afford to drink beer are tourists, soldiers, and a some businessmen. In addition, the whole country turns into a pumpkin around ten at night. It's as silent as the basement of a morgue at night. All the bustle of the street evaporates, the umbrellas and fry stalls and betel-nut sellers and trishaw drivers, the cheroot hawkers and the shouting garbage collectors and girls with platters of fruit on their heads, all of what makes the streets a congested muddy swirl in the day, it's all gone by around nine-thirty.

What food you find in the teashops reflects the influences of how many different people have lived there. Chinese and Indian snacks accompanying Nepali-style tea, all of it with a Burmese twist. It's a huge country, as big as Texas with a population of sixty million. Indians, Nepalis, Bamar, Mon, Chinese, Chins, Kachins, Shan, Kayin, so many groups. This place used to be a bigger deal than Thailand. You see the cracked and charred husks of several empires here. The older one, which left all the temples and stupas behind, was the kingdom of the Bamar kings. More recently and briefly, but still relatively visible, is the Empire of the British. You don't see too much British colonial architecture outside of Yangon, but the presence is still there. Roads, railways, those things that the Brits are good at. I met a batty old woman who was still pining for the days of the British. Apparently that's not so uncommon among people who predate the second world war. They got stuff done a whole lot better than the current assholes.

But overall, I'm thrilled to be back in Thailand, foodwise. Much of the food in Myanmar does not have the richly layered flavors of Thai food. A lot of fried carby stuff. Fried rice, fried noodles. Those are the staples. Gloppy curries without the delicacy of flavor that you find in some Thai and Indian curries. The Indian food was the best food that I had there. I had one meal at a north Indian restaurant in Bagan that was to die for. It was sort of a splashout expensive meal, mutton curry for 2500 kyat, almost two dollars! But it was unbelievably good after that horrendous minibus ride from Meiktila. A mutton curry with Chapatis and five different little pickled accompaniments to make each bite taste different. Fried onions and garlic, pickled mango, tamarind paste, maybe pickled bamboo shoots, and a different amarind paste. It was spectacular.

A staple of the Shan diet is wheat noodles, and one of their staple crops is tomatoes. So not surprisingly, in Shan state you can get a really good plate of homemade Italian pasta. Wheat, tomatoes, garlic, onions. Those are all native.

Note to future travelers: It's a "don't finish the whole plate" country, not a "clean your plate country". If you empty a plate, it gets refilled. And people are constantly handing their dishes back to the server or cook for further modifications and additions. You get used to it.

Transit

2006-07-24T22:31:00.000-07:00

One of the ways that the complete and utter dysfunctionality of the government of Myanmar can be seen is in their public transit. There are nowhere near enough buses. They're in horrible shape. People packed in like fish in a net. A mix of re-re-re-rebuilt 1940's Chevy army trucks, rebuilt 1980's Toyota vans, and other vehicular palimpsests. If you spend most of your time in transit in horrible vehicles, your quality of life will certainly suffer. In addition, the roads are really lousy. Four lanes, two in each direction, but only the two in the middle are really paved. Those are the routes between the cities. One exception is the road from Yangon to Pyay, because Ne Win, the original leader of the junta, grew up in Pyay.

Martian

2006-07-16T00:11:00.000-07:00

Movements in the Union of Myanmar, briefly-

Seventeen hours through the pouring rain walked from Kalaw to Nyaungshwe, took 3 days. Inle lake, a place where the farmers build islands of dirt out of decaying plants dredged friom the lake bottom and piled into small islands. A ride on the roof of a sardine-packed pickup truck for seven hours. Meiktila, a crossroad city where everyone behaved as if they'd never seen a foreigner, or at least not in a long time. It was a bit intense, the stares and giggles, but my anxiety was alleviated by the hospitality of the son of a watch repairman and his family. My femur was longer than the ditance between the back of my seat and the back of the one in front of me on the ride to the parched plains of Bagan. The temples out number the tourists here by several thousand, although there are more palefaces here than anywhere else I've been lately. Thailand, to where I return in two days time, will feel like Chicago.

Probably just a mild warmup for the foreignness I'll feel in rural China.

Moist

2006-07-04T07:33:00.000-07:00

Rainy in Rangoon.

Hey folks. Happy fourth. Silly me, this morning I took a stroll over to the US embassy (they do have one here even though it's a rather ungentle place) and the guards out front told me, "Come back tomorrow." And I said, "How come?" And they said, "It's independence day." I said, "Whose? Myanmar?" They said, "No, yours." Uh... Ok so I lose track of stuff like dates sometimes. Not that I have anyone to celebrate it with, since there are absolutely no foreigners here. None. I had a beer with three Bamar sailors who all had fond memories of Bourbon Street, but that's the closest I got. Yesterday, visiting three of the biggest tourist attractions in Myanmar, I saw a total of ten foreigners. All day today, not even one. And I was out all day. I guess the guys with epaulets aren't really doing their country's tourism industry any favors.

Terms like that are the way you talk about current affairs with locals. Or that's what they do when they're talking to me. Makes sense. Gestures like brushing one's hands at one's shoulders or pointing upwards get the point across quite well. I'm operating through a proxy server, but nonetheless, I'm going to euphemize about any loaded topics since the deleter-guys are probably using search engines to sort through all of the incoming and outgoing traffic looking for specific hot-button words.

One of the sailors actually said her name out loud(quietly) in the bar this afternoon. The others and I urged him to shush.

Everyone hates them. Everyone. Hates. Them. Despite the law and the real danger to them, people are eager to talk to me about the topic. It only happens in a car or inside an apartment, in safe places.

Don't worry, I'm just chatting, not joining any kind of movement. I'm very careful to avoid attracting any kind of attention from anyone with anything like a uniform.

I've heard of the first, second, and third worlds. I think I might be in the fourth. Okay, I'm exaggerating, but I've never been any place like this. Parts of rural Mexico were desperately poor, Morocco wasn't super-rich, some villages in rural Laos were pretty far down the ladder, but this is the downtown of the first city of the nation that I'm talking about. Squalid, decaying, mouldering, crumbling, those words all work well. People are kind of okay though. They're really nice. I instinctively trust them so much more than I do the Thais, never mind the Moroccans or Mexicans. They're nicer. The folks in Laos were similar, but they're developing really quickly. Exposure to the idea that You Can Get Really Rich and Buy All this Stuff!! Egads! Stuff! I'm not saying economic development is bad, and folks here would love to get a taste of it, but there are drawbacks. And I will say that greed is categorically bad. Pollutes your priorities. Some of the young Thais closely attached to the tourist industry, like the gangsters at the Drop In in Haad Rin, have done very well financially, but they're so hard. Like New Yorkers? One salient element is that this country is heavily Buddhist. As you all probably know, one of the core elements of Buddhism is that much of the suffering in life comes from material desire, and that all material things are transitory and impermanent. If this is one of the beliefs that you and everyone around you has been brought up with, perhaps you're less inclined to get worked up about the new car that the Joneses bought that you don't have. Be that as it may, there is still such thing as Not Enough Stuff. Like when you're hungry and cold and wet and your kids are crying and there's nothing you can do about it. (Not speaking from personal experience)

Anyway blah blah blah. I think I'm just in the mood to chat and think out loud. Not many opportunities for a frank chat here. I'm starting to understand better some of the aspects of the colonial mindset that I've read about. I'm not agreeing with the nasty racism and exceptionalism of those years, but I understand some of the feeling that could move in those directions. In "Burmese Days" by George Orwell, an important part of the protagonist's personality was a feeling of isolation and loneliness, feeling cut off from all that is familiar and comfortable. As a result, he spent a fair amount of time at the European Club with men he hated, just for lack of anywhere else to go. I'm even considering watching a World Cup game. Flory spoke Burmese, and knew lots of people, but there is a certain ache for what you grew up with. It's been over a month since I've met an American, I'm pretty sure. Canadians and Brits have stood in a bit for that spot in my brain, as well as numerous other Europeans. Homesick is a strong word, but I do find myself looking for the familiar where I can. Like I wrote the other day, I couldn't help myself but watch when "Sex in the City" came on TV on the bus the other day.

I don't think the epaulets are very good Buddhists.

A quote from a Buddhist text:
"Aware of the suffering caused by exploitation, social injustice, stealing, and oppression,
I am committed to cultivating loving kindness and learning ways to work for the well-being
of people, animals, plants, and minerals. I will practice generosity by sharing my time,
energy, and material resources with those who are in real need. I am determined not to
steal and not to possess anything that should belong to others. I will respect the property
of others, but I will prevent others from profiting from human suffering or the suffering
of other species on Earth."

Mom, if you ever come here, I found a bookshop that you'd love. It was like a mouldering cave filled with stacks of books bundled in twine, dirty glass cabinets of old periodicals, worm-eaten textbooks, and five little old men. The owner, Pho Thin Naing, erally loves books. He's a collector of old english-language texts from all sorts of provenances. It was like being in a wizard's laboratory, opening book after book, finding the wierdest stuff. It felt like a cabinet of secrets. I even found an original copy of book I read last week, but the copy I read was homemade with a photocopier and then bound, but this one was an original printing, and the pages were riddled with little holes from some kind of burrowing insect, dare I suggest 'bookworms'? There was a manual for running Burmese jails, archaeological scholarly texts from the fifties about the ruins in Bagan, agricultural training manuals, books on the observation of occult phenomena, lots of buddhist stuff, "the Glass Palace" by Amitav Ghosh (an author who is on my Ipod), and I don't even know what else. One of the gentlemen, U San Lwin, spoke nearly perfect English. Shocking to discover he had never been outside the borders of Myanmar(Burma in his youth), given his excellent grammar and accent. He runs someplace called the English Language institute when he's not at the Book Cave.

Everything is always damp. It is indeed the rainy season. It rains all the time. Almost. I smell. I can't make all the smells go away at the same time. It's a little bit of a drag. But some of you snarks out there have been telling me I smell my whole life. Well piss off. I'm doing the best I can, being quite hygienic, but when nothing really dries ever, what can you do?

Ok I'm going to do some translation now for a friend. Reading his French friend's travel diary, but she alas wrote it in French.

Prices

2006-07-03T05:18:00.000-07:00

Hey hey, what do you know. Apparently there is limited and censored internet available in Yangon. Which is no longer even the capital city of Myanmar, since those guys got crafty and moved their capital to out in the weeds a few years back.

So this place completely does my head in. Who knew that a border could be so big. The differences between Thailand and Myanmar are dramatic.

Here's a little sampler for you of some prices, which I found quite illustrative.
exchange rate this afternoon: 100$ US = 130000 kyat
Noodles for two on the street: 800 kyat (pronounced "chat")
Tea for two with two baked banana thingys, two samosas, one full paratha, one little fried sweet ball thingy, and all the green tea you could drink: 1000 kyat
Hotel room in a decent place with aircon, minibar, hot+cold water, and no windows: 10$ US
1991 Toyota Corolla in acceptable condition(exactly what I've got back in the states): 30,000$ US
Cellphone with simcard that has it work on the myanmar network: 4000$ US
My camera package complete (Canon EOS 20D, pretty high end digital SLR with a couple lenses etc.): 30,000 $ US
Brand-new Toyota Land Cruiser: 400,000$ US (of which only about 40,000 is the car, the rest in getting it here)
new stainless-steel watchband, including adjustment and installation: 700 kyat
Passport and visa to go somewhere else: 10,000-12,000$ US
Brand-new Shan Star Jeep(the house brand, apparently an unmitigated piece of shit): 6,500 $
Gasoline: 3$ a gallon. Six months ago it was half that. Sound familiar? Thanks Dubya.

There are no new cars here. With a few exceptions, owned by those you would logically assume would. There are stacks of mid-eighties Toyotas, lovingly beaten back into shape again and again, made to work with some low-budget wizardry. It's astonishing how well my guide's Toyota worked, given what's working against it. Even all the electronics work, which is more than I can say for most beaters back in the states. Many of the city buses are 1940's model Chevrolets. I just can't figure out how they work. I don't think the cars here have the charm of the cars in Cuba, which I think are all old curvy 50's models. It's more like an 80's timewarp crossed with a stiff shot of squalor with no chaser. Its fairly grim here. The people are devout Buddhists, eschewing most of their material desires. They don't seem to have many other options.

So the pagodas are amazing, blowing most of the stuff in Thailand and Laos out of the water. Glittering gold-and-diamond spires rising off of great gold mounds surrounded by intricately carved teak pavilions and double-bodied Sphinxes, Nagas, and buddhas. By the thousand. One I saw today was unbelievably huge. I think the word is that it's a little over 180 feet (55 meters) long, and probably a quarter of that high. I think it's the biggest thing I've ever seen. Okay not, but the massive glittering glass eyes transfix you as you enter the pavilion.

Really almost nothing is new here, except for some low-end consumer stuff from China, like necessary plastic housewares. The lack of massive public advertising punches you in the face with its absence.

There is a romance to the imposing moss-covered ruins-in-training that the British left behind and have mostly been taken over as government buildings. Hundred-years old colonials abound, defined by swaying columns and algae-covered brick. The glories of the British Empire faded almost beyond recognition.

Talking to folks and looking around really makes me see what a major tragedy was the assassination in 1947 of the man who navigated this country to independence, the chap whose daughter has been in hot water with the fat cats for quite awhile now. It' been a world of hurt ever since. It's such a cliche to say, "and it's so terrible that it's happening to such nice kindhearted people!" Well, maybe there's some relationship between the national personality and the current situation.

So folks, I think I'll be able to log on again tomorrow, but after that maybe not for quite some time.

Departure

2006-07-01T09:50:00.000-07:00

This writer has finally left fantasy island. It was high time. And my visa was expiring. Looking forward to a more outward-looking, less hedonistic period of my travels, which is about to begin. It was funny on the bus back to Bangkok, I was forced to endure about eight episodes of "Sex in the City". I was trapped. too load and present to concentrate on my book or to sleep, so I surrendered. I couldn't help but watch. It was New York, it was America, it was my craft, and in some ways, it's a decent show. In some ways it made me want to be stoned to death with overripe bananas rather than continue watching but still, that's not the point. The point was in one episode the lives of thirtysomethings were being contrasted with those of twentysomethings. And it made me glad that I'm about to resume a more thirtysomething pattern of behavior wuite shortly. I started talking and thinking about my Laos photobook project again after a conversation with my seatmate. I've had enough of Haad Rin for quite awhile. I don't regret anything I've done, I'm just saying I'm glad I'm in motion again. Ko Pha Ngan was wonderful, and it's now the closest thing I have to a home in Asia. But I'm onward now.

New photos uploaded to my smugmug photo site (tomguiney.smugmug.com). Mostly pix of my people there.

So I'm leaving Thailand early in the morning, catching a flight to Yangon, once known as Rangoon before the SLORC took over Burma and renamed in Myanmar. I am eager to see what kind of shape this poor tortured country is in. I've been reading up on their history, and it's not atypically awful for the region, it just happens to be awful to live there now under the curent government. Or that's what I would assume. I am going there tomorrow morning and I'll report back in about three weeks. There's no internet there and international phone calls are prohibitively expensive, but I'll try to find a way to keep in touch. Telegrams are what is recommended by Lonely Planet.

until I return to Thailand or someplace with internet

yours

Tom

Hounds

2006-06-27T21:06:00.000-07:00

It's kind of scary that most of the dogs (and there are many) on Haad Rin beach know me by know. The other night when I was out partying one of the dogs saw me from a hundred yards away and came running to meet me for a scratch on the head. Maybe it's because I live with four dogs that they smell them on me and that qualifies me as dog-friendly. I like all the animals I've had while I've been here. Damian, Caliban, Ying, Jezebel, Shadow, Widget, Smiler, Jessie. The dogs here are really sweet! Even though most of them are half-wild. The ones that live close to the humans learn to be docile. If they don't, I figure they learn to push up daisies instead. It's nice to always have dogs around to scratch on the head or curl up next to you on the balcony.

I'm leaving here friday, which is good. The excesses of Haad Rin can really be rather excessive, to paraphrase Oscar Wilde. I could use a break. Get back to exploring and get away from partying, from the tumbling raucous hen and stag party of The Drop In and the Cactus. Therre are armies of the young and nubile marching around with buckets in handsearching for that spoecial evening. As stupid as it can be, I've met some quite cool people at the parties. Even sensible folks like a party sometimes. It's been rather spicy a few times, such as at the Shiva Moon partry in Ban Tai when a woman flew into a jealous rage because I was talking to some other girls and the shouting match culminated with her punching me in the face. Wow. I can count the number of times I've been punched inthe face by girls on one hand. She was mortified at her behavior the next day. Appropriately. The other time that I can recall was back in New York, when Lopez, Kennedy, surly and I were at a bar after work in midtown several years ago. Two women approached us, and began flirting with us by being insulting. Um... okay. So we started teasing and taking the piss out them, but nicely enough that they stuck around for more. I pissed one of them off to the point that she started trying to hit me, so we squared off and had a boxing matxch that weent on dfor some time. Boxing match is only an accurate term if you discount the fact that I never hit her, just deflected her blows and provoked her to greater exertions. At one point, I said, Ok, I'm sorry, I'm being a jerk, go ahead and give me a good shot. She hauled off and punched me in the face so hard that her wrist swelled up like a pregnant whale and she had to go get it x-rayed. Hey. I have a hard head.

Red Curry Paste

2006-06-22T23:56:00.000-07:00

This is the key and primary ingredient in lots of Thai cooking. MAke your own, customiize it to your taste, keep it in the fridge for as long as you like.

my proportions, measured in amounts based on joints of a finger.

Two thumb joints of galangal
One thumb joint of krachai ( a relative of ginger)
three or four cloves each garlic and shallot
three or four pinkies of the pale part of the lemongrass stalk
a dozen black peppercorns
a finger joint of Thai turmeric
a sprinkle of salt
from five to fifteen small (1"-1 1/2" long"dried red chilies. Adjust number according to how "phet" you want it. The smaller the chili the hotter they are. If the little red are too much, go a bit bigger.

Mince all this stuff up quite small, then pound the living daylights out of it in your mortar and pestle. Or, for those soft prosperous westerners amongst you, use your blender or grinder. Reduce it to a paste. I do feel that having your own sweat involved makes a food better.

Anyway. That's the paste.

Now to make a typical red curry:

1 healthy glob of paste
1 glob oyster sauce
a few hunks of meat and vegetable, you pick it. I recommend carrots, cabbage and baby corn. Maybe some small green thai eggplants, little round things about the size of a golf ball.
equal parts coconut cream and unsweetened evap[orated or condensed milk. Sometimes smashed small cloves of garlic.

Put all this in a pot. Bring to a boil. Serve with rice.

So easy once you've got the paste.

Cruelty

2006-06-22T23:32:00.000-07:00

Something happened yesterday that stuck with me in an unpleasant way. Nicola and I (the nice English bird I've been kissing) were on the beach in the afternoon in Haad Rin, playing with three little puppies we found. There're loads of them around. One of them, a fuzzy little black and white thing, was just sleeping in the sand, so we left him alone as we squatted in front of him and played with the others. A little Thai boy ran up to us and grabbed a handful of skin on the little puppy's haunch. The puppy shrieked. Then the little bastard held it up in the air by its throat, choking it, then he threw it onto the concrete. Thye puppy screamed and kpet whimpering since he had hurt its leg. I wanted to give the brat the back of my hand and ask him how it felt to be bullied by someone bigger than him. Several problems. 1) Cabn't say that in Thai. 2) he's not my kid 3) his parents were there. 4) unknown cultural boundary about discipling someone else's kid. Apparently I would have been alright scolding him. Respect for one's elders is a pillar of Thai culture, so that would prbably have been alright. He was just showing off, showing that he could take from Farangs with impunity, or that he didn't care about offending us or something like that, I'm not sure exactly what, acting out for attention, something like that. Cruelty and disregard for animals is also a pillar of Thai culture. It's gotten much better since the king adopted a few strays a few years ago. He is a cultural role model and hero to the people, so what he does will be imitated. He was trying to get the stray dog problem under wraps. Sven told me a few years ago, it was too scary to walk on the beach at night. The packs of wild dogs were too numerous and too aggressive. Things are much quieter these days since the king adopted. most houses now adopt a few dogs and feed them, keeping them around. In turn those dogs keep the others away, having made it their territory. This combined with a spaying and neutering program has brought the wild population down a bit. The Thai's fairly brutal approach to dogs actually makes them really well behaved. Usually around here if a dog sees you pick up a stick, they assume you're going to throw it at them, not for them. Fetch is not the name of the game around here. They tend to be really well behaved. They know they can't come inside, they all understand, "Pai! Pai!" (Go!), and they tend to be quiet. I assume there's a certain selective pressure here in favor of being well-behaved and quiet. The bad dogs get killed. Only those dogs with a gentler nature are allowed to survive and procreate. Caliban, one of my dogs back at the Yoga retreat where I lived for a bit, was really sweet. He must have been part Basset or Dachshund or Corgi with those stubby little legs of his. A nice dog. Ying was mcu hmore trouble, always jumping up at you a bit too enthusiastically.

These brits are ruining the way I speak! All of this crap slang working its way into my vocabulary! I say things like pikey, bird, skint, fag, poof, all kinds of nosense like that. When I get back I'm going to need a linguistic reinstall. These people don't speak english.

On the 30th I'm leaving fantasy island.

Does anyone know if you can still send telegrams to the United States? I read in the paper that Western Union sent their last one in the states some months ago, but does anyone else do it?

Loyal readers, my apologies for writing so little lately. I've jsut been busy having adventures, living my nice life with my adopted family here, cooking up a storm, raging hard in Haad Rin from time to time, swimming, hiking, loafing, spinning my poi, reading, and drawing. Spinning my pi is a new party trick I picked up, even though it's an annoying hippie fad. It's fun and it's a way to get the blood moving and get my butt out of my hammock. Sort of like exercise, but mostly just for the arms and shoulders. What they are is two weighted banners on the end of two-foot strings that you whirla round you at high speed. It looks pretty cool if you've never seen it before. I tried it with the flaming wieghts the other night for the first time. No harm done. It's a nice little hobby. Not highly demanding, but I think hobbies that get your blood moving are quite salubrious. Helps you work off the buckets.

love
Tom

Pad Thai

2006-06-16T22:51:00.000-07:00

Everyone likes Pad Thai. I cook it all the time. I'm going to tell you how so you can do it at home.

get some Pad Thai noodles. They're not the same as glass noodles or thin rice vermnicelli or glass noodles. They're made from sticky rice. Bangkok Center Grocery on Mosco street in Chinatown should have them. So get some pad thai noodles first.

Then get yourself a wok and in said wok put a glob of oyster sauce, a spoonful of powdered chicken stock, two spoonfuls of sugar, about an inch and a half of water, a blob of oil, and a healthy glob of some tomato product. Any will work, like canned tomatoes or tomato paste, but I like to use about two fresh small minced tomatoes. The tomatoes all the source of that mysterious brownish orange color. Bring all this crap to a boil to get it mixed up and the tomatoes cooked down a little, then add whatever meat you're using, beef, chicken, pork, whatever. Cook the meat mostly but not totally. Then throw in a buinch of noodles. If they're fresh, throw them in straight. If they're dried, partially preboil them. Cook the noodles about two minutes, cutting them with your spatula as you go. Then throw in whatever vegetables, seafood or egg you're using. Suggested vegetables are baby corn, carrot, chinese cabbage, all sliced thinly. They cook fast. Do not overcook. Plate it up, and then sprinkle crushed peanut, minced scallion, lime juice and minced cilantro. You're done. It's really fast. It's really good.

I remember back in Milhous, my dirty but lovable hippie co-op back in the day, various folks trying to figure out hopw to make pad thai. Peoplke were always throwing peanut butter in there. All wrong. We were so wrong and ended up with a gelatinous brown mass that would cork up the New York City sewer system. Yikes. Hey. We were young. We were in love. We had no idea what we were doing.

House

2006-06-16T21:47:00.000-07:00

There are a lot of things I'll miss about Pha Ngan. All the jungle sounds: The barking geckos, chirruping frogs, whistling birds, rustling palms, the bubbling sizzle of the coffee in my kitchen in the morning. I'll miss our kitchen. I'll miss being able to cook up a feast and have my friends over. We had a great barbecue last night. The weather threatened so we just met at the house and set the grill up on the balcony with us. Lamb chops, curry-marinated pork, beef and chicken marinated in ginger, garlic and soy, a spicy Lao dipping sauce, grilled onions, baked potatoes, and of course rice. coin is running out. More soon.

I cook for my friends all the time here. It's nice having a brief window of domsticity for a couple of weeks.

I'll miss the wind rushing over my skin as I cruise through the hills on my motorbike. I'll miss my bike, my turquoise Honda Sonic 125, and the freedom it affords. I'll miss the sun fading into the fog over the islands as the squid fleet turns on their blazing white floodlights. They make it look like there is a row of stadia out on the horizon. I'll miss my cozy house where Sven and I lounge in our sarongs in the morning, or in our hammocks on the balcony when the air is too hot to breathe. I'll even miss the sweat. I'm done with cold climates. For the moment.

Bubble

2006-06-08T02:18:00.000-07:00

Since the gloom and doom of the death passed along with the widow back to Ireland, I've come to be living in a wonderful little bubble here on the island. It is not what I had intended exactly for this voyage, but I'm happy and part of the purpose of this trip is being willing to take advantage of what I find before me. During the wake, Mairead and I moved in with Sven, but he asked me to stay even after the mourning period was over and we had paced her off back to Ireland. I have a really pretty room in my own building, our living room is a balcony overlooking the a lush jungle valley, and my friends and I lounge on cushions and hammocks in the breeze. Sven, John and I have become really good friends. Vanessa, Sven's lady, has moved in with us as well. We had a splendid Bushwick-in-Thailand dinner party the other night. I understand that this is a bubble, a brief period of time with some really kind, interesting people. It's our little haven. We have a lot of fun, just cooking out at the house or hanging out at the sunset bar or raging in Haad Rin. So I'm delaying my departure yet a little longer to stay with my little family of friends for a bit. When I think of life back in New York, socially I'm definitely happier here. In some ways. Plus I don't pay any rent.

I'm going to get yelled at by all of you back home for all the odd English and Aussie slang I've picked up.

flexibly yours,
Tom

Wear

2006-06-02T20:48:00.000-07:00

I am simultaneously happy and exhausted from providing vital in loco familia support to my bereaved friend.

Requiescat

2006-06-02T00:34:00.000-07:00

One of my friends died of a sudden heart attack yesterday. Tony Frawley, Irish, aged 48. He was a member of my little family of friends here on Pha Ngan.

I got there about half and hour after it happened, and it must just have been my own racing pulse that I felt when I checked him out. He was gone, but still fully warm. We sat with him on the deck of the Dragon Bar through the rest of the sunset, overlooking Haad Salad bay. He had said to one of us last week, "I don't want a long time, I want a good time." And he had it. He and Mairead had a great three months here. And how much better a place than a long, grim decline in a hospital bed. Haad Salad is so lovely at sunset, the rocks and the palms and the fishing boats. And for her, I think it's been good to have hethe rest of us right around her, so close at hand when it happened. We've just been sitting with her and help her get everything squared away to go back to Ireland. John and Sven and I moved their stuff out and returned his motorbike. TJ took her to Samui to get some of her affairs straightened out. Better that than many other ways it could have happened.

He was starting over. After twenty-three years in the army and a previous marriage and five children, he retired and started a new life with Mairead. He was so goddamn tough when he was alive. You just can't plan these things. They were getting ready to open their sunset bar out on the rocks overlooking the sea.

And now things are breaking up and settling down at the same time. Everyone's talking about quitting smoking. Talking about leaving. Talking about taking the opportunities that are in front of them. Talking about mortality. It's all pretty familiar from other deaths, but the whole thing has been really shocking and grim.

It's funny, Sven and I were planning a going-away dinner party for all of us right when it happened. Once Mairead's on her way, I'm leaving the island.

Pyramid

2006-05-31T06:37:00.000-07:00

W wierd thing I learned abotu that's sort of an insight into the Thai financial mind is the following. A group of workers all pay into a central pot, and once a week one of them gets all the money by random drawing. The winner is then obliged to gradually pay back all of the lenders, with interest! What an insane debt generation scheme! All of them want to be the one who gets the moment of wealth which he can then use to make a big purchase or share with his huge family. Kinda wacky, righ? And they all insist on being paid monthly rather than weekly or biweekly since the checks are "too small!!"

This learned from a falang bar owner.

Charade

2006-05-31T06:23:00.000-07:00

There's a funny thing everyone has to do sooner or later. It's the visa run. Your visa expires, and if you want to stay in Thailand, you have to cross a border for five minutes and then come back. One of the easiest places to do it is just across the river from Ranong, in Myanmar. There's a whole service set up for you. You get the night boat to Suratthani and as soon as you're off the boat, you avoid the Boat Nazi who's shouting "Ranong, Ranong!" and say, Mrs. Da? And Mrs. Da is right there and waves at you and gestures to one of her men, who escorts you to the minibus. The minibus takes you to her shop, wher you pay her and she serves you a cup of tea and a little sandwich, then you're off across the Isthsmus of Kra to Ranong. After he tucks a bottle of water and a candybar into your pocket, the driver takes you straight to Thai immigration where you get stamped out, back to the bus, straight to the port. Ushered into one of hundreds of longtails doing the same thing, you whisk across the river to a Burmese waystation, where your driver collects your passports and five dollar bribe(provided by your driver to you) and gets the whole boat of you stamped through in about three minutes, and then off to the Burmese town of Kotao. In Kotao, you have five minutes. Not that more time would get you much, since you're not allowed to leave the town limits with this particular border visa. In those five minutes, a number of Burmese gentlemen will attempt to sell you cheap Viagra, Valium, lawnmower-grade whiskey, and cardboard cigarettes. Whoosh, back across the border you go, straight back to Thai immigration where you receive a stamp worth another thirty days, and you're on your way back to Suratthani. While waiting for the ferry back to Pha Ngan, one of Mrs. Da's men gives you a little styrofoam container of freshly-made fried rice, and you're almost done. All of this orchestration and direction provided for the princely sum of 1200 baht. It includes everything, all exit fees, visa fees, boat tickets, food, everything. Time elapsed. twenty hours, start to finish. But STAY AWAY FROM THE BOAT NAZI. She provides a related service but will try to rip you off and lie to you and misdirect you to make you miss your boat and have to buy another ticket from her. Someone, some thai tourism businessmen, are going to put a bullet into her one of these days. She has pissed off everyone this side of Singapore, from what I hear. And she's hurting business in Suratthani, Pha Ngan, Samui, Tao, and who knows where else. So in anycase. That's done.

Children

2006-05-29T22:18:00.000-07:00

My stitches are out, I'm declared fit to swim again. That's good. Eager to do at least a little snorkeling while I'm here.

Some English guy was telling me what a bunch of thieves the Thais are, but I felt obliged to point out to him that the mechanic who rented me my bike was perfectly willing to trust me quite a lot. I needed my passport back because my visa's up tomorrow and I have to do the border run to Ranong. Without a passport in hand there's very little point in doing a visa run. The bike is probably worth 30,000 baht (37b/dollar) and he just said, ok. You bring tomorrow. I thought that was quite swell of him.

Not much else going on other than talking about leaving the island. I love my friends here, but it's time to go. I can always come back. For many, Pha Ngan is kind of that second home, their refuge from more challanging bits of travel to other places. My friends aren't the ones who've become spoiled and decadent here, like the obnoxious frenchman who Tj decked or the english guy bitching about the pack of thieves. To be faiur, I don't particularly trust Thais who I don't know either. I understand that I really do represent a walking dollar sign, and it takes time to see around that.

Something I wonder about is some of the children. There's a few I have in mind. The other morning around dawn as the Black Moon party was winding down a bit, I saw a middle-aged asian man and his very young son sitting off to the side. Perhaps they were the cleanup crew, I don't know. That little boy is forming his opinion of falangs from the decadent hedonism of the Moon parties. What the hell is that? Or even better, when someone asks him what he wants to do when he grows up,(resuming that that question gets asked to Southeast Asian peasant children, please) will he say, "a Falang!" They sure seem to have it good. Another is the five year old son of an acquaintance of mine. The little lad runs pretty wild here. His dad's a bit self-centered, and the boy's a bit badly behaved, even if spectacularly precocious and confident. Going for attention, it seems. And lives almost entirely in the company of adults. That would be a strange bringing-up. And the last is a kid who I see out at every party and club. I call him Little Man, because that's what he is. His voice hasn't even changed, but he dresses l;ike a gangster and he appears to be friends with every whore in Haad Rin. Whoa. John looks out for him a bit because he knows his dad. But still. Sure, he'll come out somehow, but what must your impression of normalcy be if that's your life! That's the theme uniting all of them: that to them, Pha Ngan is normal.

Black

2006-05-28T22:25:00.000-07:00

I went to my last of the Moon parties, the "Black Moon". We've all agreed it's time to chill out for a while, less drinking, dancing and debauchery. My friends have told me that they usually don't go out anywhere near as much as they have in the last three weeks while I've been here. Hmm. Do I have anything to do with that? Time to take it down a notch. And time to get off this island. It's hard to walk away though, now that I've developed a crew of friends. I have to keep moving very soon, but I can understand why some choose to stay when they find a useful thing to do. That's the kicker for me. Not enough to do.

Odd event at the Black Moon was when TJ was sitting with one of her Thai friends, some French guy said something rude about Thais. That got her back up a bit to start, and then when it turned out he's been on this Island for eight years and doesn't speak any Thai, and thinks Thais are stupid, she went completely ballistic. That really is so colonial of him. He got at least what he deserved, I think. She knocked him flat of his ass and sent him running and John and I had to hold her back. She's a tough cookie.

Things didn't go so well with the French girl. I was rather mistaken about her, it appears. Advice I've received from some experienced traveler friends is that out here is really not a safe place to let your guard down like I did. No one's looking for much, nor are they open to it much. Just looking for good times. John put it like this:"She's not a slag, Tom. She's just like a guy." I guess that makes me more like a girl. I was unprepared. Maybe Rumsfeld and Cheney were right: Don't trust the French.

Crises

2006-05-25T21:37:00.000-07:00

There's been a lot of minor little incidents lately. I've found myself in the crisis manager/paramedic mode a bit. There was the time the nice french girl gave me quite a fright late one night. We were at somebody's place in Haad Rin, we'd been drinking and dancing and carrying on and really having a splendid romantic evening. Apparently the poor lass hadn't eaten much all day, because she stood up to visit the bathroom and I saw her take three steps and then slump backwards and crack her head off the tiled wall. I took care of it, checking for head and neck injuries, treating her for shock, getting her to come around and talk to me. Ididn't know what the hell had happened at first, but she looked really bad at first. Reminded me of an overdose I saw one time a long time ago. Her lips were almost completely white and her skin was green. It all worked out in the end, got her home, checked on her a few hours later just in case of concussion, but whew.
And then there was the young Indian/English girl who mistook a lily pad pond for solid ground with slightly awkward results. Her hand slapped down onto a rock and gashed the meaty part of her thumb. She doesn't have my long and checkered history of self-injury, so she started to flip out. The hardest part of it was getting her to calm down and relax and realize it's not such a big deal. And keeping all the other people from fussing and clucking and volunteering all kinds of irrelevant folk wisdom. LAcerations are very simple. There is one set of steps to take, and you take them. It's not a matter of opinion. Whisked her off on my bike to the hospital, got her stitched up, and then back to the jungle.
And the lovely French girl's ambivalent has caused me some heartburn since the day after her little crisis. Just can't help liking some people, it is rare, hadn't happened yet in Thailand, but sometimes you think it'd be much simpler if it never happened at all.

When I go to BKK next week I promise to upload lots of pictures.

Blessing

2006-05-22T21:36:00.000-07:00

Sent to me and I was very moved so have chosen to quote it back here.

By Constantin Cavafy,

Ithaka

As you set out for Ithaka
hope the voyage is a long one,
full of adventure,
full of discovery.
Laistrygonians and Cyclops,
angry Poseidon — don't be afraid of them:
you''ll never find things like that on your way
as long as you keep your thoughts raised high,
as long as a rare excitement
stirs your spirit and your body.
Laistrygonians and Cyclops,
wild Poseidon — you won't encounter them
unless you bring them along inside your soul,
unless your soul sets them up in front of you.

Hope the voyage is a long one.
May there be many a summer morning when,
with what pleasure, what joy,
you come into harbors seen for the first time;
may you stop at Phoenician trading stations
to buy fine things,

mother of pearl and coral, amber and ebony,
sensual perfume of every kind —
as many sensual perfumes as you can;
and may you visit many Egyptian cities
to gather stores of knowledge from their scholars.

Keep Ithaka always in your mind.
Arriving there is what you are destined for.
But do not hurry the journey at all.
Better if it lasts for years,
so you are old by the time you reach the island,
wealthy with all you have gained on the way,
not expecting Ithaka to make you rich.

Ithaka gave you the marvelous journey.
Without her you would not have set out.
She has nothing left to give you now.

And if you find her poor, Ithaka won't have fooled you.
Wise as you will have become, so full of experience, y
ou will have understood by then what these Ithakas mean.
She has nothing left to give you now.
And if you find her poor, Ithaka won't have fooled you. Wise as you will have become, so full of experience, you will have understood by then what these Ithakas mean.

Pix

2006-05-22T21:34:00.000-07:00

Sorry abotu the lack of pix lately, I'm just wrestling with the inadequacies of antiquated computers. Even when it works, it takes so long.

Half

2006-05-22T20:49:00.000-07:00

Went to the Half Moon party, which was nowhere near as big as the Full Moon. This island is like a barnacle filtering financial nutrients from the monthly ebb and flow of the Full Moon tide. Around Full Moon, the place is packed. Away from the Full Moon, it gets much quieter. Quiet is still a relative term when you're talking about Haad Rin though. There's always some people who want to play there, even if it only looks like a pale ghost of the seven thousand strong full moon crowd. So, the good part is the Half Moon was fun. And I also met some nice girls. The bad part is the day after I fell and gashed my shin a bit. Four stitches, nothing major, and the whole thing, anesthetic, antibiotics, sutures and painkillers all for 500 baht!! So I had to postpone my diving course until the skin is all knitted back together. The stitches come out after one week, so maybe then. I'll have to bop over the Ko Samui on the ferry to get my visa extended a little. No biggie. I still want to do th diving course here since it's supposed to be quite nice here, and the cheapest place to do it. The intstructor Phil is a nice English guy who comes recommended by my friends.

So the little Ko Pha Ngan jaunt is getting to be a bit longer than I'd thought. It's all right. I have time. Part of the purpose of this trip is to have to freedom to adjust my plans to the situation and not vice versa.

Storm

2006-05-19T00:19:00.000-07:00

Not that the weather is that interesting a topic generally, but it's certainly been noteworthy. Thew seasons are all wrong right now. We generally have at least one intense storm a day. I got caught in one the other day when I was riding. A lightning bolt crackled right over my head with the immense thunderclap sounding a heartbeat later. THe other morning around five, some noise woke me up and I looked towards my window to see my green curtains chattering straight into the room like a superhero's cape. I got up to close my window and pull in my laundry, and I found a pack of dogs had taken shelter on my porch. It was pretty intense.

Annoying about htis is it's completely lousing up the visibility in the water because of all the silty runoff. Haven't been able to go snorkeling on the reefs yet. I've tried, but the island's tides don't make any sense either. There's only one high water and one low water a day, not the two that we're used to. At low tide, the water is so shallow you couldn't drown yourself in it if you tried, never mind swim. Ah well. I'm going to go scuba diving and I think they'll take me out in a boat to where it's a touch deeper.

Haven't put any pictures up in a bit because the computers are kind of shitty most of the places I go and they won't do it. Or the connection is so ungodly slow that I'd be waiting for a month. And paying for it by the minute.

If any of you needs to call me my cell number here is 062779093. I believe you dial 011 + 66+ my number.

pirates

2006-05-19T00:10:00.000-07:00

From some of my local friends I've heard some unpleasant stories about farangs getting burned badly by Thais. A relatively common story is a farang moves here, sets up a bar or some other business and gets it off the ground, but eventually has to go home for a while. They get back after a few months and find their bar full of thais. Fine, they think, and just tell the Thais to hit the road. The Thais respond, fuck off and don't come back or we'll shoot you. Wow. That's happened with houses too. The only way to be safe is if you're part of the family, and the easiest way top do this is marry a Thai woman. In some ways, Ko pha Ngan is a bit like the Wild West, especially up in a place like Bottle Beach, not reachable except by boat, and there, the locals really make the laws. Not that it's that different elsewhere, since the cops are pretty corrupt, but it's not as bad. A guy named Jamie got put through the wringer by some Thai "friends" of his up in bottle beach. He bought a speedboat and started a business with it, kiteboarding or something, but all the legal forms that he had to sign were in Thai. So he asked some of his friends to help him out, and after all was said and done it turned out that the forms he signed were conferring ownership of the boat to the "friend". It took a lot of money and wrangling, but he got that crap voided out eventually.

Cooking

2006-05-16T03:06:00.000-07:00

I can't wait to cook for all of you guys what i learned. I took detailed note and lot of pictures, because sadly, I don't know when that's going to be. Thai food is so easy! At least the 8 dishes that I learned today:
Gaeng Phet Daeng (Curry Spicy Red) Gai (chicken) : a soupier coconut curry with veggies.
Phat (stirfried) Phet (spicy) Muu (pork): a fiery rich curry
Gaeng Gai (curry chicken): a simple drier chicken (or whatever beast) curry
Phat Gaprow (stirfried basil) with other stuff. MAde with gaprow, one of the two thai basils. Ga Prow is the one that's sort of acrid or antiseptic, but very good when cooked. Also called holy basil. Maeng Lak is the other one that has a sort of anise-like flavor, sometimes called sweet basil. We made this dish with shicken. IT's a southern Thai classic, a spicy basil-and-chicken stirfry with a molasses-like flavor.
Pad Thai. The only noteworthy detail here is that everyone makes it differently and the orangish-red flavor comes from tomato.
Laap: This cold ground-meat salad is one of the things I learned in the class I took in Laos two years ago. It always varies though. Worth ordering if you ee it on a menu. Also spelled Lab, Lap, or Larb.
Spring rolls: Kay, Chris' wife, the kitchen brains of the operation and a fantastic cook, makes hers with wrapper made from Kale! I didn't think kale lent itself to being processed into spring-roll wrappers. But it does. They get a really nice crispy texture.
And fried sweet fruit thing. Rob and I could barely stand thinking about eating another bite, since we had eaten every dish we had cooked up to this point, but these were yummy so had eat four or five. My god. I can't recall the last time I ate so much good food. We cooked small portions, but nonetheless those are formidable odds. Two men, eight dishes, three and a half hours.

Moon

2006-05-16T02:45:00.000-07:00

The primary reason that Ko Pha Ngan is on the tourist itinerary is because of the monthly Full Moon Party. Depending on the month, anywhere from six thousand to twenty thousand people converge on this little rock for this huge beach blowout. Friends of mine warned me not to get my hopes up too high, as it's become a huge festival of foolishness over these past twelve years. "Tom, it's stupid, full of drunken gap-year kids, obnoxious israelis, and pushy hookers. Don't expect much. Check it out, but don't expect much." John said, "Tom, Haad Rin (the party locale) is a cross between a comedy of errors and the Village of the Damned."

It was awesome. I met a group of Brits in my guesthouse who were older than your average gap-year tykes and we all went together. Not the healthiest of pursuits, but once in a while, it's really good to get trashed and dance your ass off with thousands of your closest friends until dawn. All the bars along the beach set up huge sound systems facing the sea and you wander along the beach until you find the music you like, and there you are. If you hate techno, you'd hate the Full Moon with a livid passion, but I've never been accused of disliking techno. The basic party fuel is the ubiquitous buckets filled with ice, Red Bull energy drink, and hard alcohol. I think the legion of extra cops and the shoot-to-kill policy keeps the volume of illicits down.

The afterparty was actually even better. It felt like old times, a bit. I led the way walking off the end of the beach with my hands cupped to my ears, following the beats with my friends in tow. We came over a small rise and found a covered shelter with ten thousand watts of vicious techno and a hundred dancing people. It was a better party than the beach party because it was so much smaller. You'd circulate, dance with sa few people, move on, talk to someone else, but gradually assemble a gallery in your head of everyone present and never be lost in the throng. It's a nice feeling for a party.

One odd detail at the afterparty was a woman I was chatting with and dancing with for a while. Even though I told her I had blown all my cash, we were till dancing and hanging out. Same plac, different channel. Her name was Boong-Lee, and while she was clearly having fun dancing and hanging out, what was on her mind was making some money before the night was over. Her seven-year old was starting school the next day and all kind of expenses loomed on the immediate horizon. Yet, there she was dancing at dawn with me. Conflict of worlds, I guess? If you're a hooker you have to go where the money is. Throngs of girls come from Bangkok for the weekend, as well as two hundred extra cops from Suratthani to supplement the local force of fifteen men.

Lordy I was tired after my friends and I had called it a night. The jungle trek followed by all that dancing takes a toll.

Expat

2006-05-16T02:18:00.000-07:00

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Jungle

2006-05-16T02:05:00.000-07:00

The day of the full mooin, two Finns and I paid a guide to take us on an all-day trek across the interior of the island. The Jungle was impressive, the guide was irritating. Part of my irritation stemmed from the language difficulties, but I think I partly just didn't like him very much. I'm the kind of person who wants detail about the local ecosystems, not just being pointed towards semi-obvious elements. He clearly knew his way around the woods, but his understanding of the systems at play in the jungle seemed pretty limited. He kept whacking at thing with his machete that weren't in the way and probably didn't apreciate being cut at, and he brought his dog along which probably reduced our already slim chances of sneaking up on any wildlife down to the vicinity of zero. This guy's generic answer to lots of questions was, "big waterfall!" Um... Ok. Perhaps I was too quick to jump on the first trek I found without sussing him out a little further. My fault. I did feel like he misled me a little as to what I was getting included in the price of the trek (800 Baht). I swear he told me, " free gas, free food at end, free beer at end." The Pad Thai his wife cooked was okay, but he charged us for everything, premium price. Whatever. IT was still a pretty cool experience. I think I'll go back alone and sit patiently so maybe I can esw a few birds or animals. We did hear a troop of monkeys barking off in the distance. For two hours of the five hour hike, we were caught in a world-saturating rainstorm. But hey. The big waterfall was nice. We swam in a pool at the bottom of the cascade to cool off. A few pools down when we were walking down to the road, we caught sight of a couple who I'm pretty sure didn't think they were visible fvrom the path. She looked like she was working pretty hard.

And then a nap and then the Full Moon.

Coconuts

2006-05-12T03:50:00.000-07:00

I saw the craziest thing today, riding my moto up over the mountain back from a gorgeous beach. There was a man walking an ape on a long leash. As I sat and watched, they went to the base of a tall coconut palm, and then the man gave some commands, and then the ape scurried up the tree and started picking coconuts and chucking them down to the guy. Wow. So, how do they do it when they don't have a trained macaque handy? Those palms are really tall.

And I saw a group of women and children gathering around a mountain of coconuts busting their butts removing the outer casing from coconuts. It's the second time I've seen a Thai sweat. The first was a woman working in a blazing hot kitchen. Did I mention what furnace this country is? Even here on Ko Pha Ngan, it's always blazing. It's got to be 95 every day, and since it also rains a bit every day, it's so humid your sweat has a hard time going anywhere.

Wow. Brit gap year kids. Wow. If you all think I party a fair amount, try these kids. It makes the Scottsdale job look like a pilgrimage to a nunnery. Not really any drugs, but plenty of drinking. That's probably got something to do with the shoot-to-kill policy that their charming prime minister introduced a few years ago. The cops knew who was who, as police generally do, and they'd knock on the door, and as soon as it opened, shoot them in the face and walk away. Something like 2000 drug dealers were executed in a very short period of time. Don't tell this to George Bush. He might get some ideas. And apparently crime skyrocketed immediately afterwards. It's basic economics. When the supply gets extremely small, the price gets extremely high, and the existing addicts can no longer afford their fix. Ergo, many resorted to crime to supplement their income.

colonial

2006-05-11T03:35:00.000-07:00

Feeling rather colonial these days. Npot so muc hfrom the obvious, that we're white people in a brown people's world and paying them to cook clean serve and amuse us, that's to be expected. More in the conversations I've found myself in. With smart people, too, but it's set off little alarms in my head sometimes. Such a common conversation when you've got such a mix of nationalities is discussing cultural characteristics of different peoples. "The thais don't work that way..." Yeah, don't you find that with the Dutch?" "So many brits do such and such" "And the LAo are especially like that!" And so on. IT just sounds like old English colonial masters disussing their subject nations. Even when we're talking about other colonial powers. Speaking in absolutes triggers my PC-trained alarms. But, to be fair, partly what is going on is gathering observations and collecting them into an impression of a people. I guess the trick about thinking like that is making sure that you and everyone else are still open to more data, and you're being fair and not bigoted.

Still in Ko Pha Ngan. It's gorgeous. I've been spending most of my time with island full-timers, like John, a Scot who's lived here full time.

Some brits taught me to play Cricket on the beach! It was fun. Fun to play games. Not just wander, ponder, then have beers with folks at night. I'm planmning to do some hiking in the jungle here. And eat some fish. And try to spend less money. Not thatit's a lot, but it's more than I meant to be spending. I think it's the beer.

One bangkok story I didn't tell was about riding a motorcycle taxi. Leaving Justus' place, I waved my hand to flag down a cab, and then a guy in a little orange vest pulled up on his motorbike. I figured, what the hell. Why not. Holy shit was that whiteknuckled experience. They shoot up between the lines of cars, the handlebars only inches from the car's side mirrors. I was doing everything I could to be as narrow as I could. Suck everything in tight. And I was grasping the metal bar behind my seat so tightly that for an hour and a half afterwards, my biceps were trembling. HE Sure as hell made good time though. That is, until he ran out of gas before we got to my destination. Apparently that's what people take when they're in a real hurry. At rush hour when their traffic slicing ability is at a premium, their prices skyrocket. You see women in Skirt suits riding on the back, sidesaddle, shading their face with their hand.

Every Thai skin product boasts that it is "whitening." They mean it. The Thai Chinese are the ruling class, and everyone wants to be pale like them. The Issan Thais are from near the Cambodian border, so they're correspondingly dark. And they suffer for it socially.

Ok gang. Off to find my evening's amusement.

um...

2006-05-10T03:48:00.000-07:00

Trying to figure out what I'mdoing a little bit. It's kind of what I predicted. Traveling alone, nowhere to go but you. Not working with anyone else's needs, you actually have to figure out what you want to do.

Lush

2006-05-09T05:57:00.000-07:00

Out of Bangkok! Whew. Rather hard-partying weekend with Justus and countless others. I'm out I'm out I'm out. I like Bangkok but I am relieved to be here in Ko Pha Ngan, this little rock of jungle poking out of the ocean. It's really lovely. Was standing with my friend John on the balcony of his house, admiring the soaring green valley beneath us. The wind was gentle, birds flitting around in the palms, and then a rainbow came out. It was a bit much. But really. This view. In the states you might get that kind of view from a fifteen million dollar house. He's moving to another place tomorrow, but he's been paying about 150$ a month for it. Um. Right. Ok. very farang-intensive place this is, so the food isn't as amazing as it is in Bangkok, which is truly amazing, but still. I'm not going to start complaining about fantasy island.

Over.