Tav Falco's Panther Burns - She's a Bad Motorcycle

I guess that Tav Falco is still pretty obscure, that's if hit counts mean anything. I've liked the guy since I first heard him. That was on a used compilation CD of Psychobilly that I picked up cheap twenty-five years ago. My! Where has the time gone?

It's not a Psychobilly act, not really. What all of the songs have in common is their unrelenting oddity, their unfailing commitment to a lack of commercial potential. That and enthusiasm, and there's a certain sincerity to it. Tav is still doing it, last time I checked, and neither of us are kids anymore. It must, therefore, be for love, and there's fun in it. I value those things.

The Knack - My Sharona live

Interesting live version, probably live. Is it just me, or are the words and the intent of this song easier to understand in this presentation than in the original record? Right here it sounds like a real #Me Too moment. Did he just say, ". . . always get it up for the touch of the younger kind?" Why, I think that he did just say that. 

Nothing at all to do with depression, except that Sharona does have three syllables. 

My Depression (Sung To The Tune Of "My Sharona")

When a depressed celebrity commits suicide, there is always an uptick in society’s compassion for people who suffer from that condition. It never lasts very long. Those are valuable teachable moments, but the lesson never seems to sink in. The proof of this is that the level of people’s patience with individual sufferers never experiences a sustained rise in volume. Parents continue to lose patience with depressed children; people continue to lose patience with depressed co-workers and friends; spouses lose patience with their depressed spouses. This is due, I believe, to the mysterious nature of depression. It cannot be measured objectively. There cannot be any clear, observable evidence, nothing, that is, comparable to an x-ray that displays a broken bone. Depression is invisible.

The Condition

A broken bone must be a relief for the treating doctor, in a way. Finally, a patient with an obvious medical problem that calls for a clearly defined course of treatment that works in the majority of cases. Doctors don’t always get that kind of clarity, because many of their patients present with maladies that are not immediately obvious. More often than not, however, there are some tests that will assist the doctor. Laboratory tests, or various mechanical imaging tests, which, taken together, can point the doctor to a narrow range of possibilities. With depression, there is no such assistance available. The patient presents with a wide range of more or less ambiguous symptoms that the patient feels, but either cannot or will not express. And that’s if the patient presents at all! Why bother? If you have a broken arm, you go to the doctor, but if you are depressed, you most often just try to shut up about it.

That’s the doctors. Honestly, they are of little assistance when it comes to the treatment of depression, even in the most treatable cases. Those would be the cases of “situational depression,” a condition that arises as a result of a sudden, shocking event, often a terrible loss, like the death of a parent or spouse. Note that, even in those cases, the sufferer may not recover any quicker from the condition because of the treatment; the condition will probably resolve just as fast if no doctor’s care is sought or given. In more serious cases, the depression is the result of events or situations that are lodged deep in the sufferer’s past, things that were serious enough to alter the sufferer’s physical and emotional development. The symptomology may ebb and flow, but the condition remains almost constant over the entire life of such a sufferer. The doctors call this “major depression,” or “clinical depression.” In such cases, there is not much that the doctors can do.

The Treatment

There are two main treatments that they try, or maybe three. One, they reach for their prescription pads and offer the patient anti-depressant drugs. These, in the experience of many sufferers, will have a beneficial effect for between three and five or so years. After that the brain’s chemistry will have adapted itself to the presence of the drugs and returned to the original imbalance. The drugs are seen as a management tool, not a cure. When the worst symptoms return, and they will, the doctor will respond by trying different medications or combinations of medications. It is, finally, a pointless and expensive enterprise, suitable only for bringing a patient back from the brink of committing suicide. 

The second popular treatment is “cognitive therapy.” This is where a highly trained counselor, who is probably not a medical doctor, will guide the sufferer in a process of holding a mirror up to their condition, in the hope that by examining it they might come to understand themselves and make the depression more manageable. The sufferer may, it is hoped, achieve some measure of control over his condition. This is, in my experience, the treatment that offers the greatest life-line to the sufferer. Note that it begins with an admission of failure: the attempt will be to make the condition more manageable. In that limited assistance, however, it can be very successful in making life a little easier for the sufferer to tolerate. In the absence of miracles, we must thank God for small favors.

There is no known cure.

The possible third treatment that I alluded to earlier is psychotherapy, the “talking cure,” first suggested by Dr. Sigmund Freud. This is an attempted “cure” administered by medical doctors who receive extensive post-doctoral training in psychotherapy. The goal is to guide the sufferer through a process of remembering and understanding the life-events that gave rise to a particular “neurosis.” In practice, the psychiatrist sits almost silently in the room while the sufferer talks about whatever subject presents itself. The doctor nods his head, grunts meaningfully, and makes notes, occasionally directing the patient to go into more detail. The idea is to cause a breakthrough, or something of the kind. In my experience, and in my opinion, it is a colossal waste of time, and a great expense, with no hope of success.

The Symptoms

Here is where things get difficult for the family and friends of a depression sufferer. People who are not depressed seem incapable of understanding what the sufferer is feeling, or why they feel like that, or why they cannot simply recognize the problem and deal with it. They wonder how someone can go on, year after years, and finally decade after decade, without simply “getting over it.” The sufferer hears the same things over and over again. “That’s all in the past!” Or, “just forget about it!” With a lot of, “why are you so negative all the time?” It is also very likely that those with the condition have been affected in their performance of life’s duties. The depression has caused them to underachieve in general, or in their working life in particular. Those around the sufferer are likely to focus on and criticize them for self-medicating, or employing avoidance mechanisms. There is more exacerbation than assistance in this behavior.

But the symptoms, what is it exactly that the depressed individual is feeling on a moment to moment basis? What are the feelings that the family member cannot understand, having never felt anything like that themselves? Allow me to try to be useful.

I am depressed, and mightily so. “How depressed is he, Johnny?” The only effective counsellor that I have ever had asked me in an early session, “how long have you been feeling like this?” I was fifty-years-old at the time. I considered my answer, and said, “since I was about four-years-old.” She laughed out loud, thinking briefly that I was kidding. Immediately seeing that I was not kidding, she regained her composure and asked me if anything in particular had happened at that time. “My sister was born.” After that, I explained, my mother became unpredictable and was more violent with me. After that, my mother, never a warm individual, was never loving or nurturing to me. After that, my life was a constant round of fear and anxiety, with frequent screaming and beatings. My sister, God bless her, is a wonderful woman and completely blameless in all of this, and, luckily, she was not subjected to the same kind of behavior that my mother exhibited regarding me. I, on the other hand, was doom-struck, and I have remained fearful and anxious ever since.

Disclaimer: I am well aware that the world is full to overflow with people who have had it much worse than me in life. Furthermore, I’ve been very lucky in general, and my experience of life has been better than could have been expected. I am not here to complain; I seek only to clarify depression for the reader, partly through an examination of my own experience.

So, symptoms. Rather than go over an endless list of feelings over the course of so many years, I will concentrate on the year between May, 2016, and May, 2017, with a nod to the previous eight years. It was a difficult time throughout. In that time, I had experienced expulsion and exclusion from my marriage and my home, gradually becoming alienated from my children’s affections as well. My marriage ended in divorce in December, 2014. In 2015, I gave away almost all of my possessions, which had been unceremoniously thrown into a storage unit by my family. They had sold my car, without telling me, before the divorce was filed. My oldest son kept my records. Other things remained at the house, or failed to find their way to the storage unit. At $120 per month, long-term storage was an unsustainable expense for me, so I tried to find good homes for things, donated what was appropriate to a favorite charity’s thrift-store, allowed a few friends to take what they wanted, and just said goodbye to the rest. I was not offered any chachkas or family pictures, and I was afraid to ask for anything. 

TO BE CONTINUED

Tiramisu Oreo Thins

These are an issue of first impression for me. I found them in my local Family Mart. (A nice chain of convenience stores in Thailand. Local company. Business model and appearance identical to 7-11.) I haven’t tasted them yet. Perhaps I should leave a comment after I’ve tasted them.

I almost never buy cookies, or donuts, or cake. Nobody has to buy them, actually, because they are thrust upon one so frequently in daily life. There’s always somebody handing you a piece of a birthday cake, or a wedding cake, or there’s a holiday or something, or you show up somewhere and there’s a box of donuts, girl scouts are selling their own cookies this month. My sugary vice of choice is ice cream, and it would be wrong if I were to buy any sweets beyond that. Well, maybe the odd piece of chocolate.

Part of the reason that I purchased a box was that I liked the packaging. Isn’t it attractive?  I paid about a dollar for this box, and it was worth it just for the two photographs of the package.

Can you get these in America? Oreo Thins, and Tiramisu, yet. These are “Product of China,” “Manufactured Under License” from the Mondelez International Corporation in the Philippines. The product and allergen information is given in Thai and in English, and there are addresses for distributors in Singapore, Hong Kong, Brunei, Malaysia, and the Philippines. All of that is printed right on the box; there are no stickers covering different information. There is no mention of Nabisco, or any other remotely American sounding entity.

What a wonderfully international new product! And slightly mysterious, too. Is it an ongoing case of trademark infringement? Because I’m pretty sure that the rights to a cookie named “Oreos” are firmly in hand somewhere in the United States. This is Asia, however, and trademark and copyright can be nebulous things over here. Some days I think that I should open a hamburger restaurant called, “MacDonald’s.” Excuse me while I go to the Seven-Elephants store on the corner to buy some milk to go with my Oreo Thins. 

#MeToo? We All Knew

The recent wave of women accusing powerful men of sexual misconduct is a welcome, if tardy, airing of grievances that have been common occurrences, and awful, for a long time. As usual, some people wish to use the movement for mischief. 

The new tempest in a teaspoon from the Red Team is (alert the media):

MERYL STREEP KNEW ABOUT HARVEY WEINSTEIN’S BEHAVIOR!!!

The trumped-up scandal is that Meryl Streep supposedly knew all along that Harvey was doing terrible things to women, and she kept her mouth shut about it while making many movies for Harvey and his companies. When asked about it, she actually said that she’d heard rumors, but she had no real information. But really, goes the innuendo, she knew! Or perhaps it was what we in the law call, “constructive knowledge.” That’s what happens when someone either knew something, or they should have known it. Either way, Meryl is accused of being complicit!  (That’s one of our big new words this year. Trump’s administration is full of it.) Accused by the right-wing meme machine.  

I don’t know who got the ball rolling on this earth-shattering revelation, but a guy named Sabo, that’s what I’m told, spread the word with posters showing Ms. Streep and Mr. Weinstein smiling in better moments, with Ms. Streep’s eyes covered by a bar that says, “She Knew.” The Sabo guy is described as a “right-wing guerrilla artist.”  

For anyone who has been living outside the range of American media for the last couple of years, Harvey has been accused by numerous women of being sexually inappropriate with them, a euphemism that seems to cover anything from making awkward passes, or letting your hand slip down to the woman’s ass when posing for group pictures, to forcible rape, in the worst meanings of the words force, and rape. To hear it told, Harvey has been guilty of this behavior over the entire range, from the almost okay to the actually criminal, for most of his career.

People are shocked! Shocked, I say!!!

This has spread far and wide to become a thing called the “hashtag ME TOO” movement. (#MeToo) And, you know what? I believe the women making the accusations. In most cases by far, I believe the women. And in most cases, I don’t think that the women are exaggerating at all, not one little bit. It’s terrible, and it has been a problem for, well, forever. Almost any woman that you meet could tell you a story about one or more incidents in which a man or men did something sexual and unwanted, showed them something, or touched them somewhere upsetting. Most women have multiple stories to tell.

It is great that this age old societal shortcoming is being brought into the light and discussed in the open. It’s great that many of the victimized women now feel empowered to give voice to their experience in an attempt to both educate the public and to see the guilty receive some punishment, or get fired, or at least get a good razzing.

The Problem

By now a long laundry list of big names has been accused of a huge variety of acts against women, described variously as “abuse,” or “harassment,” or “assault.” The big names are, so far, all men. Some are accused of actual, on-the-books violent crimes, like rape. Other accusations are often merely gross, or weird; some are disagreeable enough to make a sensible person wonder why on earth anyone would do such a thing, like into a potted plant, for instance.

For some of the accused, our reaction is one of recognition: oh, I can totally imagine him doing that stuff. But other men accused by the #MeToo gang do not seem like good candidates for the position. Like Garrison Keilor, for example. Who’d have thunk it? Al Franken, “Giant of the Senate,” got caught up in it as well. First he was ambushed by a former colleague with a photo that was an obvious set-up, and then a few other women accused him of low-level wandering-handery.  Also among the accused by now is (exclamation point!) ex. President George H.W. Bush! Which is not as strange as it sounds, actually. His name has been raised in this context since before he was elected president, both in Hollywood and in Washington. 

Shocking! Just so terribly shocking!

It’s not only women making these accusations, either. This new rush of alarming news bulletins includes allegations that certain powerful men, or they might just be actors, are actually gay, and they’ve been inflicting unwanted or otherwise objectionable sexual demands on boys over the years. That this receives so much less attention than the accusations of women betrays a deep prejudice in society that men are victimizers, and women are victims.  Not to mention the prejudice that all gay men are Cha-Cha Queens who can’t get enough anyway, so “so what?”

I do not believe that any men have as yet come forward to accuse powerful women of abusing them or making unwanted sexual demands. Hollywood is now full of powerful women, and we may be certain that this happens. Many of these modern women executives are just as power-mad as their male counterparts, and just as liable to seek to inflict their power on subordinates.

The responses of the accused men have been interesting. They vary from mild to wild, from insincere apologies to voluntary abandonment of a senate career. There have been guys who ran for cover after a brief public statement, and guys who dragged out the old “sex addict” excuse. And a lot of “deny,” of course.

But stick to the topic, Fred! Meryl Streep! Her response should be a resounding, “fuck off!” Like any of this was her fault! The idea is ridiculous.

We All Knew

Most of this stuff is alleged to have happened in the movie business, so let’s consider the day to day reality in Hollywood for a moment.

All of this stuff in the recent allegations is true, and an awful lot more besides. It’s true as a phenomenon, even if any small number of accusations in the current tidal wave happen to be less than true. And it’s all true in ways and for reasons that add up to a much bigger problem than is supposedly being grappled with already. For every woman who has come forward, there are thousands of women through history who did not or have not. They have their reasons, and we should respect them.

Not only everybody who has ever worked in the movie business (or TV), but also everybody who has ever lived in Los Angeles, knows all about it. If you live in Los Angeles, you know plenty of people who are in the picture business, or the entertainment business. They live in your neighborhood; you play golf with them; you borrow tools from them; you provide services of all kinds to them; you see them while shopping; you meet them at parties. What’s more, you do all of those things with lots of people who work AROUND the picture business. People who work for catering companies; people who park cars; people who remodel kitchens. You get the idea. And you hear stories, oh, do you hear stories.

Of course, we all feel bad for famous women who are degraded by creeps, creeps who are often older and/or ugly. Creeps who smoke cigars while the girls service them, “just pull the zipper down, honey, pardon me if I take this call while you work.” They don’t want sex like a normal person, they want to exercise their power over others and prove what big men they are. There’s a lot of pay to play in Hollywood, we all know it. We’ve all known it forever! The casting couch! There’s a term for it! The actresses don’t like it, but they have put up with it. For their own reasons, who are we to criticize?

The casting couch is usually for the newer actresses looking to get into bigger roles, although the most powerful studio executives seem to be fond of degrading even very successful actresses, just to prove that they can.  The circle of our concern, however, must be much wider than women who are already in the movie business.

This next bit is, for me, the most awful.

Women come to Hollywood every day in the desperate hope that they can become successful movie actresses. They bring themselves, a few articles of clothes, and that’s it. All they know is that they’ve always been the best-looking woman around, around their town in Nebraska, around their high school, around the mall where they worked. Hollywood, here they come! They have to get some little job, waitressing or something, and they start to look around trying to meet people. It’s easy for beautiful women to get invited to parties, and that’s where the girls really go to work. And at most of these parties, the movie industry people in attendance are not producers, they’re not agents, they’re not big shots at all. They’re sound guys, and grips, and lighting assistants. They’re in the business, though, they are actually making pictures. And they know people! A lot of the guys take advantage of the naiveté of the wannabe actresses, and that’s not nice. The sex, though, is very likely to be consensual. A lot of those country girls will cheerfully fuck the eyes out of a sound tech just to get invited to better parties where they might actually meet somebody who could help them. And so forth.

The girls hang around town for a couple of years, get passed around, get a drug habit, maybe go on an expensive vacation with an assistant producer, and try to smile and cajole and fuck their way up the power ladder. In the meantime, they might make a commercial or something, or do walk-ons as extras, but that’s usually all it comes to. They never get an agent, never speak a line, and they never come close to any quality work. It’s a hard business to break into, intentionally so. After a couple of years, all they’ve got to show for their time are an extra suitcase, some new worry lines, and one or two sexually transmitted diseases (Chlamydia, HPV, and herpes seem to be endemic). The system has abused them, their cooperation notwithstanding. The power imbalance alone makes all of the sexual transactions awful. It wouldn’t matter if the girl initiated the interaction.

This is the real tragedy of sexual misadventure in the movie business, and in the larger culture in general. Women gravitate to powerful men, hoping to gain some advantage. Men are only too willing to take advantage of them. It’s true not only in the entertainment business, but also for politicians, professional athletes, and musicians.

Conclusion

So, let’s leave poor Meryl Streep out of this. She had no duty of care to try to clean up the entire dirty system single-handed. And let’s support the #MeToo movement, because it’s tough for girls out there, in any business, and in any situation. And let’s shame some of these guys right out of whatever business they are in, let’s banish them outside the city walls. Not just the real criminals, like the roofie artists, and the violent rapists, either. You know their names, the famous ones. They, of course, should be prosecuted to the full extent of the law and sent to prison. The men who are abusing their power in order to take advantage of women in situations that do not rise to using force or drugging women, well, when they are identified, they should be banished, or shunned. They should pay a price. They should be sued, if possible, and I would hope that my brothers and sisters in the law would assist the women in this process. They should at least suffer the loss of our respect in toto and the loss of most or all of their careers.

What about the things that are going on that are just weird and disgusting? You know what I’m talking about, things that are not about sex and not about power either, they seem to be about successful men embarrassing themselves or sabotaging their own careers and relationships. Yeah, let’s banish them, even though it seems to be what they want. They had a good career, some of them, and they blew it. If I were doing things in front of women that are too indelicate for me to discuss right now on a silly little blog, I’d expect to be banished and I’d probably welcome it.

About the men whose transgressions fell short of even a solid grope, maybe we could see our way clear to call them on the behavior while allowing them to continue supporting their families. This isn’t the Spanish Inquisition. One famous man got in trouble recently for suggesting something like this, some degree of mercy for the lesser offenders. That did not go well for him. But really, there are babies, and there’s bathwater, and it never makes sense to send it all down the plug-hole together. All generalizations are wrong (including this one).

Finally, as the power imbalances in our society grow more spectacularly unequal week by week, we should try to show more compassion for everyone who gets stuck with the short end of the stick, in every power transaction, every day. That includes most of us by now, so what I am asking for is that we try to be nicer to each other. As divisions in our society grow deeper and begin to border on violence, we must all take a moment sometimes to notice the terrible changes that we are living through. I have friends, and FaceBook friends, and family members, with whom I do not agree on political matters, etc. 

Nevertheless, I love them, and I try to make that obvious even when we are in the middle of a disagreement. We all find ourselves adrift on a sea of negativity, and my dearest hope is that some of us might even decide to go in a different direction. Make these decisions yourself, don’t listen to people on TV or at church. I trust you more than I trust them. I can guarantee you that love is possible. This current climate of hate is not irresistible; it does not represent an inescapable future.

My main rule-of-thumb in life is that if I can do a certain thing, anybody can do it. This is why I still trust people. You can jump off the hate bandwagon. My confidence level is high.  

The Two Minute Hate: Pat Boone - Tutti Frutti

Most disrespectful, least successful cover version of all time. The overtly threatening black man has been deleted, and the “suggestive” lyrics have been changed. All of the fun, and the entire musical idea, have been bleached out of the wonderful original. (Appalling video, 1957.)  

For the past week it had been killing me. What was that guy’s name? The face floated in front of me, nameless. This is a very famous guy I’m talking about, he sold a lot of records back in the 1950s and ‘60s, he was in movies, he was a romantic lead! He was a star! What was his name again?

I got off on this jag by thinking about Little Richard in connection with Jimi Hendrix. It happened by accident. I do listen to Richard on occasion, but this time around I was watching a video of the song “Shotgun,” by Stacey and somebody, was it Percy? I’ll check and get back to you. I was trying to figure out how Stacy and somebody had such a great band. I checked, and it turned out to be Little Richard’s band. So, Richard, covers, “Tutti Frutti,” and who was that white guy who cut the ridiculous cover version? Dead end.

I almost gave up trying to remember, and I was happy at the prospect, to be honest. I clearly remembered that I have always hated the guy. Later in life he had become particularly obnoxious, wearing dog-collar outfits and mocking all that is righteous about modern culture, some kind of big-time Christian washed up pop star slash amateur social scientist and “values” style leader. Today I succumb to the temptation to ask Professor Google.

“tutti frutti white cover version” led me right to Pat Boone, where I made the mistake of visiting his incredibly self-aggrandizing web site.

“Singer, actor, TV host, producer, songwriter, author, motivational speaker, TV pitchman, radio personality, record company head, TV station owner, sports team owner, family man, humanitarian, a man unafraid to air his views.”

That’s a cut and paste, so don’t blame me for turning it into a list masquerading as a sentence.

As this thick, smarmy fog swished around my ankles, I immediately regretted losing the opportunity to forget about Pat Boone, possibly forever.

That’s it; I’m done; no more effort from me; the object of today’s Two Minute Hate is Pat Boone. Mike drop. 

My Thai Neighborhood

It is usually the case in America that land values and zoning regulations insure a unitary demographic for most neighborhoods. They may be mostly single occupancy, middle-income houses, or exclusively single occupancy, big-ticket houses, or mixed multiple occupancy dwellings with some focused stretches of commercial use buildings. There’s some planning going on, for better or worse. It’s not like that everywhere.

These photographs were taken out a fourth-floor window of my hospital, which is very close to the university where I teach and close at hand to the neighborhood where my condo is located. Near the bottom, you can see the old-style Thai housing built along a small drainage canal adjacent to the hospital. This, as is usually the case, is low income housing occupied by long term families of tenants or owners. Moving up the frame, to the right of center, you can see a development of attached, single family residences. These are very vertical, three stories at least, and they are probably fairly expensive. In dollars? Let’s say $200,000 (six million baht).  

The large building complex in the background is a Chinese owned development consisting of a large, expensive hotel in one building, with two equally large buildings behind it that are devoted to condos. Most of the condos are larger than usual for the area, and they are expensive. For 140 square meters, figure between $200,000 and $250,000.  

In the lower picture, you can see the continuation of the canal houses. Immediately behind these there is a sports facility with a rain cover, a common accoutrement in Thailand, which is in the tropics, after all. At photo left is a newish condo building where you could pick up a small condo (30 square meters) for $40,000 or so (one point four million baht).

In the background of the bottom picture, just right of center, is a large group of three condo buildings. These are built in a transportation dead spot; living there would be inconvenient without a car of your own. They were built by the government and are available to be purchased by Thai citizens at reduced prices. I know a woman who lives there, and she says that her condo is spacious, and the whole place is fine, but then again, she has a car.

The next large building to the right is another condo complex. This one is two large buildings containing about seven hundred condos all together. It’s very nice, with a big pool and modern exercise facilities, and a very good management company. I lived there for seven years in a small condo that I rented (30 square meters; $300 rent). You can still buy those small condos for about $45,000. Those buildings are right on the main road, so transportation is very easy. Lots of taxis right out front, and multiple bus lines with a stop on the next corner, one short block away. Pretty soon there’ll be a subway running out front. “Pretty soon,” that’s almost a joke. They have broken ground for the terminal station less than a quarter of a mile to the east, so the project has officially begun, but you learn early on that in Thailand, “soon,” and “now,” do not mean what we are accustomed to them meaning in the U.S. We’ll see how it goes. I’ll probably live to see it.

In between all of this visible housing stock, there are single and multiple family dwellings ranging from very simple and cheap to individual homes costing up to three-quarters of a million dollars. That’s DOLLARS. Plus, a wide variety of industrial properties. And everything is shoulder to shoulder at all price points. There are expensive properties that are very close to noisy industrial properties. It does not appear to me that there are any urban plans, or any building codes, or property-use regulations, to prevent the owner from doing just about any damn thing that she wants to do with her property. This is the “Land of the Free,” that is the literal meaning of Thailand (in Thai, Brataet Thai, the “Land of the Free”). Furthermore, if you own a house or a condo, there is nothing to stop you from using it for commercial purposes. By all means, locate your dentist office in your house, or run your small company out of your condo. Or sell food in the evenings from a table in front of your house, for that matter. Thailand has a degree of economic freedom that seems amazing to Americans.

I have been lucky enough to find the entire situation charming from the beginning. My attitude is always that I am here as a guest, and I did not come to Thailand to criticize their ways or to offer suggestions. Whatever Thai people decide to do with their country is fine with me.

I rather like my neighborhood the way that it is. I own a nice condo by now, and I’ll be fine living here for the long haul.