Seeking The Whole Nautilus
May have told you I was doing some landscaping consulting down here. After all this new post-tsunami reconstruction, what comes next? Landscaping, right?
Digger and Mel put in a bunch of new plants around their front porch, and when I rode up on my motorbike, they asked me what I thought. 'Looks good,' I told them.
Two doors down, Michael, recently returned from Sweden, and his Thai wife, Pom, put in new plants around their new fish ponds and asked, 'How do you like?'
'Looks good,' I told them.
Michael is also officially the owner of Bovi, who has now bitten ten people, according to Michael, who tends to tell the same story three of four times in a sitting, and each time he sees you.
"I tell them, 'He not my dog, but they say 'you feed him,' but I tell them I feed all da dogs, and they not belong me. I feed da cats, and they not belong me. I feed the Thai people also, and they not belong me,' hey?" he said, nodding his head as if to ask me if he was making sense.
"They tell me, 'He your dog. He sleep in your house'," said Michael, shrugging his shoulders with a look of resignation, like, 'What can I say to that?'
"So, I guess he my dog," he continued, followed by a vignette I'd already heard sixteen times. "He come here puppy after tsunami," he said, showing me with his hands how small the dog was. "He choose me. I not choose him. I feed him, and he stay. He only survivor of all dogs here. Before tsunami, he never make with anybody. Now, he make shit with everybody who come by."
As he told the story, a Thai man and his son rode by on bicycles, the little boy trailing a few meters behind his dad. Bovi, in the street at the time, began to make a move on the little boy. Michael shouted out, "BOVI! MAI!" and the little boy, watching Bovi all the while, screamed out in mortal terror.
Bovi eased up after making three or four stiff-legged aggressive steps after the kid, smiled, and returned to the yard, relaxing his muscles, lowering his ears, wiping the smile off his face, and glancing up sheepishly at Michael, who was giving him a tongue-lashing in Swedish.
The guys sitting on their porch across the street chuckled, and another Thai man, sauntering down the street, smiled and shook his head as Bovi left the yard and approached him, wagging his tail.
"He likes that guy," I said.
"He likes some people," said Michael. "Other people, he don't like."
Just then another motorbiker came by, the man lifting his feet off the foot pegs and onto the frame, gunning his motor as Bovi chased him down the street, Michael screaming, 'BOVI! MAI!" and Bovi ignoring him.
"That guy," said Michael, nodding his head in the direction of the biker, "he don't like."
____
When just arriving or just about to depart, don't you like to pay one last visit to your 'favorite spot', a place where there are no footprints, nothing to disturb your thoughts, and only the sounds of nature?
The other day, while walking the beach up around the Cape, I saw a piece of coral that looked "just like a chicken's foot," I told Digger.
After a few moments, he replied, "A chicken's foot? There's only about a million or so of those. You see them all the time."
"...and another piece that looked just like a brain."
He just laughed and shook his head. "You must've been up around the Cape."
"...and another piece of coral that looked juuuust like a cloud."
So, we look selectively for the perfect specimens, bypassing by all those fragmented or common shells, like Augers, Cones, Olives, and Arabian Cowries, and all that stuff collected by the tourists who are here for just a few days.
I've seen only three Nautilus shells, but they were all broken and much less than complete. The Nautilus, very rare, a cephalopod, found in the tropical Indian Ocean and Western Pacific. A weird, tenacled creature when occupying it's chambered shell, unchanged in 500 million years of evolution. I sure hope you and me don't take that long.
So, the Nautilus, or the piece of coral in the perfect shape of a heart, the 'cardium cardissa' or heart cockle, or something else unsual that might catch the eye in an early morning stroll down the beach before sunrise.
And then, washed up by last evening's high tide, there was that big piece of coral that looked just like a human skeleton; skull, rib cage, the pelvis, the whole bit, about the size of a German. The tide left it looking funny, as if it had dragged itself ashore. At first, I was shocked by the uncanny resemblance, teeth and all, on a piece of coral like none I'd previously ever seen. I approached it and said, 'People been looking for you.'
I thought it would look good propped up against one of my palm trees, legs crossed, kicked back, maybe holding a cigarette in one hand and a beer in the other. Maybe grinning, mouth agape, holding up a tiny roach. I could see it, couldn't you? like that skeleton on the rez that Misty said had the house burn down around it, and they found it sitting there on the charred springs of a stuffed chair, holding a beer.
The only way I could get it home was to drag it up the beach and strap it onto my motorbike, on the back, with it's feet on the foot pegs and securing it in place with a bungee strap around my waist. I draped the arms over my shoulders and let the chin rest on my back, reminding me of how the Japanese girl, Lulu, used to ride over the mountain to work at the volunteer center last year, hitching a ride from the jungalows. She'd put her chin right on my shoulder blade, and I always wanted to ask her, 'Is that the way they ride in Japan?' but never did.
But Lulu was very small, and this piece of coral was quite large, like I said, about the size of a German, although not as rigid. In fact, it was flexible enough for me to ride quite comfortably, which I normally can't do with someone on the back, because of my knees.
About a mile from the house, I turned and asked it, 'How you doing back there?' and I couldn't get home quick enough because the early-morning traffic was getting heavy, and people were staring. I felt somewhat self-conscious and embarrassed as they looked at me, laughing by myself as I rode down the road.
The Laundry Girl and the chicken-on-a-stick lady, and the people at the shoe shop all told me they saw me driving down the road with a skeleton on the back of my bike, and I had to tell them, laughing, 'No. That was a piece of coral.'
end
Tuesday, May 30, 2006
Monday, May 15, 2006
Slicing Through The Ectoplasm
Slicing Through The Ectoplasm
5/5/06
Khuk Khak, Thailand - On the beach of the Andaman Sea in timeless monotony, one wave rolls beneath the next, crashing behind another; one day bleeds into the next, one lifetime rolls onto another. A generation, then another. What is gained? What is lost? Want to know the future? What happened yesterday? Check the DNA. Today, what did Earth spin into motion?
And for how long have those Sea Turtles dragged themselves ashore to lay their eggs?
___
5/10/06
The drive north on motorbike to Takuapa ('Tah-koo-uh-pa') seems longer than it really is, a mere 25 kilometers, a half-hour ride, a lifetime aboard a Honda. North of Cape Pakarang, approaching Bangsak Beach, the air beneath a cool, tunneled patina canopy of jungle is thick and lava lamp gelatin, the road lined with orange blossoms, surreal, dreamy, and two dimensional.
Slicing through the ectoplasm aboard a Honda Wave, skin and sense of self stretching deep into the jungle, entering a timeless dimension of amorphous being.
___
5/12/06
They say it's good luck to see a cobra, and the Thai will even chase them, getting them to stop, coil, and fan out its unmistakable hood. So it was good luck, I suppose, to see that cobra exiting the garden, headed for the jungle. I didn't chase him, but thought of what Milo had said about that rattlesnake under my cabin on the reservation.
"You've created the perfect environment for a snake," he said. "Water, mice, birds."
On the television set, the ten-year old son of a Thai snake charmer played with a cobra, squatting, constantly moving his knees, hands, arms, swaying his head before the confused and undulating reptile, poking the snake's chest (if a snake has a chest), up in the snake's face in a stare-down contest, the cobra flicking its forked tongue, until the cobra finally struck, and the kid, practiced enough to anticipate the snake's attack, would quickly leap or lean back, just milimeters from the snake's deadly fangs. Quite a spellbinding show.
But once, the snake got him, right on the nose. The father and somebody else, maybe a grandfather or a medicine man, jumped up quickly, pulled the snake from the kid's nose, and immediately applied a paste. The studio audience gasped, and then applauded. Quite a show.
________
5/20/06
Just east across the quickly-filling reservoir, the Wat Komaneeyakhet, a vast, manicured complex of buildings, the school, the Temple, monks' dwellings, administrative facilities, open-air pavilions and dining rooms, they're getting a new swimming pool and tennis courts.
The Wat is getting a complete make-over, including a big opening ceremony a few months back for, I think, the completion of the entry-way arch at the highway, a beautiful, ornate, relief work of mostly gold and lots of other colors, all executed in Siamese style that you can sit and look at for a long time.
Three or four dozen men and women Thai workers have been busy over there for months, and after wondering for a long time just what it was they were building, along with the new long, two-story classroom buildings, and new monk's quarters, it looks like, finishing touches are being completed on the pool and courts.
It's probably for the school kids and not the resident monks. If it's for the monks, I'd like to get a shot of monks playing tennis in flip flops and saphron robes.
Went over there (to the Wat) the other night at the invitation of my students, who informed me that they (the resident monks) were having a Vientien ceremony, a lighting of the candles ceremony, there under the full moon.
One of my students said it was Buddha's awakening, but then they said it was candles. Same student said we shouldn't kill the mosquito in the temple when I brushed one away. Then, one of the monk's assistants, a local layman dressed in white, an adherent or something, was standing talking with another of the students, and reached up and slapped a mosquito on his forehead.
"What about that?" I asked. "He just killed a mosquito."
"Reflex," said my student, grinning.
Lizards, frogs, sa-corpions and sa-nakes. And the ever-present-in-the-evening mosquitos here are like the three rounds (bullets) between tracers - it's the ones you don't see that get you.
In a huge open-air pavillion with a stage occupied by six or seven resident monks in front of an enormous buddha, much of the evening's hour-long repeat-after-me chanting, prayer, and amplified teaching ceremony went right past me for two reasons; the mosquitos around my ankles kept me fidgeting and divided my attention, and the whole thing was in Thai. After the half-hour discourse/teaching/dharma talk, I leaned over to ask the Laundry Girl, "whud he say?" and she said, 'Uh..." whispering, "I'll tell you later."
"Something about Buddha, wasn't it?" I asked.
Perhaps she didn't understand the humor.* If so, perhaps it wasn't appropriate for me at that moment to be cracking a joke.
_____
* The genesis of this joke relates back fifteen years or so ago with Uncle Larue, Joseph Afraid Of Bear, who spoke (rarely) at length (in Lakota) during purification ceremony on the Cheyenne River in South Dakota, south of Hot Springs. Outside afterward, around the fire, I asked, "Whud he say?"
After a short silence, allowing elders Ernest and Uncle Joe time to respond, Brother Tom, it was, blurted out, "He said something about God."
________
5/20/06
Pen, the local lady who spends the rainy season in France with her husband, and arranged for the English classes to be taught in the Khuk Khak community building, was showing Mel the classroom when the village chief was testing the new tsunami warning system over loud speakers set up throughout the village. The old man's voice croaked out throughout the community, sounding something like, 'Testing...testing...nuong...song...sam...nuong...song...nuong..song...sam.'
"Do you have a siren or taped message to play in the event of a tsunami?" asked Mel.
"No," replied Pen. "We just get on the speaker and yell, "EVERYBODY! 'RUN! RUN! RUN!' "
______
5/25/26
Love Our Gas, Do Anything For It
Down at the 'petrol gah-rrahge', as Mel says, the gas is only about fifty cents a litre, and that can run a Honda for about a week - you might have to go back on Thursday for another fifty cents worth. Relatively speaking, that seems like pocket change for transportation, recalling how my last trip from S. Dakota to Denver exceeded two hundred dollars, US., one way.
Wudden on a Honda, wuzzit?
______
Motorbike Culture
But then, where do you have to go? In Saharut Amereeka, as they call us, we go EVERYwhere in our cars. Go to work in our cars, go to play in our cars, pick up the groceries, the kids, the laundry, go to the corner in our cars. Gotta have a car. A drive-by wouldn't be a drive-by without a car. Over here, a drive-by means, 'on a honda' .
Among other wild-ass ideas that never got off the ground, I was thinking of instituting the drive-by funeral parlor, where you could , you know, give your last respects at a drive-up window, something someone like Bryan could really appreciate. Church service, the same way. All in the comfort of your car .
Most people here are too poor to own a car, thusly, about ninety percent of the population is on motorbikes, just about anywhere you go in Asia. That's the good news? Bad news is, more people are buying cars.
So you'll see whole families aboard a bike, already told you, no helmets, everybody wearing flip-flops. Things you'd find appalling in other countries, such as the much-practiced art of propping your infant child on the seat in front of you if they're too young to stand on the seat and hold onto the mirrors. Baby can't even hold its head up. If they're three or four, they can stand on the frame and hold onto the mirror posts.
And there's a strange sort of pride you'll see in the eyes of a mother as she goes down the road with her ten-month old, can't walk yet, but old enough to stand and ride.
And before they're old enough to stand and ride, they've got a custom-made wicker child's seat designed especially to fit over the frame of a motorbike. They sell 'em in the shops, a kind of a little high chair. Most of the time, the kids don't seem to be enjoying the ride, dirt in their eyes.
Most of the time, they seem to be quite terrified, as if they know their lives are in extreme danger. It's the parents who are smiling. They've got the kid as a shield.
____
"Tttttttthat's a lance," said the stork from Amsterdam, who probably wouldn't like knowing he was refered to as such. "Ttttttttthat's madness," he said as I began to exit the lumber yard with three fifteen-foot lengths of bamboo for my thatch roof. "Why don't you let me deliver that for you," he said, nodding at his truck.
"It's not mad," I replied. "Everybody does it. Haven't you seen some of the loads people carry on a bike?"
"IIIIIIIIIIIII knowwww," he said, with a hint of whiny exasperation that I wondered was a cultural thing with the Dutch, "bbbbbbbbut tttttttthat stilldoesn'tmakeitnot mmmmmad."
"Ok," I finally said, taking him up on his offer after trying to balance the poles on takeoff and striking the rear quarter panel of his truck, him watching me all the while.
He also offered me advice on which thatch to buy. The ones that rotted.
________
end
5/5/06
Khuk Khak, Thailand - On the beach of the Andaman Sea in timeless monotony, one wave rolls beneath the next, crashing behind another; one day bleeds into the next, one lifetime rolls onto another. A generation, then another. What is gained? What is lost? Want to know the future? What happened yesterday? Check the DNA. Today, what did Earth spin into motion?
And for how long have those Sea Turtles dragged themselves ashore to lay their eggs?
___
5/10/06
The drive north on motorbike to Takuapa ('Tah-koo-uh-pa') seems longer than it really is, a mere 25 kilometers, a half-hour ride, a lifetime aboard a Honda. North of Cape Pakarang, approaching Bangsak Beach, the air beneath a cool, tunneled patina canopy of jungle is thick and lava lamp gelatin, the road lined with orange blossoms, surreal, dreamy, and two dimensional.
Slicing through the ectoplasm aboard a Honda Wave, skin and sense of self stretching deep into the jungle, entering a timeless dimension of amorphous being.
___
5/12/06
They say it's good luck to see a cobra, and the Thai will even chase them, getting them to stop, coil, and fan out its unmistakable hood. So it was good luck, I suppose, to see that cobra exiting the garden, headed for the jungle. I didn't chase him, but thought of what Milo had said about that rattlesnake under my cabin on the reservation.
"You've created the perfect environment for a snake," he said. "Water, mice, birds."
On the television set, the ten-year old son of a Thai snake charmer played with a cobra, squatting, constantly moving his knees, hands, arms, swaying his head before the confused and undulating reptile, poking the snake's chest (if a snake has a chest), up in the snake's face in a stare-down contest, the cobra flicking its forked tongue, until the cobra finally struck, and the kid, practiced enough to anticipate the snake's attack, would quickly leap or lean back, just milimeters from the snake's deadly fangs. Quite a spellbinding show.
But once, the snake got him, right on the nose. The father and somebody else, maybe a grandfather or a medicine man, jumped up quickly, pulled the snake from the kid's nose, and immediately applied a paste. The studio audience gasped, and then applauded. Quite a show.
________
5/20/06
Just east across the quickly-filling reservoir, the Wat Komaneeyakhet, a vast, manicured complex of buildings, the school, the Temple, monks' dwellings, administrative facilities, open-air pavilions and dining rooms, they're getting a new swimming pool and tennis courts.
The Wat is getting a complete make-over, including a big opening ceremony a few months back for, I think, the completion of the entry-way arch at the highway, a beautiful, ornate, relief work of mostly gold and lots of other colors, all executed in Siamese style that you can sit and look at for a long time.
Three or four dozen men and women Thai workers have been busy over there for months, and after wondering for a long time just what it was they were building, along with the new long, two-story classroom buildings, and new monk's quarters, it looks like, finishing touches are being completed on the pool and courts.
It's probably for the school kids and not the resident monks. If it's for the monks, I'd like to get a shot of monks playing tennis in flip flops and saphron robes.
Went over there (to the Wat) the other night at the invitation of my students, who informed me that they (the resident monks) were having a Vientien ceremony, a lighting of the candles ceremony, there under the full moon.
One of my students said it was Buddha's awakening, but then they said it was candles. Same student said we shouldn't kill the mosquito in the temple when I brushed one away. Then, one of the monk's assistants, a local layman dressed in white, an adherent or something, was standing talking with another of the students, and reached up and slapped a mosquito on his forehead.
"What about that?" I asked. "He just killed a mosquito."
"Reflex," said my student, grinning.
Lizards, frogs, sa-corpions and sa-nakes. And the ever-present-in-the-evening mosquitos here are like the three rounds (bullets) between tracers - it's the ones you don't see that get you.
In a huge open-air pavillion with a stage occupied by six or seven resident monks in front of an enormous buddha, much of the evening's hour-long repeat-after-me chanting, prayer, and amplified teaching ceremony went right past me for two reasons; the mosquitos around my ankles kept me fidgeting and divided my attention, and the whole thing was in Thai. After the half-hour discourse/teaching/dharma talk, I leaned over to ask the Laundry Girl, "whud he say?" and she said, 'Uh..." whispering, "I'll tell you later."
"Something about Buddha, wasn't it?" I asked.
Perhaps she didn't understand the humor.* If so, perhaps it wasn't appropriate for me at that moment to be cracking a joke.
_____
* The genesis of this joke relates back fifteen years or so ago with Uncle Larue, Joseph Afraid Of Bear, who spoke (rarely) at length (in Lakota) during purification ceremony on the Cheyenne River in South Dakota, south of Hot Springs. Outside afterward, around the fire, I asked, "Whud he say?"
After a short silence, allowing elders Ernest and Uncle Joe time to respond, Brother Tom, it was, blurted out, "He said something about God."
________
5/20/06
Pen, the local lady who spends the rainy season in France with her husband, and arranged for the English classes to be taught in the Khuk Khak community building, was showing Mel the classroom when the village chief was testing the new tsunami warning system over loud speakers set up throughout the village. The old man's voice croaked out throughout the community, sounding something like, 'Testing...testing...nuong...song...sam...nuong...song...nuong..song...sam.'
"Do you have a siren or taped message to play in the event of a tsunami?" asked Mel.
"No," replied Pen. "We just get on the speaker and yell, "EVERYBODY! 'RUN! RUN! RUN!' "
______
5/25/26
Love Our Gas, Do Anything For It
Down at the 'petrol gah-rrahge', as Mel says, the gas is only about fifty cents a litre, and that can run a Honda for about a week - you might have to go back on Thursday for another fifty cents worth. Relatively speaking, that seems like pocket change for transportation, recalling how my last trip from S. Dakota to Denver exceeded two hundred dollars, US., one way.
Wudden on a Honda, wuzzit?
______
Motorbike Culture
But then, where do you have to go? In Saharut Amereeka, as they call us, we go EVERYwhere in our cars. Go to work in our cars, go to play in our cars, pick up the groceries, the kids, the laundry, go to the corner in our cars. Gotta have a car. A drive-by wouldn't be a drive-by without a car. Over here, a drive-by means, 'on a honda' .
Among other wild-ass ideas that never got off the ground, I was thinking of instituting the drive-by funeral parlor, where you could , you know, give your last respects at a drive-up window, something someone like Bryan could really appreciate. Church service, the same way. All in the comfort of your car .
Most people here are too poor to own a car, thusly, about ninety percent of the population is on motorbikes, just about anywhere you go in Asia. That's the good news? Bad news is, more people are buying cars.
So you'll see whole families aboard a bike, already told you, no helmets, everybody wearing flip-flops. Things you'd find appalling in other countries, such as the much-practiced art of propping your infant child on the seat in front of you if they're too young to stand on the seat and hold onto the mirrors. Baby can't even hold its head up. If they're three or four, they can stand on the frame and hold onto the mirror posts.
And there's a strange sort of pride you'll see in the eyes of a mother as she goes down the road with her ten-month old, can't walk yet, but old enough to stand and ride.
And before they're old enough to stand and ride, they've got a custom-made wicker child's seat designed especially to fit over the frame of a motorbike. They sell 'em in the shops, a kind of a little high chair. Most of the time, the kids don't seem to be enjoying the ride, dirt in their eyes.
Most of the time, they seem to be quite terrified, as if they know their lives are in extreme danger. It's the parents who are smiling. They've got the kid as a shield.
____
"Tttttttthat's a lance," said the stork from Amsterdam, who probably wouldn't like knowing he was refered to as such. "Ttttttttthat's madness," he said as I began to exit the lumber yard with three fifteen-foot lengths of bamboo for my thatch roof. "Why don't you let me deliver that for you," he said, nodding at his truck.
"It's not mad," I replied. "Everybody does it. Haven't you seen some of the loads people carry on a bike?"
"IIIIIIIIIIIII knowwww," he said, with a hint of whiny exasperation that I wondered was a cultural thing with the Dutch, "bbbbbbbbut tttttttthat stilldoesn'tmakeitnot mmmmmad."
"Ok," I finally said, taking him up on his offer after trying to balance the poles on takeoff and striking the rear quarter panel of his truck, him watching me all the while.
He also offered me advice on which thatch to buy. The ones that rotted.
________
end
Sunday, May 07, 2006
The Shop Comes To You
The Shop Comes To You
Khuk Khak, Phang Nga, Thailand - If you wait long enough, they say, eventually, everything will come to you. That's what they say. One might wonder if they're just talking about 'things', or Karma, or love, or money, or what.
Over here, if you sit at home long enough, everything will eventually come to you. There are vendors of every sort, and they'll bring everything to your door, in the manner of the Fuller brush salesman and the milkman, for those who can remember the milkman, or the fishman. But that was back in the day, long before Mrs. Sweeney's Microwavable Frozen Square Fish Bricks.
___
"You and I are going to become very good friends," I said to the ice cream (that's 'Isa-Kareem') vendor when he jingled his way past my house, looked up, saw me looking back at him, then swung into the empty lot beside my house where everyone in town, it seems, comes to view from a panoramic vista, the continuing dredging work on the ever-expanding reservoir that will someday export water to the villages of Khuk Khak, Bang Niang, and Khao Lak.
That's one long-ass sentence, inna?
Besides selling me a drumstick, he dismounted his three-wheeled motor chariot to check out my newly-installed thatched roof over the back patio, suggesting reinforcement for the monsoon winds that will otherwise blow it away if left it in its current, what I had previously thought was finished, state.
And Yahn, who seems to stop by every day, and whom it seems, doesn't have a working job, has said on three or four occasions that the pitch needs to be increased to shed the water. Otherwise, it'll mildew and eventually rot.
But did I listen to either one of them?
Nah.
The first big wind presented an idea of what the isa kareem man was talking about, and a few weeks later, after several rains, when the whole business began to mildew from trapped water, it became apparent what Yahn was telling me, and I realized that maybe these Thai might know something about living in the tropics.
_______
Mr. Gui, who runs the big hardware store in Bang Niang, said a good one the other day when I was trying to explain to him the high mountains of Colorado. 'Much snow', I told him.
"Ahhhhh," he said. "Sah-No."
"Yeah," I said, making the motions of a downhill skier. "Sah-Kee."
Yeah, downhill sah-keeing on the sah-lopes.
___
"Repeat after me," I told the three-times-a-week English class of a dozen adults above the Khuk Khak shoe shop. "Slllllleeep."
"SAH-LEEEEEP."
"Let's try again. Sllllllllllllleeeep."
"SAH-LEEEEEEEP."
_________
They gave me a name over here last year that I took a long time to figure out what everyone was calling me.
'P' Yai.'
The 'P' is an honorific title, and I knew 'Yai' meant 'big', so I naturally assumed they were calling me 'Mr. Big', either because of my XL American size, or maybe because they had somehow heard of who I almost could've been, back home in my own country. Who knows? Someone could've said something.
'Don't you know who he almost could've been?'
Wonderful line, inna? Came from the reservation, 1998, relatively recent. Along with, 'Be your own damn nigger,' spoken with the emphasis on 'own', as would an aging southern Black grandmother, sah-peaking to her grandson.
The quote, now moving rapidly toward both coasts from S. Dakota, arose while ditch-digging one day, laying a new copper water pipe to replace the plastic one that wasn't worth a shit to begin with, and had been punctured repeatedly by gophers, playing a mind-game with Brother Tom, who insisted the gophers were 'against' him, and that yes, he was out there yet another day, another time, attempting to 'defeat' the gophers. Happened six or seven times before we dug up the whole damn thing and replaced it with copper.
If my memory serves me correctly, which I have learned lately that it often does not, I told the crew at the time, "When my momma see-int me off to schoo, she told me, 'Boy, you ain't nevva gon' haf' to do fiel nigguh work again. Evva.' "
But here it was, some thirty seben eleben years behine what she said, and there I was, right along with Bo and Manuel and Lupe' and that other guy who left after one day, doing field nigger work that I thought I had left a longgg-ass time behind me, in graduate school, at least.
That was back in the day, before Manny approached me, telling me I could make it to the top if I kept a good work ethic and stayed away from fast women and that 'bad crowd' down on 32nd street.
"Instead of looking at de championship," he told me, "you could be looking at de yudge."
But did I listen to Manny?
Nah.
He would always say after the match, "I try to tell you, but you no leeson. NOW look at you!"
And sure enough, the fast women and bad crowd got me up in front of a local magistrate, who told me, "Son, you had a chance to almost be somebody. Considering her age, I'm only going to give you thirty-six months. You can do your time in the state prissson, or you can take your chances in the 'Nam."
I said to to her, "What the fuck, Your Honor. That's an easy choice. I'll take my chances in the 'Nam."
The rest is history.
___
So, I was big then, compared to the Vietnamese, and I still am, compared to the Thai. That's why they call me 'Mr. Big'.
Or, that's what I thought. Then, here I come to find out that it don't mean, 'Mr. Big' or 'Big Daddy' at all, but rather, 'Big Brother.'
"Ohhhhhh. P' Yai," they say when they finally get it. "That's like means, big brother. Same same oldest son."
Donchaknow that let the wind out of my sails, when all along I thought it had something to do with importance.
_______
So, besides the ice cream man and the lady who comes by selling chicken-on-a-stick, there is the Knife Man, selling any kind of shape and size of balade imaginable. See? They've got me talking like that. That's 'blade'. He's got everything you need, from fingernails clippers, Edward Scissorhands and general purposwe kitchen knives, up to a French guillotine.
And besides the Ice Cream Man and the Chicken Lady and the Knife Man, there's the Broom Man, the Aluminum Ladder man, the Fresh Fish & Meat Lady, the Salad Lady, the Burmese Wicker Chair Guys, the Portrait-of-the-King vendors, the Basket Lady, the Carved Buffalo Horn Lady, the Feather Duster & Toilet Bowl Brush Man, the Iced Pop-in-a-Sack and Snack People, and the Cushion & Stuffed Animal Man, coming through either on foot, pulling a two-wheeled cart, or on 3-wheeled motorcycles with side cars, outfitted with sun shades or umbrellas for when it rains.
________
And it was raining last night, so the Bamboo Girl who was going to attend the dinner party chose to remain in Takuapa instead, and bring down the free bamboo chair tonight, instead of in the pouring rain, when all those people who we didn't think would show because of the weather, showed up anyway for dinner, the first fifteen being Thai, and making me wonder if any of the foreigners at all would show.
They did, fashionably late, and staying late, whereas all the Thai were gone by 8:30, except for Jack.
Turned out that we ordered way too much food. The fish and chicken curry were big hits, but we had too much fried rice, and didn't really need the ten kilos for the one vegetarian who showed up.
Had just the right amount of small giveaway trinkets, flower arrangements, potted plants, shower caddies and the evening's main prize for that lucky person out there, a fully automated electronic mosquito zapper, that I ended up keeping for the house.
An open house dinner party was how it was billed, and an open house in the tropics needs a mosquito zapper. Had to re-think that one. Had to think outside the giveaway box.
"What's the occasion?" a few had asked, and I tried to explain the ideas of give-away and, 'feeding the people' out of a spirit of thanksgiving, any day, any time, and not just on one prescribed American holiday that reminds many Native Americans of an unpleasant series of horrific circumstances arising out of this one particular event that subsequently became institutionalized in American history as 'Playoff Day'.
__
So, here I was holding this dinner party with the excited anticipation of giving away as much as I possibly could, and then all these folks began showing up with gifts. The wife of Nakon, the iron- worker who custom-made my iron gate, showed up with two plants, an Aloe and an Orchid; other people showed up with food, drink, and desserts, and I ended up with more beer than with what we had on hand for the beginning of the party.
That's the way it went, everyone asking me about the house, "How much you pay?"
If you're a foreigner staying long time in a rental property, everyone asks you that same question. On the street, they'll all ask you where you're going. If you're a foreigner, or 'farang' as we're known here, they know you must be going somewhere. You've GOT to be going somewhere. The third question is, 'How long you stay?'
I want to say, "On planet Earth?" and, "Heaven, I hope," to where I'm going, and, "Why is it important to you how much I'm paying? What are you going to do with that information?"
But that would be too smart-alecky and far too oblique for the humor to be appreciated, so I don't use it that much, instead, answering honestly, "Not much", "Khao Lak", and, "six months," to their questions.
We laugh about how that question, 'Where are you going?' from complete strangers, would be received in New Jersey or New York.
_________
The big event of the evening was the low-key arrival of Chatchada, the internationally famous supernova artist-in-residence who assists Digger and Melanie with their art and English program at Senanakul High School up in Takuapa. She GAVE me one of her pieces, a framed charcoal abstract of fishing boats, prominently displayed on the kitchen wall, the first thing you see when you enter the house.
'Better leave it right where it is,' I thought, gazing at it in admiration. Leave it where it is, rather than take it back to the States and run the chance of having it ripped off in my absence, like those drunk Indians did this time when they broke into my reservation home and took with them all my tools, irreplacable artwork, and ceremonial drum, Brother Tom said in an email.
Home? Where's home? You mean planet Earth?
How long you stay? I don't know.
end
Khuk Khak, Phang Nga, Thailand - If you wait long enough, they say, eventually, everything will come to you. That's what they say. One might wonder if they're just talking about 'things', or Karma, or love, or money, or what.
Over here, if you sit at home long enough, everything will eventually come to you. There are vendors of every sort, and they'll bring everything to your door, in the manner of the Fuller brush salesman and the milkman, for those who can remember the milkman, or the fishman. But that was back in the day, long before Mrs. Sweeney's Microwavable Frozen Square Fish Bricks.
___
"You and I are going to become very good friends," I said to the ice cream (that's 'Isa-Kareem') vendor when he jingled his way past my house, looked up, saw me looking back at him, then swung into the empty lot beside my house where everyone in town, it seems, comes to view from a panoramic vista, the continuing dredging work on the ever-expanding reservoir that will someday export water to the villages of Khuk Khak, Bang Niang, and Khao Lak.
That's one long-ass sentence, inna?
Besides selling me a drumstick, he dismounted his three-wheeled motor chariot to check out my newly-installed thatched roof over the back patio, suggesting reinforcement for the monsoon winds that will otherwise blow it away if left it in its current, what I had previously thought was finished, state.
And Yahn, who seems to stop by every day, and whom it seems, doesn't have a working job, has said on three or four occasions that the pitch needs to be increased to shed the water. Otherwise, it'll mildew and eventually rot.
But did I listen to either one of them?
Nah.
The first big wind presented an idea of what the isa kareem man was talking about, and a few weeks later, after several rains, when the whole business began to mildew from trapped water, it became apparent what Yahn was telling me, and I realized that maybe these Thai might know something about living in the tropics.
_______
Mr. Gui, who runs the big hardware store in Bang Niang, said a good one the other day when I was trying to explain to him the high mountains of Colorado. 'Much snow', I told him.
"Ahhhhh," he said. "Sah-No."
"Yeah," I said, making the motions of a downhill skier. "Sah-Kee."
Yeah, downhill sah-keeing on the sah-lopes.
___
"Repeat after me," I told the three-times-a-week English class of a dozen adults above the Khuk Khak shoe shop. "Slllllleeep."
"SAH-LEEEEEP."
"Let's try again. Sllllllllllllleeeep."
"SAH-LEEEEEEEP."
_________
They gave me a name over here last year that I took a long time to figure out what everyone was calling me.
'P' Yai.'
The 'P' is an honorific title, and I knew 'Yai' meant 'big', so I naturally assumed they were calling me 'Mr. Big', either because of my XL American size, or maybe because they had somehow heard of who I almost could've been, back home in my own country. Who knows? Someone could've said something.
'Don't you know who he almost could've been?'
Wonderful line, inna? Came from the reservation, 1998, relatively recent. Along with, 'Be your own damn nigger,' spoken with the emphasis on 'own', as would an aging southern Black grandmother, sah-peaking to her grandson.
The quote, now moving rapidly toward both coasts from S. Dakota, arose while ditch-digging one day, laying a new copper water pipe to replace the plastic one that wasn't worth a shit to begin with, and had been punctured repeatedly by gophers, playing a mind-game with Brother Tom, who insisted the gophers were 'against' him, and that yes, he was out there yet another day, another time, attempting to 'defeat' the gophers. Happened six or seven times before we dug up the whole damn thing and replaced it with copper.
If my memory serves me correctly, which I have learned lately that it often does not, I told the crew at the time, "When my momma see-int me off to schoo, she told me, 'Boy, you ain't nevva gon' haf' to do fiel nigguh work again. Evva.' "
But here it was, some thirty seben eleben years behine what she said, and there I was, right along with Bo and Manuel and Lupe' and that other guy who left after one day, doing field nigger work that I thought I had left a longgg-ass time behind me, in graduate school, at least.
That was back in the day, before Manny approached me, telling me I could make it to the top if I kept a good work ethic and stayed away from fast women and that 'bad crowd' down on 32nd street.
"Instead of looking at de championship," he told me, "you could be looking at de yudge."
But did I listen to Manny?
Nah.
He would always say after the match, "I try to tell you, but you no leeson. NOW look at you!"
And sure enough, the fast women and bad crowd got me up in front of a local magistrate, who told me, "Son, you had a chance to almost be somebody. Considering her age, I'm only going to give you thirty-six months. You can do your time in the state prissson, or you can take your chances in the 'Nam."
I said to to her, "What the fuck, Your Honor. That's an easy choice. I'll take my chances in the 'Nam."
The rest is history.
___
So, I was big then, compared to the Vietnamese, and I still am, compared to the Thai. That's why they call me 'Mr. Big'.
Or, that's what I thought. Then, here I come to find out that it don't mean, 'Mr. Big' or 'Big Daddy' at all, but rather, 'Big Brother.'
"Ohhhhhh. P' Yai," they say when they finally get it. "That's like means, big brother. Same same oldest son."
Donchaknow that let the wind out of my sails, when all along I thought it had something to do with importance.
_______
So, besides the ice cream man and the lady who comes by selling chicken-on-a-stick, there is the Knife Man, selling any kind of shape and size of balade imaginable. See? They've got me talking like that. That's 'blade'. He's got everything you need, from fingernails clippers, Edward Scissorhands and general purposwe kitchen knives, up to a French guillotine.
And besides the Ice Cream Man and the Chicken Lady and the Knife Man, there's the Broom Man, the Aluminum Ladder man, the Fresh Fish & Meat Lady, the Salad Lady, the Burmese Wicker Chair Guys, the Portrait-of-the-King vendors, the Basket Lady, the Carved Buffalo Horn Lady, the Feather Duster & Toilet Bowl Brush Man, the Iced Pop-in-a-Sack and Snack People, and the Cushion & Stuffed Animal Man, coming through either on foot, pulling a two-wheeled cart, or on 3-wheeled motorcycles with side cars, outfitted with sun shades or umbrellas for when it rains.
________
And it was raining last night, so the Bamboo Girl who was going to attend the dinner party chose to remain in Takuapa instead, and bring down the free bamboo chair tonight, instead of in the pouring rain, when all those people who we didn't think would show because of the weather, showed up anyway for dinner, the first fifteen being Thai, and making me wonder if any of the foreigners at all would show.
They did, fashionably late, and staying late, whereas all the Thai were gone by 8:30, except for Jack.
Turned out that we ordered way too much food. The fish and chicken curry were big hits, but we had too much fried rice, and didn't really need the ten kilos for the one vegetarian who showed up.
Had just the right amount of small giveaway trinkets, flower arrangements, potted plants, shower caddies and the evening's main prize for that lucky person out there, a fully automated electronic mosquito zapper, that I ended up keeping for the house.
An open house dinner party was how it was billed, and an open house in the tropics needs a mosquito zapper. Had to re-think that one. Had to think outside the giveaway box.
"What's the occasion?" a few had asked, and I tried to explain the ideas of give-away and, 'feeding the people' out of a spirit of thanksgiving, any day, any time, and not just on one prescribed American holiday that reminds many Native Americans of an unpleasant series of horrific circumstances arising out of this one particular event that subsequently became institutionalized in American history as 'Playoff Day'.
__
So, here I was holding this dinner party with the excited anticipation of giving away as much as I possibly could, and then all these folks began showing up with gifts. The wife of Nakon, the iron- worker who custom-made my iron gate, showed up with two plants, an Aloe and an Orchid; other people showed up with food, drink, and desserts, and I ended up with more beer than with what we had on hand for the beginning of the party.
That's the way it went, everyone asking me about the house, "How much you pay?"
If you're a foreigner staying long time in a rental property, everyone asks you that same question. On the street, they'll all ask you where you're going. If you're a foreigner, or 'farang' as we're known here, they know you must be going somewhere. You've GOT to be going somewhere. The third question is, 'How long you stay?'
I want to say, "On planet Earth?" and, "Heaven, I hope," to where I'm going, and, "Why is it important to you how much I'm paying? What are you going to do with that information?"
But that would be too smart-alecky and far too oblique for the humor to be appreciated, so I don't use it that much, instead, answering honestly, "Not much", "Khao Lak", and, "six months," to their questions.
We laugh about how that question, 'Where are you going?' from complete strangers, would be received in New Jersey or New York.
_________
The big event of the evening was the low-key arrival of Chatchada, the internationally famous supernova artist-in-residence who assists Digger and Melanie with their art and English program at Senanakul High School up in Takuapa. She GAVE me one of her pieces, a framed charcoal abstract of fishing boats, prominently displayed on the kitchen wall, the first thing you see when you enter the house.
'Better leave it right where it is,' I thought, gazing at it in admiration. Leave it where it is, rather than take it back to the States and run the chance of having it ripped off in my absence, like those drunk Indians did this time when they broke into my reservation home and took with them all my tools, irreplacable artwork, and ceremonial drum, Brother Tom said in an email.
Home? Where's home? You mean planet Earth?
How long you stay? I don't know.
end
Sunday, April 30, 2006
Footprints In The Sand
What?
'Footprints in the Sand'? You'd think after all those claimed years of journalistic and teaching experience, a writer could come up with something better than that, wouldn't you?
How about, 'Just This Little Stretch'?
Khuk Khak, Thailand - The sea was sounding extra loud the last couple of days, so I went down to the beach to check it out, see what's up. The tide. Going to the sea is like taking a walk in the woods, or doing anything in nature; once you're there, you think, 'I should do this more often.'
Khuk Khak beach, a well-kept secret, was deserted, as usual. The beach is one of the nicest up and down the stretch of coast from Khao Lak and Bang Niang to the south, to Cape Pakarang and Bangsak beaches to the north. Those beaches bustle with resorts and restaurants and activity, but Khuk Khak is quiet.
Since it's just down the road from my house, and where I swim, I've adopted it quietly as my own cleanup and restoration project, obliging to keep it clean and plant a few coconut palms.
Simple plan. Just take a plastic bag on your walk. Along with the innumerable plastic water bottles, whiskey bottles, and small, amber M-150 and Shark bottles, today yielded a little plastic Elk, and a small, green Irish Bear with a clover leaf on his heart, something, it appeared to be, from St. Patrick's Day.
They said a big wave came in three mornings in a row, submerging the kitchens of some of the businesses close to the beach at Bang Niang. People just shake their heads.
The sea was turbulent and unsettled. The sense I got after two hours out there was that nothing is certain. Anything can happen.
________
Anything can happen.
Those folks down at the Sofitel resort didn't know that anything could happen in the earth's history when on Sunday morning, the day following Christmas, 2004, 650 perished before noon. Although much of Khuk Khak was underwater, my house, the last on the road to the Sofitel, stayed dry and above water, with the wave being absorbed by the river, closeby, and the reservoir.
"Most of them were old people who didn't get out of their rooms," said Menat.
___
The Sofitel is one of the remaining resorts that hasn't been rebuilt. Everyone around here seems to know the story of the Turkish owner who wasn't fully insured or something or other to do with the financing required for the restoration work.
Maybe, who knows, maybe he's got the cash and wondering if he should reinvest it, or spend it somewhere else. Anybody's guess about what a person does with their cash. Anyway, it ain't been touched since.
'The Sofitel Magic Lagoon Resort and Spa', says the damaged sign above the entrance. The Sofitel Ghost Resort, with only three uniformed security guards pulling eight-hour shifts. Really, there's nothing left to guard.
___
So what we've got down there on the beach is desertion, a good place to go for a walk, and spend your own foolish time squatting by a wash of shell and coral, contemplating the spirals of a sea shell, the patterned development of a Cowry, or the amazing universe within a sand dollar.
Just behind me, the next wave washed across my tracks, erasing those size 13 footprints in the sand, as if I had never been there, and those waves could be lifetimes.
So, if you want to make your mark on the world, don't write it in the sand.
_______
A person can make a mark upon the world by being a great artist. However, for many of us lesser beings, we must content ourselves with something much more modest than the Sistine Chapel or the Eiffel Tower, like shower caddies, for instance.
On the ride up and over the mountain the other day, winding the motorbike through the 'S' curves to deliver a shower caddy order in Nam Khem, I realized that I hadn't even scraped the surface of the potential market out there. Gotta think outside the box. Gotta think of exports to The States.
And whenever I show them to a Thai, they always marvel at them and exclaim, 'Good idea!' as if nobody over here had ever thought of making a coconut ashtray or bamboo catch-all.
Stuck in paradise, making shower caddies.
And right next door to paradise, we've got living hell. That would be Myanmar, or Burma. Went there yesterday, crossing the border by longtail boat to the immediate assault of a dozen kid hawkers, all trying to sell Viagra to me and every other male who disembarks in Myanmar.
First time it was kind of cute, having a personal entourage. 'Don't you feel like a rock star?' I asked Choi, the girl from China with the dark sun visor who missed her visa departure date by a full week and would've had to endure a world of shit at immigration in addition to the exorbitant overstay fees, had it not been for our humoring the official by giving him an expensive pen in trade for his cheap plastic Bic, and engaging him in distracting conversation about his Ft. Benning, Ga. parachute jump school wings over his crisp, uniformed pocket as he stamped out Choi's new visa.
___
The first time that kid grabbed me, I just looked at his hand until he let go of my arm. The second time, I told him, "Don't grab me. Keep your hands off of me."
The same guy pulled up a seat at the ice cream shop where they serve almost the best ice cream in the world by graceful girls with swirled powdered faces. Trying to get my attention, he kept touching my arm.
"Didn't I already tell you to stop touching me?" I asked the guy, a dark, curly-haired teenager just trying to make a buck off a foreigner. "I've already told you three times now. I don't want to tell you again," I said to him, as a father might to a young son.
He clearly understood English. The British were in Burma for how many hundredslktax of years? But, then he hit me again on the arm. I had to get ugly with the kid and tell him to go away and leave us alone, which he did, after also being spoken to by the management.
"You should've faked him with the right, then laugh," said Digger, feigning a right hook. "And then when he laughs, rock him with the left. Lay his ass out."
No. Then you'd really be the Ugly American. Instead, we just laughed, and tipped the gravel-voiced eleven year-old who escorted us up to the lookout point and never asked for anything nor tried to sell us anything.
"Watch out for sah-nakes and sah-corpions."
________
Suddenly, it seems dogs have turned against me.
I've always been a friend to dogs, a soft touch for a handout or a scratch behind the ears. They've always seemed to know that. But just the other day, that little short-legged pig of a bitch of the Laundry Lady's actually bit me!
Thai dog, right? Yeah, I wanted to smack it with that broom that the Laundry Lady picked up and threatened to smack it with. I was sitting there on my motorbike, shaking my fingers and thinking, 'Yeah. Go ahead and smack that bitch.'
And then, up at the Takuapa bus station parking lot, as I passed by a group of lounging dogs, this one particular brown and white fuzzy dog with a thick neck and thick accent rose up decidedly and came after me like he was going to shred my ankles or ass.
He couldn't just be ignored. He was too loud, and too close. And on a bike, you can only look at a chasing dog for so long before you have to return your attention back to where you're going, lest you ram into the back of a parked car or some other immovable object.
And every time I looked back to the front, here he came some more, accelerating and growling and barking even more viciously. The son of a bitch. I was almost ready to park the bike, get off, and give him some good old American Canine Whoop-Ass, but it would've caused a scene in the parking lot, and already, hundreds of people were wondering why that dog was so furiously chasing that tall farang across the lot.
"I'm already not in the mood for your shit," I told that mutt. "Come closer, and I'll kick your ass," I said, taking off my hat like I was going to smack him with it.
He seemed to understand English or make out the gist of what was said (the Thai have no swear words), because it only served to infuriate him further, and he quickly achieved an advanced state of frothing rage, really coming after me.
'Damn,' I thought. 'I can't accelerate away. I'm in a bus station parking lot with perhaps a couple thousand people going every whichaway on foot, on bikes, and in cars,' and besides, I was going the wrong way around the terminal, against the clockwise traffic pattern. Maybe that's what pissed off the dog.
When he finally gave up the chase, I rode away, thinking, 'Jesus! What wild hair did he have up his ass?'
And maybe at some time or another, you've had the same thought about your dog. Or some other relationship. And when you're thinking, 'I didn't deserve that,' no, you deserved it.
________
And everybody is talking about how schitzy the animals have been acting lately. Like Bovi.
"He never make shit with anyone before tsunami," said the owner. "and now, he make shit with everyone who go by."
Bovi has a reputation in Khuk Khak as The Main Dog, the Alpha Male, and everyone and every dog, from one end of town to the other, knows it. A typical-looking brown Thai dog that you see everywhere, Bovi is a battle-scarred mass of solid rice and fish-eating muscle who will recognize the sound of a motorbike and the people he doesn't like, and rise out of a half-slumber to rocket across the yard and scare the bejesus out of whomever it is passing by at the time.
In anticipation of his aggression, some riders come by with a cane or stick of bamboo, knowing his reputation and where he lives, always eyeing the property in fearful respect when they pass. The dogs in the Burmese tin shanty camp around the corner, only come partially to the corner, and then only tentatively in groups of not less than four, not daring to lift their leg on Bovi's declared turf.
Some of those who've been bitten have come to talk to Digger and Melanie about Bovi, who sleeps on their porch, and sometimes inside, but actually belongs three doors down to the guy who lives in Sweden, Michael.
They shake their hands in that dial-spinning, turning-on-the-shower motion and say, 'Not our dog. He belong to man in Sweden.'
________
Back a couple of entries ago, there was mention of a bong on the beach, or near the beach, or something to the effect that may have caused consternation on the part of some readers to question if the writer was a casual observer, feverishly taking notes and recording quotes, or, was a partaker in the New Year's festivities.
And some of you might be thinking, 'Hey, it don't need to be New Year's to take a few bong hits,' right?
Well, as BT once said in reply to an embarrassing question in a room full of people about the number of illegitimate children he had, 'That information is in the secret files.'
________
So, if a long talk (yes, not 'walk') on a secluded beach doesn't get the aches out, then either a bottle of wine or a trip to the world reknown Thai masseuse should do it.
Sometimes they're pretty good, and sometimes they don't get it, not even close. Have to show them the sensitive areas...'there's a gunshot wound, there's embedded shrapnel (Manny said I could've almost been a national hero if I'd marketed myself right. Packaging, promotion, book deals...a run for the senate. If I played my cards right, with the right people behind me, I could've been a County Commissioner, he said), there's embedded glass, there's an ancient knee injury...'
They want to know about the scatter of Sun Dance scars across the chest. 'Boom boom?' they ask, making a gun with their thumb and index finger.
Rather than explain it, I say, 'Yeah.'
Do they hurt? No. They itch. They start itching about the middle of May.
______
Speaking of the middle of May, I never really swore off booze, per se. Never needed to. Quit totally for a couple three decades, and then picked it back up a few years ago here in Thailand, thinking, 'Who needs to role model for anyone - I'm not around Indians.' So what the hell? A glass of wine with dinner once every three or four meals is cool, inna?
And then, there's this friend who had never taken a drink in her entire life. She was in her fifties at the time, and had lived through the sixties and Woodstock and Filmore West, and all that stuff, and had never smoked a joint or attended a fraternity kegger or had a glass of wine with dinner.
Admirable, yes, and probably Max Clarity, but one may wonder how a person can go through an entire life in only waking-state consciousness, forgoing all those other altered states. Don't they say we have brain receptor cells just lying in wait for those cannibanoids? As Lupe says, 'There muss be a reeson.'
And as Brother Tom says, 'We don't need no stinking reesons.'
God, Jesus, Allah, Buddha, Baha Ullah, Mother Mary, Your Ancestors, or Hakuman The Monkey God. Can it get you by? What about coffee?
Gotta have three cups, man. Just to get started.
________
One day while out there on Khuk Khak beach with my plastic bag, a rare visitor approaching from way up at the Cape asked if I was cleaning up the entire beach.
"Not the whole thing," I replied. "Just this little stretch."
-end
'Footprints in the Sand'? You'd think after all those claimed years of journalistic and teaching experience, a writer could come up with something better than that, wouldn't you?
How about, 'Just This Little Stretch'?
Khuk Khak, Thailand - The sea was sounding extra loud the last couple of days, so I went down to the beach to check it out, see what's up. The tide. Going to the sea is like taking a walk in the woods, or doing anything in nature; once you're there, you think, 'I should do this more often.'
Khuk Khak beach, a well-kept secret, was deserted, as usual. The beach is one of the nicest up and down the stretch of coast from Khao Lak and Bang Niang to the south, to Cape Pakarang and Bangsak beaches to the north. Those beaches bustle with resorts and restaurants and activity, but Khuk Khak is quiet.
Since it's just down the road from my house, and where I swim, I've adopted it quietly as my own cleanup and restoration project, obliging to keep it clean and plant a few coconut palms.
Simple plan. Just take a plastic bag on your walk. Along with the innumerable plastic water bottles, whiskey bottles, and small, amber M-150 and Shark bottles, today yielded a little plastic Elk, and a small, green Irish Bear with a clover leaf on his heart, something, it appeared to be, from St. Patrick's Day.
They said a big wave came in three mornings in a row, submerging the kitchens of some of the businesses close to the beach at Bang Niang. People just shake their heads.
The sea was turbulent and unsettled. The sense I got after two hours out there was that nothing is certain. Anything can happen.
________
Anything can happen.
Those folks down at the Sofitel resort didn't know that anything could happen in the earth's history when on Sunday morning, the day following Christmas, 2004, 650 perished before noon. Although much of Khuk Khak was underwater, my house, the last on the road to the Sofitel, stayed dry and above water, with the wave being absorbed by the river, closeby, and the reservoir.
"Most of them were old people who didn't get out of their rooms," said Menat.
___
The Sofitel is one of the remaining resorts that hasn't been rebuilt. Everyone around here seems to know the story of the Turkish owner who wasn't fully insured or something or other to do with the financing required for the restoration work.
Maybe, who knows, maybe he's got the cash and wondering if he should reinvest it, or spend it somewhere else. Anybody's guess about what a person does with their cash. Anyway, it ain't been touched since.
'The Sofitel Magic Lagoon Resort and Spa', says the damaged sign above the entrance. The Sofitel Ghost Resort, with only three uniformed security guards pulling eight-hour shifts. Really, there's nothing left to guard.
___
So what we've got down there on the beach is desertion, a good place to go for a walk, and spend your own foolish time squatting by a wash of shell and coral, contemplating the spirals of a sea shell, the patterned development of a Cowry, or the amazing universe within a sand dollar.
Just behind me, the next wave washed across my tracks, erasing those size 13 footprints in the sand, as if I had never been there, and those waves could be lifetimes.
So, if you want to make your mark on the world, don't write it in the sand.
_______
A person can make a mark upon the world by being a great artist. However, for many of us lesser beings, we must content ourselves with something much more modest than the Sistine Chapel or the Eiffel Tower, like shower caddies, for instance.
On the ride up and over the mountain the other day, winding the motorbike through the 'S' curves to deliver a shower caddy order in Nam Khem, I realized that I hadn't even scraped the surface of the potential market out there. Gotta think outside the box. Gotta think of exports to The States.
And whenever I show them to a Thai, they always marvel at them and exclaim, 'Good idea!' as if nobody over here had ever thought of making a coconut ashtray or bamboo catch-all.
Stuck in paradise, making shower caddies.
And right next door to paradise, we've got living hell. That would be Myanmar, or Burma. Went there yesterday, crossing the border by longtail boat to the immediate assault of a dozen kid hawkers, all trying to sell Viagra to me and every other male who disembarks in Myanmar.
First time it was kind of cute, having a personal entourage. 'Don't you feel like a rock star?' I asked Choi, the girl from China with the dark sun visor who missed her visa departure date by a full week and would've had to endure a world of shit at immigration in addition to the exorbitant overstay fees, had it not been for our humoring the official by giving him an expensive pen in trade for his cheap plastic Bic, and engaging him in distracting conversation about his Ft. Benning, Ga. parachute jump school wings over his crisp, uniformed pocket as he stamped out Choi's new visa.
___
The first time that kid grabbed me, I just looked at his hand until he let go of my arm. The second time, I told him, "Don't grab me. Keep your hands off of me."
The same guy pulled up a seat at the ice cream shop where they serve almost the best ice cream in the world by graceful girls with swirled powdered faces. Trying to get my attention, he kept touching my arm.
"Didn't I already tell you to stop touching me?" I asked the guy, a dark, curly-haired teenager just trying to make a buck off a foreigner. "I've already told you three times now. I don't want to tell you again," I said to him, as a father might to a young son.
He clearly understood English. The British were in Burma for how many hundredslktax of years? But, then he hit me again on the arm. I had to get ugly with the kid and tell him to go away and leave us alone, which he did, after also being spoken to by the management.
"You should've faked him with the right, then laugh," said Digger, feigning a right hook. "And then when he laughs, rock him with the left. Lay his ass out."
No. Then you'd really be the Ugly American. Instead, we just laughed, and tipped the gravel-voiced eleven year-old who escorted us up to the lookout point and never asked for anything nor tried to sell us anything.
"Watch out for sah-nakes and sah-corpions."
________
Suddenly, it seems dogs have turned against me.
I've always been a friend to dogs, a soft touch for a handout or a scratch behind the ears. They've always seemed to know that. But just the other day, that little short-legged pig of a bitch of the Laundry Lady's actually bit me!
Thai dog, right? Yeah, I wanted to smack it with that broom that the Laundry Lady picked up and threatened to smack it with. I was sitting there on my motorbike, shaking my fingers and thinking, 'Yeah. Go ahead and smack that bitch.'
And then, up at the Takuapa bus station parking lot, as I passed by a group of lounging dogs, this one particular brown and white fuzzy dog with a thick neck and thick accent rose up decidedly and came after me like he was going to shred my ankles or ass.
He couldn't just be ignored. He was too loud, and too close. And on a bike, you can only look at a chasing dog for so long before you have to return your attention back to where you're going, lest you ram into the back of a parked car or some other immovable object.
And every time I looked back to the front, here he came some more, accelerating and growling and barking even more viciously. The son of a bitch. I was almost ready to park the bike, get off, and give him some good old American Canine Whoop-Ass, but it would've caused a scene in the parking lot, and already, hundreds of people were wondering why that dog was so furiously chasing that tall farang across the lot.
"I'm already not in the mood for your shit," I told that mutt. "Come closer, and I'll kick your ass," I said, taking off my hat like I was going to smack him with it.
He seemed to understand English or make out the gist of what was said (the Thai have no swear words), because it only served to infuriate him further, and he quickly achieved an advanced state of frothing rage, really coming after me.
'Damn,' I thought. 'I can't accelerate away. I'm in a bus station parking lot with perhaps a couple thousand people going every whichaway on foot, on bikes, and in cars,' and besides, I was going the wrong way around the terminal, against the clockwise traffic pattern. Maybe that's what pissed off the dog.
When he finally gave up the chase, I rode away, thinking, 'Jesus! What wild hair did he have up his ass?'
And maybe at some time or another, you've had the same thought about your dog. Or some other relationship. And when you're thinking, 'I didn't deserve that,' no, you deserved it.
________
And everybody is talking about how schitzy the animals have been acting lately. Like Bovi.
"He never make shit with anyone before tsunami," said the owner. "and now, he make shit with everyone who go by."
Bovi has a reputation in Khuk Khak as The Main Dog, the Alpha Male, and everyone and every dog, from one end of town to the other, knows it. A typical-looking brown Thai dog that you see everywhere, Bovi is a battle-scarred mass of solid rice and fish-eating muscle who will recognize the sound of a motorbike and the people he doesn't like, and rise out of a half-slumber to rocket across the yard and scare the bejesus out of whomever it is passing by at the time.
In anticipation of his aggression, some riders come by with a cane or stick of bamboo, knowing his reputation and where he lives, always eyeing the property in fearful respect when they pass. The dogs in the Burmese tin shanty camp around the corner, only come partially to the corner, and then only tentatively in groups of not less than four, not daring to lift their leg on Bovi's declared turf.
Some of those who've been bitten have come to talk to Digger and Melanie about Bovi, who sleeps on their porch, and sometimes inside, but actually belongs three doors down to the guy who lives in Sweden, Michael.
They shake their hands in that dial-spinning, turning-on-the-shower motion and say, 'Not our dog. He belong to man in Sweden.'
________
Back a couple of entries ago, there was mention of a bong on the beach, or near the beach, or something to the effect that may have caused consternation on the part of some readers to question if the writer was a casual observer, feverishly taking notes and recording quotes, or, was a partaker in the New Year's festivities.
And some of you might be thinking, 'Hey, it don't need to be New Year's to take a few bong hits,' right?
Well, as BT once said in reply to an embarrassing question in a room full of people about the number of illegitimate children he had, 'That information is in the secret files.'
________
So, if a long talk (yes, not 'walk') on a secluded beach doesn't get the aches out, then either a bottle of wine or a trip to the world reknown Thai masseuse should do it.
Sometimes they're pretty good, and sometimes they don't get it, not even close. Have to show them the sensitive areas...'there's a gunshot wound, there's embedded shrapnel (Manny said I could've almost been a national hero if I'd marketed myself right. Packaging, promotion, book deals...a run for the senate. If I played my cards right, with the right people behind me, I could've been a County Commissioner, he said), there's embedded glass, there's an ancient knee injury...'
They want to know about the scatter of Sun Dance scars across the chest. 'Boom boom?' they ask, making a gun with their thumb and index finger.
Rather than explain it, I say, 'Yeah.'
Do they hurt? No. They itch. They start itching about the middle of May.
______
Speaking of the middle of May, I never really swore off booze, per se. Never needed to. Quit totally for a couple three decades, and then picked it back up a few years ago here in Thailand, thinking, 'Who needs to role model for anyone - I'm not around Indians.' So what the hell? A glass of wine with dinner once every three or four meals is cool, inna?
And then, there's this friend who had never taken a drink in her entire life. She was in her fifties at the time, and had lived through the sixties and Woodstock and Filmore West, and all that stuff, and had never smoked a joint or attended a fraternity kegger or had a glass of wine with dinner.
Admirable, yes, and probably Max Clarity, but one may wonder how a person can go through an entire life in only waking-state consciousness, forgoing all those other altered states. Don't they say we have brain receptor cells just lying in wait for those cannibanoids? As Lupe says, 'There muss be a reeson.'
And as Brother Tom says, 'We don't need no stinking reesons.'
God, Jesus, Allah, Buddha, Baha Ullah, Mother Mary, Your Ancestors, or Hakuman The Monkey God. Can it get you by? What about coffee?
Gotta have three cups, man. Just to get started.
________
One day while out there on Khuk Khak beach with my plastic bag, a rare visitor approaching from way up at the Cape asked if I was cleaning up the entire beach.
"Not the whole thing," I replied. "Just this little stretch."
-end
Thursday, April 27, 2006
Fireworks, continued
Fireworks II
First, a clarification; the quote in the April 19 entry, 'Don't bring a knife to a gunfight', attributed to a 'conversation with Leroi, Omaha, 1982', may have given the misleading impression that I was the one having the conversation, and thusly, the quote.
Actually, the quote, an approximate derivative of the original, is attributable to Lahonse 'Lip' Jackson, who had said, "Nigguh! Don't brang no knife to no gunfight!" as he stood over Leroi Levers, who at the time was bleeding on the sidewalk outside Miss Rachel Jefferson's Beauty Parlor & Tire Shop, near 32nd St. and Benson.
Leroi, just before producing a six-inch switchblade, had said to Jackson, "Nigguh, don't let yo' big-lip mouth write a check yo' black ass can't cash," or words closely to that effect. It was at that point that Jackson, being sensitive anyway about his larger-than-normal-even-for-a-Black-person lips, reached into his jacket pocket and produced a small-calibre firearm, saying, "Cash THIS, Nigguh!", whereupon the aforesaid immediately discharged the weapon and emptied its contents into the upper body of Levers.
Since both men are currently deceased, I took the liberty of modifying the language to remove the offensive racial slur*, the mispronunciation, and the double negative. I think they would both probably be happy that the quote was moved forward and put into circulation.
Although the dispute had originally begun over foul play in the closing seconds of a pick-up basketball game at the East 32nd St. Drug & Alcohol Rehab playground**, it escalated during a visit to Bee Bop's Package Liquor Store, and erupted into violence in front of Miss Rachel's place before several onlookers. Leroi expired shorty after the confrontation and was pronounced 'DAS' (dead at scene) by the Lincoln County coroner and Miss Rachel, who, upon the arrival of St. Mary Mother a Christ Hospital EMTs a half hour later, said, 'The nigguh's dead.'
Lip Jackson, thereafter known as, 'Cash' Jackson, went on to live a happy and fulfilled life as an enormously successful investment banker until dying under extraordinarily mysterious circumstances*** in a horribly tragic boating accident in 1979. He was never charged with the death of Levers in the susequent criminal non-investigation.
7th Precinct deputy police commissioner, Wilson 'Bug-Eye' Washington, said, "It looks to me like they'll need a new point guard down on 32nd Street."
___
*not a slur when used within a racial group. It is only considered offensively derogatory when used by those outside the group, in application to one within the group. From a journalistic standpoint, it would be okay to use the quote, as is, I suppose. On principle, we'll have to let it stand.
**known for Amos Bigby's standing rule, spoken to a visiting player from Kansas City, 'We don't call no fouls down here, Nigguh. We call an ambulamps.'
***see; 'Lip Jackson Death Ruled Foul Play'; Omaha Register, 5/21/79.
_______
First, a clarification; the quote in the April 19 entry, 'Don't bring a knife to a gunfight', attributed to a 'conversation with Leroi, Omaha, 1982', may have given the misleading impression that I was the one having the conversation, and thusly, the quote.
Actually, the quote, an approximate derivative of the original, is attributable to Lahonse 'Lip' Jackson, who had said, "Nigguh! Don't brang no knife to no gunfight!" as he stood over Leroi Levers, who at the time was bleeding on the sidewalk outside Miss Rachel Jefferson's Beauty Parlor & Tire Shop, near 32nd St. and Benson.
Leroi, just before producing a six-inch switchblade, had said to Jackson, "Nigguh, don't let yo' big-lip mouth write a check yo' black ass can't cash," or words closely to that effect. It was at that point that Jackson, being sensitive anyway about his larger-than-normal-even-for-a-Black-person lips, reached into his jacket pocket and produced a small-calibre firearm, saying, "Cash THIS, Nigguh!", whereupon the aforesaid immediately discharged the weapon and emptied its contents into the upper body of Levers.
Since both men are currently deceased, I took the liberty of modifying the language to remove the offensive racial slur*, the mispronunciation, and the double negative. I think they would both probably be happy that the quote was moved forward and put into circulation.
Although the dispute had originally begun over foul play in the closing seconds of a pick-up basketball game at the East 32nd St. Drug & Alcohol Rehab playground**, it escalated during a visit to Bee Bop's Package Liquor Store, and erupted into violence in front of Miss Rachel's place before several onlookers. Leroi expired shorty after the confrontation and was pronounced 'DAS' (dead at scene) by the Lincoln County coroner and Miss Rachel, who, upon the arrival of St. Mary Mother a Christ Hospital EMTs a half hour later, said, 'The nigguh's dead.'
Lip Jackson, thereafter known as, 'Cash' Jackson, went on to live a happy and fulfilled life as an enormously successful investment banker until dying under extraordinarily mysterious circumstances*** in a horribly tragic boating accident in 1979. He was never charged with the death of Levers in the susequent criminal non-investigation.
7th Precinct deputy police commissioner, Wilson 'Bug-Eye' Washington, said, "It looks to me like they'll need a new point guard down on 32nd Street."
___
*not a slur when used within a racial group. It is only considered offensively derogatory when used by those outside the group, in application to one within the group. From a journalistic standpoint, it would be okay to use the quote, as is, I suppose. On principle, we'll have to let it stand.
**known for Amos Bigby's standing rule, spoken to a visiting player from Kansas City, 'We don't call no fouls down here, Nigguh. We call an ambulamps.'
***see; 'Lip Jackson Death Ruled Foul Play'; Omaha Register, 5/21/79.
_______
Wednesday, April 19, 2006
Baby Bath Warm Water
How's the water of the Andaman Sea? Still roiling, still angry, still filled with debris? Jellyfish, Sea Turtles, baby bath warm calm as can be. |
Friday, February 03, 2006
People Reclaim Khao Lak From Sea/Jungle
People Reclaim Khao Lak From Sea/Jungle
Just saw a lady walk by, carrying five gallons of water on her head. No hands.
'Five G''s', as we say on the rez, where someone always needs five 'G's of gas. She was from the close quarters, tin roof shantytown Burmese camp, just right over there, low key in this little low rent Thai community of Bang Niang (Bahng Nee-ahng, 'a' as in father), situated between the sea and a block from the main strip artery running from Khao Lak, just south of here, to Takuapa to the north.
She was trailed by four youngsters as she left the little mini mart diagonally across the street, rebuilt now since the tsunami, when it was swept off its foundation, and the owner, when he saw the wave approaching, said, 'I go jogging,' making a pumping motion with his arms.
The wave caught him, he said, and when he popped to the surface, he went swimming. People were on the rooftops, in the palm trees.
Yeah, Bang Niang. Heart of the path of the wave. This is the beach where the now famous police boat, sitting parked just right over there, got taken from however many miles out to sea it was, inland to where it's parked now, right at the edge of the jungle and the bottom of the mountain, killing scores of people, hundreds they say, on it's swath through Bang Niang.
They've made the boat a permanent memorial, and the convergence point for both the '100 Days' ceremony and the recent One Year memorial, which took place there at the boat, and down on the beach at Bang Niang. If you walk up close to it, you'll see flowers, photos, messages, incense.
They've also made it a major tourist attraction, and any time during the daylight hours you can see all sorts of different nationalities out there with their digital cameras. They say that boat, and the tsunami, 'put Khao Lak on the map.'
And so, with the belief that a tsunami comes long once every thousand years, and in anticipation of what's going to happen economically to this area, ALL SORTS of new construction is going up, ALL OVER THE PLACE. This doesn't include the feverish activity that took place just rolling up to the 100 Days memorial, when everybody wanted to be open for business.
Everywhere up and down the strip, from Khao Lak to Cape Pakarang and beyond, on up to Bang Sak Beach, new construction is going on. All the pre-existing resorts are being rebuilt, and it seems like every bit of land is being used up, with encroaching jungle growth being cleared for building someone's new house or two-story Asian-style, shop below/living quarters above.
It's hard to believe they'll be able to fill all those rooms and restaurants, but they say they will. Like Mel said the other night, "Someone is spending some money."
_________
So, why would anyone want to rent an apartment in the heart of the path of the wave? If another one comes, you'll be thirty feet underwater. Lay there sleepless the other night in the room where they said that guy died, wondering what I would do if the room suddenly filled up with water. Swim to the door, down the hallway, and out through the kitchen, out back, and pop to the suface, right?
Positioned as it was, next to the last in a row of eight low apartments oriented perpendicular to the sea, the walls withstood the wave, unlike the first two rentals on the end, swept off their foundation, not rebuilt yet.
Aung, who rented me the place, lived with his wife and two small children in the rental on the end, closest to the sea. They must not've been home, since they all survived. I don't know. He just points to the naked foundation and laughs, making a sweeping motion with his arm. Whoosh. Gone.
Yeah.
I figure I'd have to hold my breath for about twenty seconds. Thirty, max.
_________
Besides that Burmese lady carrying those five Gs of water on her head...I watched her walk down that ramp out of the mini mart, holding it with one hand as she crossed the street, wondering if she'd let go. Sure enough, she did...there was that girl the other day walking with a one-liter bottle of water balanced on her head, talking with her friend as they walked down the road.
And then there was a Thai family of six on a motorbike going down the road, Dad driving, little one on a wicker chair astride the frame in front of dad, another little one behind, then mom, then the eldest on the back, baby in the basket.
'Back in the States,' I thought, 'they'd shoot the parents.'
And then there was that guy on a motorbike, dragging an armload of re-bar (long steel rods for reinforcing concrete) behind the bike. You can imagine what that sounded like going down the road.
And for sound going down the road, Digger and Mel transported an armload of bamboo on their bike. As Mel recounted wrestling with the bamboo, we laughed about tying the bundle off to the frame of the bike, or around your waist. Either way, you'll be un-assing the bike if the bundle should happen to catch on something in the road.
Tie it to the frame, and you'll go over the handlebars. Tie it around your waist, and the bike keeps going, while you drops squarely down on yo' tailbone. Brilliant! Brilliant idea!
That's funny. What wasn't funny was that old man's triple compound fracture of his right leg. Ankle and two places below the knee. I could feel it crunching around in my hands as we loaded him into the back of a pickup truck for an emergency run up to Takuapa hospital.
Should've splinted it. A good medic would've immobilized it. All the bamboo laying around, you'd think you could find a splint. Cannot. Only thing was a long-handled axe in the sidecar in which the man old man was riding, but when I picked it up, his daughter screamed out, "NO! NO!", like, 'this crazy foreigner is going to amputate my father's leg on the spot.'
Lot of people standing around, gawking. The guy driving the truck wasn't hurt, but the third party, who was on a separate motorbike, kissed the pavement and was sitting on the asphalt, bleeding from the nose and mouth.
It happened just behind me at an intersection, a three-way spill in my mirror. We got the bike rider to his feet and into a truck. Dazed and confused, but no apparent concussion. Off they sped, the truck beeping it's way north.
The old man sat stoically, amazingly detached from his injury, unflinching as I put a bag under his knee to relieve the pressure on his twisted ankle and mangled lower leg. I looked up at him, and he just looked back at me, almost vacantly, like someone in the advanced stages of altzheimer's.
Later that night, I studied my Thai. How do you say, 'Call ambulance!'? How do you say, 'Go! Quick!'?
"REEP! REEP!"
Carrying gauze and roller bandages might be advisable. A kit bag. That was the second in a week. Same spot. Same intersection. Gravel pullout onto asphalt highway. Bike down, clipped by car. Medic! Cuts and abrasions. Treatment at scene. ' Stop the bleeding, prepare for shock.' Start fluids. Just like in a war zone...tell 'em, 'everything is going to be okay,' even if it's not.
________
Went to the big boathouse beach party and danced with all the girls, even though they didn't know they were dancing with me. Moved around on the sand, bopping to 'Job To Do', a big-name Thai band with hits on the radio. Maybe about three hundred in attendance.
It was a big deal for Scott, the project manager who has been here for over a year, and hit his target of 47 longtail fishing boats, which they launched just before sundown. They've added another 22 boats to the list, and, 'who knows where it will go from there,' said Scott.
He let me play on the big tracked backhoe earlier in the day, scooping out the boathouse launch canal that God keeps insisting on re-filling at each high tide. I had lied to Scott, telling him that I used to run heavy equipment 'alllllll the time.'
Actually, my experience with heavy equipment was just a Bobcat. I also lied to those two Belgians in dreadlocks, telling them that I built the boathouse pretty much by myself, when they asked if I was connected to the boathouse in some way.
Funniest part of the evening was watching the wife of my friend and chief boatbuilder, Aer, a Burmese Muslim. She was trying unsuccessfully to get her daughter's attention, who was in buried the middle of the crowd, dancing in carefree abandon, the only girl out there wearing a headscarf.
On the edge of the dance area, a gyrating guy rattled on in Thai for several minutes, shouting in my ear above the music, not a word of which I understood, but the drift of which was, 'when the music is this good, you've just GOT to dance.'
Sat earlier with the interpreter and former monk, Khong, who was also dancing with all the girls. When he poured me a drink of Thai whiskey, I pointed to the amulets around our necks. "Can Rong Po Thout drink whiskey?" I asked.
"Yes. He can," replied Khong.
__________
end
Just saw a lady walk by, carrying five gallons of water on her head. No hands.
'Five G''s', as we say on the rez, where someone always needs five 'G's of gas. She was from the close quarters, tin roof shantytown Burmese camp, just right over there, low key in this little low rent Thai community of Bang Niang (Bahng Nee-ahng, 'a' as in father), situated between the sea and a block from the main strip artery running from Khao Lak, just south of here, to Takuapa to the north.
She was trailed by four youngsters as she left the little mini mart diagonally across the street, rebuilt now since the tsunami, when it was swept off its foundation, and the owner, when he saw the wave approaching, said, 'I go jogging,' making a pumping motion with his arms.
The wave caught him, he said, and when he popped to the surface, he went swimming. People were on the rooftops, in the palm trees.
Yeah, Bang Niang. Heart of the path of the wave. This is the beach where the now famous police boat, sitting parked just right over there, got taken from however many miles out to sea it was, inland to where it's parked now, right at the edge of the jungle and the bottom of the mountain, killing scores of people, hundreds they say, on it's swath through Bang Niang.
They've made the boat a permanent memorial, and the convergence point for both the '100 Days' ceremony and the recent One Year memorial, which took place there at the boat, and down on the beach at Bang Niang. If you walk up close to it, you'll see flowers, photos, messages, incense.
They've also made it a major tourist attraction, and any time during the daylight hours you can see all sorts of different nationalities out there with their digital cameras. They say that boat, and the tsunami, 'put Khao Lak on the map.'
And so, with the belief that a tsunami comes long once every thousand years, and in anticipation of what's going to happen economically to this area, ALL SORTS of new construction is going up, ALL OVER THE PLACE. This doesn't include the feverish activity that took place just rolling up to the 100 Days memorial, when everybody wanted to be open for business.
Everywhere up and down the strip, from Khao Lak to Cape Pakarang and beyond, on up to Bang Sak Beach, new construction is going on. All the pre-existing resorts are being rebuilt, and it seems like every bit of land is being used up, with encroaching jungle growth being cleared for building someone's new house or two-story Asian-style, shop below/living quarters above.
It's hard to believe they'll be able to fill all those rooms and restaurants, but they say they will. Like Mel said the other night, "Someone is spending some money."
_________
So, why would anyone want to rent an apartment in the heart of the path of the wave? If another one comes, you'll be thirty feet underwater. Lay there sleepless the other night in the room where they said that guy died, wondering what I would do if the room suddenly filled up with water. Swim to the door, down the hallway, and out through the kitchen, out back, and pop to the suface, right?
Positioned as it was, next to the last in a row of eight low apartments oriented perpendicular to the sea, the walls withstood the wave, unlike the first two rentals on the end, swept off their foundation, not rebuilt yet.
Aung, who rented me the place, lived with his wife and two small children in the rental on the end, closest to the sea. They must not've been home, since they all survived. I don't know. He just points to the naked foundation and laughs, making a sweeping motion with his arm. Whoosh. Gone.
Yeah.
I figure I'd have to hold my breath for about twenty seconds. Thirty, max.
_________
Besides that Burmese lady carrying those five Gs of water on her head...I watched her walk down that ramp out of the mini mart, holding it with one hand as she crossed the street, wondering if she'd let go. Sure enough, she did...there was that girl the other day walking with a one-liter bottle of water balanced on her head, talking with her friend as they walked down the road.
And then there was a Thai family of six on a motorbike going down the road, Dad driving, little one on a wicker chair astride the frame in front of dad, another little one behind, then mom, then the eldest on the back, baby in the basket.
'Back in the States,' I thought, 'they'd shoot the parents.'
And then there was that guy on a motorbike, dragging an armload of re-bar (long steel rods for reinforcing concrete) behind the bike. You can imagine what that sounded like going down the road.
And for sound going down the road, Digger and Mel transported an armload of bamboo on their bike. As Mel recounted wrestling with the bamboo, we laughed about tying the bundle off to the frame of the bike, or around your waist. Either way, you'll be un-assing the bike if the bundle should happen to catch on something in the road.
Tie it to the frame, and you'll go over the handlebars. Tie it around your waist, and the bike keeps going, while you drops squarely down on yo' tailbone. Brilliant! Brilliant idea!
That's funny. What wasn't funny was that old man's triple compound fracture of his right leg. Ankle and two places below the knee. I could feel it crunching around in my hands as we loaded him into the back of a pickup truck for an emergency run up to Takuapa hospital.
Should've splinted it. A good medic would've immobilized it. All the bamboo laying around, you'd think you could find a splint. Cannot. Only thing was a long-handled axe in the sidecar in which the man old man was riding, but when I picked it up, his daughter screamed out, "NO! NO!", like, 'this crazy foreigner is going to amputate my father's leg on the spot.'
Lot of people standing around, gawking. The guy driving the truck wasn't hurt, but the third party, who was on a separate motorbike, kissed the pavement and was sitting on the asphalt, bleeding from the nose and mouth.
It happened just behind me at an intersection, a three-way spill in my mirror. We got the bike rider to his feet and into a truck. Dazed and confused, but no apparent concussion. Off they sped, the truck beeping it's way north.
The old man sat stoically, amazingly detached from his injury, unflinching as I put a bag under his knee to relieve the pressure on his twisted ankle and mangled lower leg. I looked up at him, and he just looked back at me, almost vacantly, like someone in the advanced stages of altzheimer's.
Later that night, I studied my Thai. How do you say, 'Call ambulance!'? How do you say, 'Go! Quick!'?
"REEP! REEP!"
Carrying gauze and roller bandages might be advisable. A kit bag. That was the second in a week. Same spot. Same intersection. Gravel pullout onto asphalt highway. Bike down, clipped by car. Medic! Cuts and abrasions. Treatment at scene. ' Stop the bleeding, prepare for shock.' Start fluids. Just like in a war zone...tell 'em, 'everything is going to be okay,' even if it's not.
________
Went to the big boathouse beach party and danced with all the girls, even though they didn't know they were dancing with me. Moved around on the sand, bopping to 'Job To Do', a big-name Thai band with hits on the radio. Maybe about three hundred in attendance.
It was a big deal for Scott, the project manager who has been here for over a year, and hit his target of 47 longtail fishing boats, which they launched just before sundown. They've added another 22 boats to the list, and, 'who knows where it will go from there,' said Scott.
He let me play on the big tracked backhoe earlier in the day, scooping out the boathouse launch canal that God keeps insisting on re-filling at each high tide. I had lied to Scott, telling him that I used to run heavy equipment 'alllllll the time.'
Actually, my experience with heavy equipment was just a Bobcat. I also lied to those two Belgians in dreadlocks, telling them that I built the boathouse pretty much by myself, when they asked if I was connected to the boathouse in some way.
Funniest part of the evening was watching the wife of my friend and chief boatbuilder, Aer, a Burmese Muslim. She was trying unsuccessfully to get her daughter's attention, who was in buried the middle of the crowd, dancing in carefree abandon, the only girl out there wearing a headscarf.
On the edge of the dance area, a gyrating guy rattled on in Thai for several minutes, shouting in my ear above the music, not a word of which I understood, but the drift of which was, 'when the music is this good, you've just GOT to dance.'
Sat earlier with the interpreter and former monk, Khong, who was also dancing with all the girls. When he poured me a drink of Thai whiskey, I pointed to the amulets around our necks. "Can Rong Po Thout drink whiskey?" I asked.
"Yes. He can," replied Khong.
__________
end
Wednesday, December 28, 2005
Return To Tsunamiland/Ten Degrees From Comfort Zone
Return To Tsunamiland/Ten Degrees From Comfort Zone
From snow boots to flip flops; fry bread, meat and potatoes, to rice and fish; from the sacred pipe and feathers, to buddhas and amulets; from the Lakota Nishnabotna to the Thai Chao Phraya; and from the pow wow drum to the bamboo flute. We're not in Kansas anymore, are we Toto?
Suddenly...well, not so suddenly...actually, after a 26 hr. round-about flight, everything is hot and steamy at 8.5 degrees off the equator. Tropical jungle, lizards, giant slugs, and tiger balm.
Still trying to master the Thai toilet, a porcelain affair with two footpads on either side, designed for deep knee-bend squatting. For a man with bad too-much-basketball knees who's accustomed to a cigarette, a magazine, and a prolonged...uh...engagement...during the course of evacuation, a Thai hole-in-the-floor can be an excruciating daily exercise.
Upon return to Khao Lak in Phang Nga province, where 78% of the deaths in Thailand occurred, the one thing most evident was the industry of the reconstruction effort in preparation for the one-year memorial to take place on December 26th. Nature had rebounded, and everything was green again, after being torn, scarred, and denuded.
Where nine months earlier it appeared that most of the work was being done by volunteers, now everywhere Thais were at work, building homes, pouring concrete, re-opening their shops for the Christmas high-tourist season, and rebuilding the destroyed resorts up and down 'The Strip', a 30 kilometer stretch of beautiful sandy beach peppered with fishing villages and tourist industry.
"It's a good thing so many countries came to help us," said the home owner in Khuk Kak village of the immediate post-tsunami volunteer aid. "We were still in shock."
The Tsunami Volunteer Center moved from its mountaintop base to a permanent storefront in Khao Lak at the southern end of the strip, abbreviating its nine-syllable name to 'The TVC', which is strange, saying 'the TVC', or the 'VC', eliciting negative associations for anyone who can remember fighting the VC in the Vietnam war.
______
Out at the boathouse at Cape Pakarang, boatbuilders were finishing their 42nd boat, with a target of 47 for the project. Among the friends there, was the interpreter, Kong, the former monk 'from the waist up', with whom I'd been teaching figures of speech.
After a long hug, he greeted me by saying, "It's a piece of cake. It's a walk in the park."
"I'm just along for the ride," I told him, which was impossible for him to repeat. 'Arong for the lide,' he kept saying before giving up. It's okay to laugh. They make fun of us, too.
Some sadness accompanied my return, to learn that Digger's guardian in my absence, Mr. Kon, had been murdered in a dispute with another Thai, shot in the head; and Mr. P. Korn, who died of a heart attack at age 37.
P. Korn worked at the VC as a driver, and we had become friends last spring after providing medical assistance following a traffic accident that left him trapped in his vehicle. Three days after my arrival, his family conducted a 100 Days memorial at their home in a small Thai village south of here, attended by friends, a dozen monks from the local wat (temple) who led the service, and another couple dozen foreigners from the volunteer corps, including Digger and me, who were invited by his wife, who informed us upon our arrival, 'P. Korn. He die.'
It was a short service in sweltering heat. They fed everyone under tent shades, and the old men sat around tables smoking cigarettes and chatting, while the women prepared the food, and the volunteers clustered in small groups. It seemed the family was thankful we were all there.
That wasn't the end of the immediate misfortune, for on Christmas Eve, Digger splashed his motorbike on the pavement of Khao Lak when a fifteen year-old German girl wearing aviator sunglasses behind a tinted visor, and an ipod plugged into her ears, failed to look both ways before pulling out directly in front of him on Khao Lak's major thoroughfare.
Digger caught her broadside and ended up with rasberries on his leg and hip, the bike suffering minor damage. Her father (who didn't witness the accident) insisted it was Digger's fault, saying 'he should have gone around her...he should have let her go across...he should have stayed in the bike lane...he should have slowed down...'
Of course he was defending his daughter, and I wondered what her version would be...'I was just sitting there, and when I tried to cross, he hit me.'
Despite the father's protestations, we noticed the next day, she was no longer in the saddle, but sitting behind her mother on another bike.
_______
Merry Chrissmaaaaats! That's how they say it, and in the English/Thai dictionary, it's sort of spelled like that. Despite being a land of predominantly Buddhists, they celebrate Christmas here, with people running around in Santa hats and tiny lights strung up around the shops.
The volunteers made the most of being away from home for the holiday by holding two parties and big feeds in the afternoon and evening, with Santa and his helper elf, all dressed up and arriving at the party on an elephant.
Khao Lak was buzzing with thousands of people arriving either for their Christmas holiday, or for the next day's big event, the one-year tsunami memorial. Traffic up and down the strip was horrendous and dangerous, with the tweet of cops' whistles incessant throughout the day.
Concerts and performances were held up and down the strip, from Khao Lak to Bang Niang, where the police boat, which had been swept inland two miles, taking with it countless lives, now sat as a permanent memorial and testimony to the suffering of that dreadful holiday-turned-disaster.
Hundreds of Thai students had come in from Bangkok to plant 10,000 trees in one day that was previously estimated at a month's work. The shops were full, and the resorts and restaurants were packed. People were coming in from all over the country and the world, with surviving families of the dead flown in by the Thai government.
The Prime Minister and Princess Ubonrat, who lost her son to the wave, were also coming in, along with embassy staffs and other dignitaries zooming around with siren police escorts, so security was intense, with more helicopters in the air at one time than I'd seen since Vietnam.
Driving along the strip on a motorbike, the energy and intensity of the day with the helicopters whopping overhead, was a pure adrenaline rush, something like the buzzing, flesh-prickling moments outside the stadium preceding a Minnesota Vikings playoff game, or a hot combat zone.
We met survivors. John, from Austrailia, who lost his younger sister; another young man who was in bed with his girlfriend when 'the wall exploded', and he never saw her again, waking up in the hospital, asking, 'what happened?
We met Sara, from Sweden, on the beach. She had lost her mother, her husband, and her baby in the tsunami. She said she had been on CNN and Larry King, and that the Americans 'were fantastic', helping her in trying to find her son, who someone said was seen in the top of a coconut tree.
She has been back several times, still trying to find him, she said, and still loves the Thai and the country. I asked if it was painful for her to return to the scene of trauma, but she said, "No. I'm not afraid of ghosts, and everything I love is here. But I don't enjoy the sea as I once did."
Her face looked narrow and drawn, and she didn't smile once during our conversation, but as we departed, I looked back and saw her enter the water for a swim.
________
The One-Year Memorial was Thailand's big event of the year, taking the entire year in preparation. It began in steamy heat in front of the police boat with an inter-denominational Buddhist/Muslim/Christian prayer service for the 'releasing of the souls', attended by perhaps five thousand or more people.
Then it rained cats and dogs in the afternoon, with everyone seeking shelter. A cleansing, it seemed.
As darkness fell in the evening, the rain had stopped, and thousands of people gathered at the beach at Bang Niang where row upon row of plastic seats had been placed among the coconut palms, and a half-dozen huge green LCD screens displayed closed-circuit video for the audience too far from the stage.
Along with the VIPs and dignitaries seated up front were scores of survivors from foreign countries who had lost loved ones in the tsunami. It had even touched the royal family. Despite the huge mass of people, the atmosphere was incredibly quiet and composed.
Hundreds of student volunteers distributed free green tea and boxes of tuna sandwiches, orange juice and sweet breads donated by Thai Airlines. Everyone was funneled through security entry checkpoints where we were scanned by Thai and Swedish security police, just like prior to boarding an aircraft or entering a courtroom.
The media were everywhere with satellite dishes, cables and antennae sprouted from their huge production vans. Thai navy patrol boats cordoned off the sea in a huge arc, and tsunami paintings were on display, as well as a commemorative wall of photos of the young prince, surrounded by flowers, flowers, flowers, everywhere.
Each person was given a commemorative candle in a plastic flower holder to light after the Prime Minister's and Princess' brief and to-the-point addresses to the crowd. Taking their cue as the Princess lit the ceremonial torch, the lights went down, the navy boats lit their searchlights, and the entire assembly lit their candles as five thousand five-foot lanterns were lit and sent aloft from the beach by a battalion of Thai army men in three 100-yard rows, assisted by groups of students.
Representing the lost souls and the releasing of their spirits, the ceremony was spectacular and deeply emotional, as the lanterns floated upward and south toward Khao Lak, as awe-inspiring as any Fourth of July I've ever seen.
Digger said, "You'll never see another sight like this in your life."
- end
Full Moon Over Khaosan Road
Full Moon Over Khaosan Road
As the full moon shined down upon the steaming streets of Bangkok, I wondered, "Is the moon full over there where you are, too?"
Probably not.
The internationally famous Khaosan Road is like Times Square in New York, or the Pearl Street Mall in Boulder, Colorado - frequented mainly by tourists, and avoided like the plague by the locals.
Nonetheless, with little else to do in the evenings, I made the obligatory stroll up and down the street, hoping maybe to see someone I knew, or just sip a Singha and take in Bangkok's nightly circus freak show.
Thousands of international tourists slogged down the avenue lined with brightly lit restaurants, guest houses, bars, souvenir and tailor shops, passport and visa services, ATMs, currency exchanges, portable food vendors, bookstores, CD shops, tattoo artists, hair stylists, and a plethora of t-shirt and clothing salespeople.
At curbside you can have your hair done up in dreadlocks, corn rows, or shaved bald, like some of the European girls, making their statement. Or you could get that new tattoo.
Obese middle-aged Europeans, still pastey white from a scandinavian winter, roamed the boulevard, while 60 year-old German bastards, their guts hanging heavily over their belts, strolled along with their 20 year-old Thai girlfriends-for-a-night.
Everyone who had been in Southeast Asia for any length of time sported new t-shirts proclaiming where they'd been - Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar, Vietnam, and Thailand's islands.
I thought a good t-shirt marketing idea would be, 'I've been to the International Space Station,' with a picture of the ISS, and underneath it - 'And You Haven't.'
Everyone has a one-upmanship story to tell to a willing listener, their story not of their historical past or their country of origin, but where they've recently been. It's always the same: "We did Vietnam, and then we did Laos for two weeks, and then we did Cambodia."
"Yeah, I did Vietnam, too. Back in the sixties. But when I got home, I discovered Vietnam did me."
Everyone but me has a cell phone now, so to fake it, I just hold my hand to my ear and press an index finger onto that little piece of cartilage and start talking...to Jesus or whomever else might be listening in, like the CIA or the Dept. of Homeland Security, from what they're saying these days on the TV set.
The parade continues all night long and into the early morning hours, with old couples in retirement with the time and money to be there; young couples carrying enormous long-haul backpacks and weeks of road dirt; insecure, wide-eyed girls travelling alone; pretty, mini-skirted secure girls with their boyfriends; lonely old farts of both sexes, looking tired and forelorn; and entire families with babies in strollers and kids tagging behind, most all of them Europeans...and small groups of giggling Japanese. No Americans, no Mexicans, and just a smattering of skillet-black Africans.
Like the Khaosan Road t-shirt with the evolutionary graphic of the ape to upright bi-pedal modern man, proceding to a hunchbacked ape-man at a computer, with the comment, 'Somewhere, something went terribly wrong,' I kept thinking, 'something is terribly wrong with this picture.'
Wealth. People with money. That's why there aren't any Mexicans. And fear. That's why there aren't any Americans. Fear has kept us within our borders.
But there's no need for fear on Khaosan Road, or in Thailand as a whole, or anyplace else on the planet for that matter. Just like the t-shirt says, 'No Fear.'
- end
As the full moon shined down upon the steaming streets of Bangkok, I wondered, "Is the moon full over there where you are, too?"
Probably not.
The internationally famous Khaosan Road is like Times Square in New York, or the Pearl Street Mall in Boulder, Colorado - frequented mainly by tourists, and avoided like the plague by the locals.
Nonetheless, with little else to do in the evenings, I made the obligatory stroll up and down the street, hoping maybe to see someone I knew, or just sip a Singha and take in Bangkok's nightly circus freak show.
Thousands of international tourists slogged down the avenue lined with brightly lit restaurants, guest houses, bars, souvenir and tailor shops, passport and visa services, ATMs, currency exchanges, portable food vendors, bookstores, CD shops, tattoo artists, hair stylists, and a plethora of t-shirt and clothing salespeople.
At curbside you can have your hair done up in dreadlocks, corn rows, or shaved bald, like some of the European girls, making their statement. Or you could get that new tattoo.
Obese middle-aged Europeans, still pastey white from a scandinavian winter, roamed the boulevard, while 60 year-old German bastards, their guts hanging heavily over their belts, strolled along with their 20 year-old Thai girlfriends-for-a-night.
Everyone who had been in Southeast Asia for any length of time sported new t-shirts proclaiming where they'd been - Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar, Vietnam, and Thailand's islands.
I thought a good t-shirt marketing idea would be, 'I've been to the International Space Station,' with a picture of the ISS, and underneath it - 'And You Haven't.'
Everyone has a one-upmanship story to tell to a willing listener, their story not of their historical past or their country of origin, but where they've recently been. It's always the same: "We did Vietnam, and then we did Laos for two weeks, and then we did Cambodia."
"Yeah, I did Vietnam, too. Back in the sixties. But when I got home, I discovered Vietnam did me."
Everyone but me has a cell phone now, so to fake it, I just hold my hand to my ear and press an index finger onto that little piece of cartilage and start talking...to Jesus or whomever else might be listening in, like the CIA or the Dept. of Homeland Security, from what they're saying these days on the TV set.
The parade continues all night long and into the early morning hours, with old couples in retirement with the time and money to be there; young couples carrying enormous long-haul backpacks and weeks of road dirt; insecure, wide-eyed girls travelling alone; pretty, mini-skirted secure girls with their boyfriends; lonely old farts of both sexes, looking tired and forelorn; and entire families with babies in strollers and kids tagging behind, most all of them Europeans...and small groups of giggling Japanese. No Americans, no Mexicans, and just a smattering of skillet-black Africans.
Like the Khaosan Road t-shirt with the evolutionary graphic of the ape to upright bi-pedal modern man, proceding to a hunchbacked ape-man at a computer, with the comment, 'Somewhere, something went terribly wrong,' I kept thinking, 'something is terribly wrong with this picture.'
Wealth. People with money. That's why there aren't any Mexicans. And fear. That's why there aren't any Americans. Fear has kept us within our borders.
But there's no need for fear on Khaosan Road, or in Thailand as a whole, or anyplace else on the planet for that matter. Just like the t-shirt says, 'No Fear.'
- end
Wednesday, December 14, 2005
Instant Karma/Garlic Breath of Jackal
Instant Karma/Garlic Breath of Jackal
Bangkok - On the long-way-around 26 hr. flight to Asia via Paris (weren't we supposed to be flying the other way?), they gave us a flyer about the H5N1 Avian Flu virus, commonly known as the 'bird flu'. Maybe you've heard about it already. The news was slow getting to the rez, but we found out anyway. Essentially, the info said, 'No eat da chicken that sneeze.'
What about the seafood? Is it ok? The waiter said, "No. The seafood hab peeple."
Just yesterday, they said, another skeleton washed up on the beaches of Khao Lak.
_______
In a city of 7.5 million people and tens of thousands of t-shirt designs, I'm the only one running around in a Running Strong for American Indian Youth T-shirt, promoting the cause, where no one has ever heard of South Dakota, much less Pine Ridge Indian Reservation. And alllllll those Lakotas up there thinking we're the center of the universe.
You might be thinking, 'I'll bet the first thing he did was go out and get laid,' but no, as Dave from Alaska said last night while watching the Khaosan Road circus freak show, where skinny European guys in orange and purple dreadlocks and huge backpacks parade down the street with their newly tattooed girlfriends, 'Sex without love is empty.'
Actually, the first thing I did upon arrival was race to the airport men's room and dispose of my socks, longjohns, hooded sweatshirt, fleece jacket, and cheap-ass Wally World insulated moccasin bedroom slippers.
The second thing I did was race back through the airport and return to the men's room stall and ask the new occupant for my passport and money belt, which I had left hanging on the toilet paper dispenser.
Not knowing how to say, 'Excuse me' in Thai, and since the flight was from France, I tried my long-forgotten French, "Scusay Moi...passporrrr."
The guy just laughed, and through a crack in the door, handed out a money belt to the distraught and anxious fool on the other side. Yes, that would be me. And though much relieved to see he hadn't ripped off the cash inside, I wondered if he was laughing at my absent-mindedness, the stupid accent, or both.
________
Every day there's a tattooed cripple on the sidewalk just around the corner from the hotel, sitting with his begging bowl, to whom we (Digger, too) always give whatever spare change we have at the moment. Late in the day yesterday, for the first time, I saw him walking away from his spot with all his belongings.
That's okay. Him same same Buddhist monks who go about shortly after sunrise with their begging bowls, supported by the faithful populace. They say by giving to the monks, one gains karmic merit, but who knows if it's in this lifetime or the next.
For me, it seemed instant, but I didn't know if it was the monk's daily ration of rice, a chicken leg, a sweet banana-wrapped rice thing, rice sauce, and flower; or that old Thai grandma I escorted across 16 lanes of traffic, or that recently mangled dog with the raw foreleg learning to hop around on three, to whom I offered my breakfast, or maybe that other old lady I aided getting up those steps, that seemed to be in some way connected to all the good fortune I experienced yesterday, with everyone giving me everything for free.
'Mai mee ben ha, no probrem. You hab (have). You take,' they all said, waving off my effort to pay.
So, yesterday, everything was free. Free ride even from the cab driver who asked how many babies I had, then gave me three buddha amulets for their protection and good fortune. 'Rong Po Thuot. Him numba ONE,' he said, giving a thumbs up and handing over three buddha pendants, refusing payment.
While looking for the mangled dog I had seen the previous day, the fortune teller who gave me a free reading came down the street pulling all his belongings in a wheeled suitcase to his spot across from the royal palace.
The previous day, while drawing in red ink the lines across my palm and telling me if I stayed in Thailand, I would get married to a Thai 'laydee', he told me that I would live to be 85 yrs. old. We shared a cigarette, and he told me I should learn the language.
Then he stared seriously and vacantly through me, reached up and touched my eyebrows, and said, 'You lib to be old man. Eighty years old.'
That's revised down five from the day before. At this rate, I'd better get out of here within the next six days, or avoid the guy altogether.
Nevertheless, it's better than the life expectancy on the rez, where the lifespan is something like 47. Told Bro Tom, "We'd better get out of here (Pine Ridge), man. We're stretching the limit."
Also stretching the limit on this internet access machine at 1 baht per minute. Cheap cheap, but like the downloads that adjust the price to more like 3 baht per minute, I'm old and slow.
Garlic Breath of Jackal
Lots of garlic in everything down here. Reminds me of Lupe' on the rez, when one day after eating the burritos he had fixed, he commented, 'Your breath smells like a DOG'S ASS!"
I had to ask him, "how would you know what a dog's ass smells like, Lupe?"
- end
Bangkok - On the long-way-around 26 hr. flight to Asia via Paris (weren't we supposed to be flying the other way?), they gave us a flyer about the H5N1 Avian Flu virus, commonly known as the 'bird flu'. Maybe you've heard about it already. The news was slow getting to the rez, but we found out anyway. Essentially, the info said, 'No eat da chicken that sneeze.'
What about the seafood? Is it ok? The waiter said, "No. The seafood hab peeple."
Just yesterday, they said, another skeleton washed up on the beaches of Khao Lak.
_______
In a city of 7.5 million people and tens of thousands of t-shirt designs, I'm the only one running around in a Running Strong for American Indian Youth T-shirt, promoting the cause, where no one has ever heard of South Dakota, much less Pine Ridge Indian Reservation. And alllllll those Lakotas up there thinking we're the center of the universe.
You might be thinking, 'I'll bet the first thing he did was go out and get laid,' but no, as Dave from Alaska said last night while watching the Khaosan Road circus freak show, where skinny European guys in orange and purple dreadlocks and huge backpacks parade down the street with their newly tattooed girlfriends, 'Sex without love is empty.'
Actually, the first thing I did upon arrival was race to the airport men's room and dispose of my socks, longjohns, hooded sweatshirt, fleece jacket, and cheap-ass Wally World insulated moccasin bedroom slippers.
The second thing I did was race back through the airport and return to the men's room stall and ask the new occupant for my passport and money belt, which I had left hanging on the toilet paper dispenser.
Not knowing how to say, 'Excuse me' in Thai, and since the flight was from France, I tried my long-forgotten French, "Scusay Moi...passporrrr."
The guy just laughed, and through a crack in the door, handed out a money belt to the distraught and anxious fool on the other side. Yes, that would be me. And though much relieved to see he hadn't ripped off the cash inside, I wondered if he was laughing at my absent-mindedness, the stupid accent, or both.
________
Every day there's a tattooed cripple on the sidewalk just around the corner from the hotel, sitting with his begging bowl, to whom we (Digger, too) always give whatever spare change we have at the moment. Late in the day yesterday, for the first time, I saw him walking away from his spot with all his belongings.
That's okay. Him same same Buddhist monks who go about shortly after sunrise with their begging bowls, supported by the faithful populace. They say by giving to the monks, one gains karmic merit, but who knows if it's in this lifetime or the next.
For me, it seemed instant, but I didn't know if it was the monk's daily ration of rice, a chicken leg, a sweet banana-wrapped rice thing, rice sauce, and flower; or that old Thai grandma I escorted across 16 lanes of traffic, or that recently mangled dog with the raw foreleg learning to hop around on three, to whom I offered my breakfast, or maybe that other old lady I aided getting up those steps, that seemed to be in some way connected to all the good fortune I experienced yesterday, with everyone giving me everything for free.
'Mai mee ben ha, no probrem. You hab (have). You take,' they all said, waving off my effort to pay.
So, yesterday, everything was free. Free ride even from the cab driver who asked how many babies I had, then gave me three buddha amulets for their protection and good fortune. 'Rong Po Thuot. Him numba ONE,' he said, giving a thumbs up and handing over three buddha pendants, refusing payment.
While looking for the mangled dog I had seen the previous day, the fortune teller who gave me a free reading came down the street pulling all his belongings in a wheeled suitcase to his spot across from the royal palace.
The previous day, while drawing in red ink the lines across my palm and telling me if I stayed in Thailand, I would get married to a Thai 'laydee', he told me that I would live to be 85 yrs. old. We shared a cigarette, and he told me I should learn the language.
Then he stared seriously and vacantly through me, reached up and touched my eyebrows, and said, 'You lib to be old man. Eighty years old.'
That's revised down five from the day before. At this rate, I'd better get out of here within the next six days, or avoid the guy altogether.
Nevertheless, it's better than the life expectancy on the rez, where the lifespan is something like 47. Told Bro Tom, "We'd better get out of here (Pine Ridge), man. We're stretching the limit."
Also stretching the limit on this internet access machine at 1 baht per minute. Cheap cheap, but like the downloads that adjust the price to more like 3 baht per minute, I'm old and slow.
Garlic Breath of Jackal
Lots of garlic in everything down here. Reminds me of Lupe' on the rez, when one day after eating the burritos he had fixed, he commented, 'Your breath smells like a DOG'S ASS!"
I had to ask him, "how would you know what a dog's ass smells like, Lupe?"
- end
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