Thailand’s a Fun Country

Everything here is fun. At any business meeting that I have attended, the snacks were the most important thing, lunch was provided if the time was anywhere near, and anyone who got a cell phone call just took it, stood up and walked out of the room laughing and talking. This lack of discipline extends to academics too. For certain majors the required thesis must be in English, and I see stuff that includes paragraphs of perfect English mixed in with paragraphs of mangled English, it’s obviously been cut-and-pasted off the internet, probably Wikipedia, but you’d never know because no sites are provided.

Every teacher here is a government official and has a military style uniform. The elaborate accoutrement tell the experienced viewer what degree the person has, what grade level they are at, and what honors they have received. They also have row after row of “battle ribbons,” the small multicolored bars of which there are tiers and tiers on any general’s chest, they get medals for any old thing at all, but that’s a complaint for another day. American enlisted men get them for things that are either bloody hard or bloody dangerous. What did the teacher do to get all those medals? Four tiers was not uncommon, each tier has three or four. Heroes or what? All police have them too, and many workers on the railroad, I kid you not. I asked around.

The ribbons have no independent meaning at all. After four years as a teacher, or whatever, you get to wear one tier, one row. Every four years thereafter you can add one. They have no other significance. They can be in any colors or combinations.

This place is the triumph of form over function; form is extremely important and function is an afterthought. They don’t care if you sign a years worth of time sheets at once, as long as at the end of the year there’s a years worth of signed time sheets in the file, a big book, that no one will ever look at, but which will take it’s place upon a shelf in numerical order and will stay there forever.

So it’s all like a game, really. Buy a cell phone so you can take pictures of yourself and send them to friends; buy a lap-top so you can play games while you pretend to study; spend all your time in English class drawing pictures of oranges that are labeled, “Oranqe,” wear a cool watch but when teacher asks you what time it is, just tell him, “I don’t know, it doesn’t work.”

But everyone seems to be working; everyone seems to eat well; all of the cars and trucks and motorcycles are running fine, Thai mechanics are excellent; most people seem to be happy most of the time, whether they’re at work or at a party, sometimes it’s hard to tell the difference; Thai roofs do not leak, and that’s asking quite a bit in the tropics; Thai buildings don’t collapse; the food here is as safe as the U.S. or Europe; and if anybody gives you water to drink, you can be sure that it’s drinking water, they wouldn’t want to make you sick, they don’t drink the tap water either probably.

The world could learn a lot from Thai people. I know I have.

Oh! It’s all just too exciting.

Watching myself heal, it’s always gratifying. I heal with the speed of summer lightning, you can watch my cuts heal. I don’t mean like watching grass grow, I mean you can watch those things dry up and crust over in real time, it’s like a miracle, Lazarus came back from the dead slower than my cuts heal. About eight last night I cut myself on a can, inside the first joint of my left index finger, bad place to get cut, pretty deep, bleeding like a stuck pig, it was an ugly mess, hurt some too. I looked around for my antibiotic ointment and band-aids, I know they’re here somewhere, I couldn’t find them. I wondered if I should visit the clinic today, it’s free. By nine thirty the bleeding had completely stopped and it was kind of dried over. This morning it was fine. My body is amazing.

I had another gourmet dinner tonight, total cost three dollars. Some chicken, perfectly non-greasily fried, with crispy fried onions; a few sticks of marinated pork; delicious spicy papaya salad, the great Som Tam; some sticky rice; a small can of rambutans stuffed with pineapple. A couple of pops, and a nice English gangster movie on the big Samsung.

Went to the office today, got there about nine after a nice, leisurely breakfast at home. Had some Internet fun, talked to some of my friends, had a nice lunch of stir fried pork with garlic and some vegetables, left the office for home at two thirty, “to get home before the rain.” Took a nap.

Fact checking my lessons I’m even learning something. Just what is the difference between theft and larceny? It’s a close call. I always thought the law was interesting. Just don’t make me fight tooth and claw with those other lawyers, all at the mercy of those black robed devils.

So I suppose that I’ll stay with y’all for a while, no hurry to leave this corrupt shit-hole of a world, might as well wait for the real bad news from the doctor, might be a while yet, I have a good constitution, I’m interested in things, I manage to have some fun in between episodes of self-induced horror. Might as well give it more time, wait for a novel descendant or two, or the re-ignition of love. Stand back, Mr. Fred, dig yourself, chill. It could all take a while.

At least I enjoy sleeping.

Dear Finder of Fact

Evidently there is someone out there who is appointed to judge which blogs are living, breathing organisms, which ones are merely moribund, and which ones are actually dead. Perhaps it’s a group, it’s a big job after all. Maybe they have a bunker somewhere. Indiana, maybe.

My advice is, get out more, meet some people. Your web time has convinced you that your opinion means something. It doesn’t. This is a blog, and blogs can have only one subject: The Blogger. If there were any other subject it would be a web site. Web sites have value; blogs do not. They are not worth the paper they are printed on. They are the most disposable and ephemeral of all entertainments, down the list with limericks and thirty-year-old TV Guides.

So get over it.

Mr. Fred, Oh! The Lucky One

I always feel like I've been lucky, consistantly lucky over the years. Two unlikely things that I have wished for have actually come true.

I used to ride my bike past Pepperdine in Malibu once a week on my way to risking my life in the canyons. It was so beautiful. I had one in a seemingly endless series of shit jobs at the time, and I thought, wouldn't it be great to have a few years to do nothing but study here? Five years later I got into the law school, and it was as great a three years as I had thought.

In Thailand, Bangkok, my favorite hotel is the Suwan Dusit Palace, or Place, it calls itself either one seemingly without pattern. It's on the campus of Ratchapat University and it is run by students of their hospitality industry programs, so it's great and cheap. Walking on the campus I always thought, wouldn't it be great to teach at a Thai university, all these fabulous co-eds in the tight black skirts and white blouses. So now I teach at Ramkhamhaeng and I can tell you, the co-eds are breathtaking.

Oh, and I was lucky in my marriage too.

My City

Remember that slogan for New York? "My city can kick your city's ass."

Well, speaking from Bangkok, I'm pretty sure that my new city could stomp your city's ass flat.

Joseph Tanaka, August 15, 1948 to August 27, 1948

Comments on “The Dash” reminded me of Joe Tanaka.

Joe has been a good friend to me since I was very young. He’s buried across the way and facing the grave of my maternal grandfather, now grandmother too. The Catholic cemetery on Kissena Boulevard in Flushing, across from the golf course. I was born on August 16, 1948 myself, so Joe’s gravestone always had great resonance for me.

It’s horrible when that stuff happens, that two weeks to live stuff. In the Seventies I worked with a girl about my age, twenty seven or eight at the time, in Los Angeles. She’d had it tough: at home there’d been abuse, physical, emotional and sexual; she ran away at fourteen and within two years she was working in a bar and married to the abusive fifty plus year old bartender. She’d been clear of that marriage for a couple of years and had just married a really nice guy her age. She was a great kid, still cheerful, kind of cute. We were really happy for her, we all knew her story, she wasn’t shy about telling it. She got pregnant, and there were no problems, perfectly normal birth, “you have a son!”

The next day the doc’s came in and told her some bad news. The baby had a genetic problem with his skin, it was brittle. Every little movement drew blood. The kid would die almost immediately. He lasted about a week, one terribly painful, bloody week. Talk about being crushed, the young mom’s eyes were permanently widened after that, her voice a little hysterical, she’d gone a little crazy. We lost track of her.

I don’t know Joe’s story, but it was a short one. He’d have turned sixty next month, like me, if he’d lived.

There but for fortune, my babies, join me in a silent prayer for the lucky, the living. So, in heaven, is Joe still an infant or does one in his situation become the heavenly representation of the man he might have become?

Et in Arcadia, Ego

I’ve been to lots of Thai funerals. The chanting, the snacks, the muted good cheer. Today I went to one where the dead guy was a friend of mine. It was a first.

I liked this guy. He was more fun than a barrel of monkeys, and he spoke pretty good English, he might have been homosexual, whatever, for some reason he enjoyed my company, and I certainly enjoyed his. Check out the picture that accompanies this post. That’s less than a month ago, the whole Law staff, along with some faculty, had a big party weekend in Pattaya, he was one of the “Masters of Ceremony” kind of guys. He also was my Xerox connection when I needed handouts for my classes. I saw him all the time. He was very sociable. Well now he’s dead.

And it only happened yesterday. He was working, nothing unusual, until four o’clock or so, when he told his secretary that he was very tired and that he was going to lay down on the couch for a while. She thought nothing of it until ten minutes went by and she heard the death-rattle. By the time she’d crossed the floor to the couch he’d turned green, stone dead.

He was about fifty-three. Heart attack, most likely, there’s no autopsies here, could have been a cerebral hemorrhage, maybe an aneurism. I’m no doctor.

I’ve been to lots of Thai funerals, but this is the first time I’ve seen the peculiar custom of “watering” the body. He was set out on a table with his face exposed, covered by a red cloth up to his chest; he was dressed but you could see the stitches roughly closing the gutting-gash up past his adam’s-apple. His left hand was extended over a large ceremonial vessel. His wrist was wrapped in the typical Thai flower wreaths. Hundreds of people lined up, kneel-walking the last ten feet to the body, were given a small ceremonial cup with water and flower petals, and poured the water over his bare hand. Some country boys actually clasped the hand as they poured. I took my turn and I must say, it’s an affecting way to say goodbye.

Sunday I’ll go to the burning of the body, I’ve never been to one of those either. Funerals are much more serious affairs when you actually liked the loved one.