funny how things work

Back up a year and change: the English department has three distinct divisions: MA, MFA, and TESL. I am an MFA, a writer, a creative type prone to moodiness, brooding, excess and privation, and I resent the Mas, the academics enroute to further academics who analyze my work and tell me what I'm saying. And TESL people are in a different world entirely—they study linguistics, phonics, and use alternative languages even when speaking English.

As a lifelong academic, I respect the Mas for their literary endeavors, but I am perfectly content allowing the TESL folks to remain in a different world, which has about as much appeal for me as a textile factory: sure, it'd be interesting to see to satisfy the curiosity of how it's done, but even if it threw its full weight into desire, I probably wouldn't be motivated beyond buying a book that would sit on a shelf.

Heh.

And now I've crash landed in a place without libraries or bookstores, half a planet away from the bars and cafes where the best ideas and exchanges took place, smack dab in the armpit of TEFL land. Love how that works.

A long post on living

Here's the problem: I am replacing a guy who went batty, put a kid in a headlock, and threatened to punch another student. During class. He was a replacement for a dearly loved teacher who, a few weeks into class, was pulled teaching high school in the Regular Program into the English Program to teach 1^st grade. And the list continues back. When the English Program has someone who can't hack it, they get jettisoned to the Regular Program (go me). When the English Program needs someone, they pull from the Regular Program. When the Regular Program has a gerat teacher, that person gets plugged into the English Program at the first opportunity. It's the simple reality that the English Program draws top kids with top parents while the Regular Program is a lower/last option for students who couldn't test into one of the good secondary schools.

Which doesn't change that the RP director is tired of getting dumped on. In fact, especially after my predecessor's debacle, he's ready to make a show to protest the idea that his program is the EP's loo.

Here comes me. With a long paper trail of baggage.

I've been living in a hotel downtown, where I have an upper-level room with aircon and wireless for a semi-reasonable amount. Not sustainable, but it'll work until I have a sense of whether I'll be sticking around.

It's made for a mentally busy week.

If my life here is so temporary, why? What would make it at least less temporary, if not more permanent? What am I after here? If I'm not finding it, what would I want?

In fact, what DO I want? Here, there, anywhere?

After trying a century egg, I can say with great certainty that I do not want green eggs and ham.

Interlude: in Malaysia, I found food I would not eat. Imagine an egg made of purplish jello, a little bit darker than blue glass from the desert, with a greenish-black yolk. These are century eggs. For the first time in this hemisphere, I found something I just couldn't bring myself to try.

But then I ended up in a very backwater, very traditional Thai place. There was a table made of bamboo poles and slats with steam trays that had not seen much heat or sanitation in a great long while, and a lady who scooped a paddle of rice onto a plate and waited while I picked out the two least... explosive looking dishes.

What can I say? I was really hungry and tucked in with the hope that blind enthusiasm would keep me going long enough that the food would either become tasty or get down far enough that I could make it outside before a return trip.

Well, one of the dishes had century eggs.

They were as palatable to the palate as to the mind.

And this is coming from the guy who now likes fish sauce and is fine with the thought of leeching juices out of mouldering anchovies, collecting it in a container, and pouring the odiferous contents on food I'm about to eat.

So I'm in a hotel to avoid making a deposit and paying for a month up front if I'm not going to be employed that long. Which is to say, I know this town is not home: if I didn't have a job, I wouldn't stay. It would be a great place to bring people, but it has the same issues as Moscow: you can get to anything you want—whitesand beaches, waterfalls, a national park, scuba diving, crazy partying, two major universities—but it'll take a couple of hours. And while I do want to learn the culture, and culture in this area is relatively unadulterated, it takes more language skills than I have to get into. And there just aren't enough literati around here to bring many traditional performances or other stereotypically cultural experiences.

Which gets to the point of what exactly I am after. That's surprisingly difficult to answer.

When was the last time someone said, “What do you want from life?”

What brought me here was one lifetime goal: to live abroad. Now that I'm here, what next?

Funny enough, meditating helped a great deal. Has been helping for a goodly while. And to jump ahead, one of the things I definitely want is to learn about Buddhism and meditation while in this Buddhist country. Also Thai massage, and any other sort of non-western medicine.

But once I got my head into it and out of the confetti clouds of distraction, I realized I've had the opportunity to see past many of the assumptions and mindless conveniences that help me put myself in a place to live a full, rich, rewarding life.

Image: toppling the scooter while a group of students watched my face readjust itself on a hose faucet, and thenceforward having a helpful Thai person, either much older or much younger than I am, prevent me from the chance of injury while parking my bike at night, walking it to the road in the morning, or starting it at any time whatsoever.

Image: splayed flat on my back with my swollen legs, speckled with sores burned in by the soothing balms I'd tried to use, stretched up onto a wall, trying to get the energy to walk up a flight of stairs for a clean set of clothes.

Image: the blood drips on the counter as I bought Tylenol, rubbing alcohol, gauze, and rotgut at the muban store while the freshly-toppled scooter idled outside because my body—still in shock—wasn't going to be starting it.

Image: two mornings later realizing that sleeping in one position in a coma of pain and contraindicated pain treatments had sunk bruises into my back.

Image: my boss picking me up from the hospital and saying, in the same voice he said, “Don't take this the wrong way, it's not that you're a bad teacher...” “Just stay on your feet!”

Or the next week catching eriatric train of thought spinning through my head: I had quite a fall, and I need to be careful lest I take another.

Image: checking the mirror and realizing that the pants I bought to look sharp for interviews after the Italy trip, an investment in a temporary professional costume for an overly-skinny state, will now fall off unless I cinch in a fistful of waistline.

Image: threading my belt, which used to be a little too long, through all the belt loops, and then, to cinch my pants far enough to keep them up, threading the tail of my belt through half the loops again.

Image: bleeding on the pavement—again—while parents watched an ambulance arrive, load me onto a stretcher, and cart me to the hospital.

There are a couple of funny things here. It's funny how the list of wants has changed since I made the move to that first lifetime goal of living abroad. And it's funny that it was still tough to get through the flak to figure out what I'm after.

But here's what I can say I want:

To stop hurting. Not necessarily to feel good, but I want a break from feeling sore. From aches and pains, bones and guts grinding, the absurdity of being cold when the temperature drops below 75. To be able to run, not to have to plot my day based on how few stairs I need to climb.

Really—this is me. A couple years ago, my morning run started at 6,000 feet, ended two miles later at 9,000, and took under ten minutes on the return. And now I'm worried about climbing two flights of stairs.

I want to be able to exist in peace. I am a very busy and driven person. I am fidgety and antsy in body and mind, and over the past number of years, I have so loaded myself with such distraction that I am no longer content not having anything to do. Meditation helps, but even that is an occupation: directed avoidance of doing something, or consciously embracing doing nothing.

I want to feel a sense of competence. Not excellence, but capabilities such that I do not cringe when I see a higher up walking toward me or my boss's number on an incoming call/text.

And before I leave the country, I'd like to learn about Buddhism from Buddhists.

Later, I'll worry about things like personal enrichment, debt, friends, love, experiences, objects. None of them mean anything when I can't be present for them without wallowing in discomfort and distraction. So for now, there's my bucket list:

-no more hurting

-no more worrying

-and while I am where I am, more pursuit of nothingness

Who would've thought it'd take a week of purgatory after a summer of hell to figure that out?

Which comes back to the job: what's it worth?

In American terms, not enough to keep the minimum monthly payments from bottoming me out, despite setting aside a third of my salary for what amount to pitiable expenses, in dollar terms. (Image: making a booking on the idea, “this will only cost X dollars!” and paying half of my eating/living budget. Sound byte: American voice says, “That only costs fifty bucks?” Me: “Which is to say, three days of my top-tier salary or enough to feed a traditional Thai family of four for a week.”)

How much do I want to stay here now that I've lost my original position, would not have applied had I known the internal expectations and culture, and have had my wages garnished based on my master's being in music and me being an English teacher (evidently, the terminal degree in writing does not count as English). Yeah, I left that bit out, because I just don't want to go there right now.

“When the director told me he was cutting your salary,” my boss said, “I told him that someone with your resume could get a job anywhere and would be especially hard to keep after a salary cut.”

What's the job worth?

Ease.

Yes, it will kick my ass. The RP will steamroll my skinny ass, but at least I know the town. And it's cheap and relatively easy. In this area, as in the rest of Thailand, white skin might be synonymous with cash cow, but at least the culture isn't quite as bent to exploiting farangs as it is in more developed points up north. My Reiki teacher is an hourish north, with Buddhadasa Bhikku's Suan Mokkh an hour beyond that.

Question: now that I know how much the shit stinks here, how much is it worth to avoid having to go kicking around another pasture?

It's a reminder to consider my wants/goals: it really doesn't matter where I am, provided it is a generally safe environment. Having my wages cut is utter bull, especially on such a blatantly false premise, but does it stink more than it sucks to move? Is the idea of a wage cut, even a minor one, more odious than the idea of a traion trip with my tuba and duffels? Assuming it is, is it worth learning to negotiate another academic ladder rather than protest up this one?

Here's where the other things come in. I have no desire to move. Maybe, once I am strong and sound enough to have grown bored with this town, relocating will become a priority. And once it does, all those things I love, the things I would've listed as lifetime wants and needs—mountains, trails, wilds, birdsong and the sound of wind blowing through vegetation; the sanctity and sanctuary of a world greater than me, the grandeur of comparative permanence in a constantly changing environment as remarkable as I care to notice—once I am hale and healthy enough to experience the world outside without the distraction of being so physically unwell, I will begin a job search in earnest. But until then, while my priority is simply living, that will be my focus.

But then....

But in each class, there's a knot of students who want to learn. For whatever reason, they are engaged in the lesson, dutifully mime the weirdo sounds, repeat the same sentences, blink huge lightbulbs when they finally understand an instruction I don't know how to give in Thai, and dutifully help out their classmates who are on the hot seat and stuck. Deep emotions run just beneath the surface, and the devastation or elation when called out is as shocking to the culturally-insensitive farang as being called out is to the collective-thinking Thais.

There's the fantastically steep learning curve of EFL, especially at a beginning level, with tangible results to match mental leaps.

As I walk down the hall, I push a bow wave of, "Hello teacher! How are you!" as "Harry Potter Harry Potter Harry Potter!" trails in my wake.

I am the farang in the regular program, and while all of us farangs look alike, I look like Harry Potter. Everyone, everyone knows me. And I am exciting to talk to.

There is the fact that today, the third day of the term, it took more than twice as long while I drug a knot of students whispering to each other and calling out whatever phrases they knew--how are you, how old you are, where are you from, what is your name, how old are you, where you are from, in a constant torrent.

What a fantastic place to be.

The gritty

I told myself I wouldn't think about my teaching situation being as chaotic and personally inhospitable as imaginable. Then I started living it.

You know the room: Kubrik meets Hitchcock with tropical ambience by Burton. A student sits in each of the sixty desks, the best-preserved of which would be in an American scrap heap. Many students support their work on cross-hatched splinters. And yes, there are many splinters; rather, there is much bleeding. And if someone gets nicked--teacher exempted--it means a dramatic exeunt to the nurse.

As is typical, those who know the least and are the least inclined to attend class are the largest in voice, body, and classroom presence. White skin and blond hair only get a skinny guy so far, especially since much larger guys, and all the more established teachers use canes to maintain classroom order, and caning is not in a farang's repertoire, even if I were willing to carry a cudgel. So in any class, there's a large knot of people--95% male--disinclined to be present and willing to participate only as far as dropping bombshells in Thai. I'm sure I'd be laughing, too, if my voice weren't cracked hoarse from shouting over the ambient conversations, were someone to translate.

And the ambient noise is extreme. At any given time, the web of classroom discussions receives fortification from passing friends, hams ditching class and mooning past the doorway, or guys sitting outside and chatting or flirting with students not quite brave enough to ditch class entirely. When hall noise isn't directed straight at my class, there's the inevitable roar of a thousand or so students sharing one concrete building, or recreating (or ditching) on the flagstones out front. And then there's the street, the campus PA system, the other departments on campus, the stadium next door, and the air base just beyond to boost the ambient decibels (final approach passes directly over campus, and we're close enough to the runway that a large helicopter or a low approach whips the trees into a flurry of falling branches and scattering leaves).

One of the louder hams is named X. Coming from a Thai, "X" is mainly an "Eh" vowel with some sort of consonant that could turn the word into "Ed," "Egg," or "Ek." A thai tongue has zero predilection for the English "k-s" to distinguish "X." So it's a good teaching point: everyone aspirate "Kuh," then hiss "Sss," like teacher Harry Potter is doing while spraying the front row while articulating consonants. It's exciting enough having X on the spot while I explain my confusion over Egg and Ed and eventually X, and the rubber-lipped funny faces to accompany articulation have been worthwhile enough--we've done an open-lipped "zzzzz" and a one-lip "vvvvv" and an articulated "tuh" and aspirated "T"--that I have everyone's attention. Not enough to quell the ambient conversation, but most eyes are on me, especially as we do the call back. And just as I'm about to roll from the "k-s" in "Ex" to the "k-t" in "subject," my tongue gets purchase. In a blink just long enough to make for a killer Hollywood special effect, my front teeth drop down into fangs before the glistening pink crescent of my partial goes soaring in a slow-motion arc that ricochets off the whiteboard and slides under the teacher desk.

Class was pretty well dismissed, despite lasting another 38 minutes.

On popularity--?

It's a new campus for me. I move like a shark with a cloud of following lampreys, but without being graceful, powerful, intimidating, or anything but stumping along in clogs while sweat pours off my body, and the lampreys are twittering students chirruping, "Harry Potter! Harry Potter! Harry Potter!"

It will make for an interesting evolution.

discipline

And then came PeeWee. She comes up to my armpit and is almost as skinny as I am, but she's petite in the same way a woven steel cable is petite.

She is my Thai teacher—the nice Thai lady I am theoretically relieving from some of her teaching duties.

How to describe—she has dark hair, dark eyes, nut-brown skin, is somewhere between 30 and 65, and wears a gorgeous wardrobe of traditional Thai skirts and tops (why do they only make women's clothes that small?)--which describes 98% of the veteran teachers on campus.

Like almost all Thai teachers, she carries a rod: a polished branch a couple cm thick with red tape on the last handlengths of either end. It's telling that the tape is nicked and dinged threadbare. When she's in the front of the class, she clicks around on her sizable (for Thailand—maybe 3cm) pumps tapping her rod on things—the floor, the board, the wall, desks, and, yes students.

When she circulates through the desks, her hands flit around like nervous finches. But they light only on troublesome and noisy perches, and wherever they light, they tweak: twisting an ear, cuffing someone upside the head, disarming one student of a ruler to whap another student's hand—this is how discipline happens in the regular program. But getting through the class is still a matter of endurance shouting, and that's what surprises me.

I first encountered the corporal punishment while talking with the fourth-grader who christened me Teacher Ow. He was sitting outside his classroom and poked at my most recent injury.

“Ow, teacher, your arm is hurt.”

“Yes, and how are you today?”

“I am hurting, too, teacher. I did not do my homework so my hands were slapped. See, teacher?”

Big, red, well-defined ruler marks front and back on his left hand.

“Today she was not very nice.”

“Well, why didn't you do your homework?”

“Because I was playing with friends. Usually she does not hit me for missing this homework, but today she was in a not good mood.”

And that was in the prim and proper EP.

In my new building, teachers regularly line students up to whap the hell out of the backs of their legs: “Class, five minute break while you watch mea beat your peers.” It is simply part of things. Jack around too much and get a whack.

Believe it or not, it works.

In the morning, students file down the main promenade, stopping to wai a small group of bigshots. If the student is out of place—hair's a mess, uniform isn't on straight, that sort of thing—their legs get whapped. If they're way out of line, they are pulled aside to watch the rest of campus file past, occasionally getting whapped, before they get a right whallop. And it's like the occasional round of poo-peeing: it just comes with the territory.

Welcome to Thailand.

Day 1

I'm on super extra double dog parole. Thai faces have been floating past my classroom and loitering outside. It's fun to think that people I don't know but have seen in the elevated distance know all about me--really, it helps give a relaxed, natural classroom vibe.
As for that, groups of 50 early adolescents are inherently very noisy, especially when excited. And boy are they.
There will be a hyperabundance of gargled saltwater, and even if that works, I'll be in the contrabass range by Thursday.
Fun to start out on my loudest, longest day: six back-to-back rounds of high schoolers followed by 50 minutes off and a bout of 6th graders.
The good news is that I've made it through and the lurking sihlouettes haven't had anything bad to say, yet, so here's hoping.
Wheee!

On mis-speaking

The Juan Williams thing is exactly what I was talking about in an earlier post concerning bringing back Thai social attitudes. Here, in a collective culture, it's perfectly legitimate to say, "You're one of X" and let it go. In that vein, I am tempted to characterize a number of uncomfortable situations based upon the groups of individuals involved: it's late at night and I've just walked into the far end of a dead end alley where a group of very large males is kicking a soccer ball around and speaking in a language I don't recognize, but to say "X guys make me nervous" goes too far. Certain women, identifiable by their dress, frequently cover their faces when passing near me; this is an individual choice but identified by a collective marker.

Here, holding the collective as representative of the individual is fine. But that just won't fly back stateside, where the individual and his or her intention supersedes the external characterizations (yet we can still characterize young people based upon the voluntary signifiers of clothing: "Punk/emo/gangsta/preppy kids" is okay to identify an individual or group and justify characteristic habits, but race or religion must be avoided).

Interesting

On Nationalism

I got a little tired of the nationalistic propaganda crammed down American throats, but I'm learning to recant. Consider this: Thailand's Ministry of Education vetoed a movement to make English the country's official second language. The veto was not on the basis of "Western=farang=bad," but instead to keep from conveying the impression that Thailand had once been colonized. More here.

Now, I'd be curious to see if a Sino language had similar problems, but it strikes me that a country too concerned about a twenty-first century opinion of its sovereign development in the 17th-19th century to officially adopt an already prevalent alternative language into its educational program has some big issues backing such choices.

Debauching

It took close to an hour to find Soi Cowboy. We set out without maps or other references, assuming it would be hard to miss a global mecca of debauchery under a city's lights during a Friday-night full moon. I guess I'm not one to talk, but who would've thought that a place with such mythic weight would be half the size of the small-town backstreet in the middle of a comparative wilderness and downright forest where I grew up? And who would've imagined that enough neon to completely plaster the relative enormity of a Vegas casino could be concentrated into a street too inconspicuous to attract the attention of any conscientious cartographer.

To Soi Cowboy

But here we are, in the manic day-glow of Soi Cowboy on a Friday night, long after the full moon dropped behind the skyline. It is my companions' last night in country, mine in the city, and we're looking for something wild; this is Soi Cowboy, after all. And it seemed a good sign when a tout sitting with the mototaxi and tuktuk drivers held up a card advertising pussy shows: writing, pingpong, eel and worse.

“Tuktuk, three minute” he said, and got worked up when we said we'd be staying here. “No show, no show here. I take you, three minute. No show here!”

That was three bars ago.

In the meantime, we've found some of the most disinterested, preoccupied, distracted and half-assed displays of Snoopy dancing imaginable. So far, the girls we've seen have, without exception, been standing on stage with one hand negligently draped on the pole and their legs making stepping motions with the intensity of a freshmen's pen sliding across the page as he falls asleep in class. And around us sits a pack of pilgrims staring and cajoling with the enthusiasm I wish I felt. But I can't get past the girls' blank stares, the deadpan faces reflecting utter disinterest in the gyrating nethers, that they all sneak glances at the soccer game on the TV, or that a couple of them simply stood watching TV.

My best guess is that while we grew up hearing stories about Soi Cowboy from our parents and their contemporaries, many of the earnest faces with wide eyes staring from amid nests of crows' feet under anything-but-natural hair could've been here to make the initial reputation, or were at least old enough to cement the mythologizing as it trickled back stateside.

What's worse: watching a girl a decade your younger sharing a stage with a woman old enough to be your mother, neither of whom displays any awareness of standing topless on a stage while upstanding members of Generation Viagra lust and leer at... midlife crisis second wives? Daughters that never were? Animate means to prove something else entirely? Or realizing that those guys are looking at you as competition or a measure or somehow interested in the same goods and needing to prove it. Gag.

Our last stop pushed past the fringes of pathetic. We were the only customers and sat drinking Diet Coke while a surprisingly fleshy lady climbed into a shower stall to soap and gyrate herself for our benefit.

Had she not been behind plastic or immediately ducked out after the show, I would've handed her a sizable tip. As happened, it seemed best to leave the tab and tip on the table and duck out while the barkeep's head was turned.

Almost funny jokes

A stately gent finds himself too inebriated to operate his room key. A girl young enough to be his youngest kid's youngster comes to his rescue and helps him stagger into the room.

A guy walks into a go-go bar on three legs: two skin and bone, one a metal cane with a rubber safety pad. He lurches out almost draped over a girl many decades his younger. A minute later, the madame, who moves with nothing but careful deliberation, rushes out of the joint waving his cane.

Two guys walk into a bar. One is married, the other hasn't seen a naked woman in more than a year. And in the latter's world, that is a distinguishing characteristic of bachelorhood.

It's a girlie bar in the heart of a world-famous red light district, and it's the sixth they've been to.

They leave separately, one paying for the opportunity to walk out with an exotic beauty on his arm, the other with a bill for their drinks. All of their drinks, including the lady drinks that slid down almost as smoothly and quickly as the other hand reached the crotch.

Now, is it more appropriate to ask which is which or would the comedic effect of, “So why am I the one sitting in front of a computer” (which has far too many dirty overtones after an evening of go-go bar hopping) be sufficient?

Movie night!

We went to MBK, Bangkok's super-ultra-megamall. It occupies a full city block stacked seven stories deep, with a mega-plex and vendor population roughly the size of a Midwestern county seat. It's westernized enough to be generally segregated into purchasing categories, i.e. one floor is cosmetic pharmaceuticals, another is cell phones, another is dining and furniture. A truly Thai construct would be a hodgepodge of availability: rather than congregating by product, businesses would be arranged by whoever showed up and staked out territory, where they would return day after day, week after week.

It also happened that I was distracted by a display of DVDs--there were a couple of titles I've had an eye out for since before arrival in-country, and they were in English. Score!

So here's me, picking up DVD cases and handing them to the nice girl, who asks for a ridiculously low price; I don't even haggle.

"Come back in 15 minutes."

As we walk around and see more DVD hawkers, it hits me: they're just copying! One place will have a few hundred titles, each of which is stored on a hard drive and photocopied for display and hawking.

Oh.

So maybe when I thought, "That's not even out yet!" I was not so far off.

And eat it, too

After all the time spent wishing I could escape notice, I went walking through one of Bangkok's seedy hives of go go clubs. I went around each level of a three-tier amphitheater lined with curtained-off clubs and nigh-naked women hanging off (generally) drunken men who were hanging onto the balcony rail (who thought this one up? A third-floor dance club with a waist high bannister to catch whomever comes stumbling out?), with occasional clouds of perfume and cigarette smoke around covens of girls waiting for some prey to come by.

Three levels of this, with probably fifteen clubs per level, and at least two clumps--oops, did I say coven last time?--of women per club, and me walking from one end to the other.

Sounds like my typical story, right? For some reason I had to cut through, and barely made it out intact?

Well, here I went. Right into the thick of debauchery row.

And I did not get touched once. No, "Hey sexy," nobody grabbing my arm, no beseeching hellos, nothing.

All the way up.

All the way down.

At least invite the skinny SOB in for a drink, right?

Nothing.

I'll take the initiative to say it's a pin on the chest: the question is whether it's for accomplishment or discharge.

Opening Scene in the Big Mango

Open with a close-up of a small tornado of flies in front of an indistinct hodgepodge of urban background: there are balconies, doors, windows, buildings, plants, laundry, the effluvia of vertical urban development.

Slowly pan out to reveal a dozen small paper cups on the veranda of a traditional Chinese-style spirit house. Spirit houses are common, and offerings are obligatory in occupied instances, but the swarm of flies is unprecedented. Typically, people put out Fanta or Coke in bottles, fruit offerings, and incense. No incense here, just little paper cups of juice, like the little cups of sacramental grape juice in some of the more conservative churches.

Pause while a brown-skinned man in a button-down uniform swaps out old cups for new; flies buzz indifferently.

A fuzzy figure lurches through the foreground. I'm limping past wearing a large backpack on my back, a smaller backpack on my front, my glasses scratched and my forehead and the bridge of my nose stinging from where I took a faceplant at the train station. Ladies whose living depends upon them selling themselves to people with my gender indications and skin color do not stand up or speak out to get my attention.

Pan out, scan up to the top of the insect whirlwind, focus to the neon in the background: two-foot tall red neon "Carnival Cabaret" with, "GO GO GIRLS" and "WORLD'S ONLY DOUBLE GO GO CAROUSEL" and "LIVE GIRLS" and "TONIGHT!"

Next door, the shop advertises "Offsite Massage."

My hotel is across the street

If I were to believe this rhetoric, life would be real easy.

On Breaking

A blind guy broke me. In Ayutthaya, I had a massage at a clinic of blind masseuses, but as the lady who worked me over hailed me as I walked down the alleyway, I'm hesitant to say I had a massage from a blind person. It was a little clamshell alcove in a back alley off of a local market bazaar a little too dense and intense to be farang-friendly, and the three other cots were each occupied by a Thai person—generally a good sign. And it was a good massage, although after one flurry of Thai, all the masseuses had to shuffle over to grope up my leg and squeeze my bony ass compared to that of the stout man in the next bunk.

But then came the clinic in Chiang Mai. A guy who was likely three times my weight and had a thing for picking his teeth between belching and scratching his crotch lit into me pretty hard. I'm accustomed to a massage being right on the verge of painful, but this guy was keeping me right on the edge of screaming. He would lean his upper body up and down a circulatory line, and then lean into a pressure point. I whimpered an spoke up about my right calf a few times—it still hurts like a bitch after the bike wreck—and then he went working his way down it with gouging thumbs. He nailed an extremely tender spot dead on, and I just about lost it. He had me flip over and gave up after a couple smears at my pecs. I was grateful to sit up, thinking I would get a nice neck and head rub, but he dug into pressure points on my shoulders using his elbows, and the crushing broke me.

Enough with the hurting. Enough with the pain. I just want to feel okay, for my body to relax and be happy, or at least not fighting, not aching, not feeling broken.

No more acupuncture—the lady filled me with needles, some of which went a little too deep, and one of which rotated around in slow circles, then put a heat lamp on them and left me in a room without AC for a little over half an hour—no more Thai pummeling, no more aching and bruising, and I'm going to use it as an excuse to enjoy that part of Thailand.

I've decided that the next time I let someone touch me, it will be a Thai girl who makes me look big and bulky, even in my present condition, and if the massage centers on bubbles or breasts, so much the better. Maybe it really is time to hit up Soi Cowboy.

Emergence

I'll just cut to the fun stuff: after an hour of left-handed sawing and wrenching with a mini knife I bought mainly as a bottle opener, the cast is off without bloodshed save for a few knuckle scrapes on my left hand. Right arm is pallid and tender, and I'll be wearing a wrist brace for a while (bones don't heal as quickly as they did 20 years ago), but at least I can type and shower.

The funny part was walking around trying to find a mechanic who would let me use some tin snips, or who would simply volunteer a small saw, to separate the novelty attention-getter from the farang, who is suddenly just shy of invisible.

And the good news

While purchasing my peanut bliss, someone paid for a measure-thy-fatness deal and stepped off before her time was up.

It wasn't a real accurate measurement, what with me holding a bottle of ice tea, a bottle of water, the jug of milk, peanut butter, my bag, my camera, and my good lens, and it said my body fat (I'm guessing that's what had the percent sign on it) is critically low, but it also had me up almost ten kilos. So between the energy to stump around, the inclination to take photos, and the numbers on the rise, it looks like the rebound might take hold.

Peanut butter helps.

Maybe I should also credit a toddler-sized bag of pork cracklins. Never liked 'em back home--the last package Gram sent me had a bag of pork rinds in it, which she had thoughtfully punctured for ease of shipping and said they should be okay if I microwave them for a minute or two--but this is some good fatty pig.

bliss=

Jar of super chunky peanut butter+spoon+chocolate milk.

I almost feel guilty.

But I've already put in my daily miles (photos processing), and as long as I'm paying for an aircon room, I have an obligation to enjoy it, right?

On Bangkok

Bangkok met me with a flock of touts: three motorbike taxi drivers, two tuk-tuk jockeys, and a tour tout. It was easy to get past the tour jockey, but the drivers were tenacious.

It's a nice thing about Nakhon Si Thammarat: the songtaus just orbit their routes and honk at any pedestrians; some of the mototaxis honk and shout until you make eye contact and shake your head. Outside the BKK train station, they surrounded me and physically blocked me while demanding my destination: 200 for a tuktuk, but just a hundred for a mototaxi. Two hundred for a tuktuk, when it's 10 back home?

I should've realized what was going on when they lined up three deep to keep me from asking the cabbie his metered rate, but I relented when a mototaxi driver dropped to 80 and everyone else I could hear was saying 250 for an enclosed, air conditioned taxi.

My first impression outside of the station, and one that's upheld so far, is that traffic in Bangkok and northern Thailand is nothing. To whit:

-I've seen no cars and only seen one scooter driving on a sidewalk, and that was a teenager joyriding through a historic park.

-People honk before running yellows and don't run reds unless there's already a full intersection (going their direction).

-People honk as a courtesy, a warning that they're coming. In NST, the same courtesy is an aggressive warning, more a warning to move your ass out of the way than an announcement of your presence; people honk vigorously when merging or turning or passing; songtaus and mototaxis, which honk especially enthusiastically in any of the said situations, also honk vigorously whenever they see a pedestrian on either side of the street.

-as a pedestrian, it's possible to gauge traffic well enough that simply stepping into the flow—the only way to cross a NST street—isn't a very liveable option.

In the course of things, I ended up walking through a number of pretty highly touted guidebook destinations. But I found that out later. At the time, I was more struck by the number of English-only signs and odd bits of quirk and inconvenience—a submerged walkway, an elevated walkway, packed with tourists and overly homogenized trinkets available at considerable markup.

Maybe that's one of the benefits of all the time wandering through places where farangs shouldn't wander: I've stumbled into understanding prices and negotiations and some of the ways my kind are swindled: “MISS THIS AND YOU MAR YOUR EVERLASTING TRAVELLER'S KARMA! Not only does this place feature inferior reproductions of the products you would've been seeing for blocks had you walked via the back roads, it offers the ONCE IN A LIFETIME OPPORTUNITY to take a photo in a hackneyed Kodak Photo Zone before you spend three times as much for the chance to shop in a place too inconvenient for the locals!”

Not that I have problems with the tourist industry: I grew up on its payoffs, will probably return to its local workforce, and I would drop a lot of money and travel-weary steps for a breakfast buffet with real potatoes, eggs, Tabasco, and Heinz. And I have no doubt that I could find it in BKK.

What I dislike is that between the dingy alleys and shiny markets, there is no change in displayed prices or proprietors' attitudes, yet the products flop 100% in quality.

And what irks me is the construct: in NST, if you follow a local through a market—a regular market and not a sidewalk carnival—you won't see haggling. You might catch a, “Really?” “Well, no,” but no haggling. Once you learn to say, “Really?” or “how much?” or “X Baht? It's only Y over there,” there is no haggling, even for a farang. And even if you don't put forth that effort/have the language skills (look at me try to sound competent), you're still saving 10-20% on what you would spend in a western-influenced mall/department store/grocery mart. But in BKK and points north, my experience is that the proprietors are after as much as they can get, i.e. the price drops 100% as soon as you make a reasonable comparison (you want 100B to take me there? It cost 40 to get here), and each number is cut by a third if the transaction is in Thai.

I guess it's like reading Thai numbers around NST: if you can read the numbers on the Thai side of the sign (or take a guess and divide the Arabic numerals by 2 or 3) and offer that amount, you end up paying the local rate, which you pay if you take the time to ask or are a repeat customer. But either situation is a rarity, so the chance to haggle is as much relation-building as financial. Up north, simply asking, “really?” is enough to halve the price, and the vendor looks bored the entire time.

Vendor, songtau driver, anyone but a clerk in a department store has ripping you the hell off as a baseline reference point, and if they do defend the price, they do so voraciously and in inverse proportion to the product's worth—if it had any worth at all, you'd know it coming into the transaction, and if you haggled it would be based on some sort of comprehension, so it's a better financial plan to haggle the hell out of it before the rube sees what's on the line.

What boils down, I guess, is that people up here take my ignorance and exploitability for granted, and there's no special accord or recognition if I've figured out how to convey that I'm not quite as farang as I look.

I guess if I broke down and enjoyed it for what it's supposed to be—a paradise of shopping malls and dens of debauchery—it would be easier. But when I'm not much of a mall-crawler at home, why start here in Thailand?

To Bangkok

I'm sitting in an unlit car in a hospital-green train while men in military uniforms shine lights in people's eyes while pounding beer and spinning their holstered guns on the pockmarked tables. Five cars ahead, my stuffed dog is guarding a bunk insistently set up at 7:00 PM. Just next to me, a window large enough to dive through while wearing a sousaphone flashes with the passing nocturnal countryside—silhouetted palm trees, rubber plantations, the periodic building, and a passing train sends a tornado through the car.

I'm enroute to Bangkok from Nakhon via Surat Thani. Someone recommended taking a minivan to ST because there are more departures and cheaper fares; NST has two per day and they take the long way around the peninsula to get to the main N-S line. Sure, you drop a hundred baht on the minivan, but you save a few hundred more and about 7 hours of travel. Plus, I figured I would get to see another city, and that's always a plus. I told myself.

It was a good lesson in doing proper research.

Night train to Bangkok

Suppose the departure time mattered and getting there was important: the train left NST at 1430 or 1530, I don't quite recall, and a ticket would've been 660 with an arrival at 0515.

The noon minivan left NST at 1245 for my farang rate of 150, not 50, TB. It dropped the passenger load in a narrow sort of horrible alley somewhere in town: Surat Thani has the worst sort of dilapidated and eroded jungle rot and grime scabbing over the buildings, and the back alleys are just ugly. I was standing on the street/parking lot/sidewalk/garbage dump while the other passengers dispersed.

Eventually, a motorbike taxi driver came up. I had just set down my massive load—not that heavy, but I'm not in good shape to hoist it. I was trying to ask the slick ticket salesman how to get to the train station and trying not to see the farang surcharge putting the gloss in his hair. It was especially fun because he was not speaking English, period.

Right off, the mototaxi guy picked up what I was saying: “Oh, satanee rotfai, you go train. Two hundred baht.”

I almost didn't laugh—the 8K trip to my erstwhile digs was 40. Now it's 200 to the train station?

I pointed at passing songtau, and the mototaxi decided he'd track down a tuk tuk for me. For 200 B. Welcome to farang corner—arguing will only burn linguistic bridges and hike the price. So I sucked it up and followed the songtau driver.

Surat Thani is the port for THE party islands, and it has developed its exploitive tourist industry the way a horticulturist nurtures orchids. Every block has a travel agent or three, designer clothing, and the most ungenuine atmosphere I've seen since Naples: everything is for sale but nothing has a price. You're welcome to make an offer, but the only one that will be accepted is the “Special Rate” occasionally advertised.

In this town, I am a commodity. I am a fat, farang wallet waiting to be fleeced, petals of dollars falling from my pockets and waving around with my day-glo green cast.

How to define, to describe one's own inadvertent commodification? Perchance similar difficulties came about early in the sexual revolution: how to describe the abjectly belittling look of objectification?

It ended up being a twenty-five minute ride to the train, so I almost got over the driver kicking me out in the middle of a cloudburst of afternoon downpour.

And I was an eensy bit peeved that the next train was from NST: better to wait and take the next train, the one that'll arrive after sunrise, I told myself. Especially when the ticket agent went prattling off about something and charged me 760, cash, for my fare in a second-class aircon sleeper. So, o save a couple hundred and get there sooner with the bonus of seeing the next largest town in the province, or maybe the largest (which somehow glorifies it?) I was down just over 1K B and going to arrive an hour later, But I was in a corner. Welcome to farang country.

I had an hour-plus to kill, so it was time to walk around town: nothing to dispel my original impression, and plenty to instill gratitude for the unapologetic character of NST: it might be unfair, but it is more equitable in so being. Anywhere a farang goes in Surat Thani, expect to get raped.

My train was only 80 minutes late. While reading the travel guide, I realized that I just have no interest in visiting Bangkok. It's big, it's busy, it's expensive, it's commercial, it's wild shopping and foreign food and the sex trade and hells-yeah, full throttle on the debauchery! Or it's the ultimate in luxury and convenience and carries a matching price.

I just don't care. Mexican food? Great—the lard here is beautiful, so refried beans should be absolutely fantastic.

“He said the nachos were the most expensive single dish he'd ever eaten, but that they were completely worth it.” Nachos? Really?

And accommodation, well, places with descriptions that would send me running from the potential of roaches and crabs cost as much as an establishment that would send me running from its extravagance.

Do I really want to drop that kind of money on creature comforts so I can visit a meditation retreat and specialist medical care? How much is a night in the hospital? H1N1 be damned, maybe I'll check in.

Or I could just pass.

A few K north of BKK is a town with prices akin to what I'd pay and a pace along what I'm after. Done and done: I'll get to BKK around sunrise, stash my bag at the train station, find the wat that hosts retreats and fill out an application, find a hospital with a gastroenterologist and make an appointment, and beat it out of the bustle.

Okay, I'll confess: I would like to see a pingpong show, but such glorious debauchery hardly has appeal when one's blood isn't thick enough to properly circulate unless one's feet are elevated.

So I'm again the freakshow farang, now among a singing crowd of armned, drunken railway policemen. And boy is a laptop exciting. Good thing, too, bcause if the lights came on the attention would be on me and my cast, not the gadgets.

Take what you can, right? Especially when it's a victory, which you should probably accept without questioning, especially when such things are oddities to the point of remarkability.

At least enough time has passed for everyone to fall asleep.

Save for a preteen girl surreptitiously snapping my bunk curtain open and closed at passers-by, everyone was asleep. Mai pen rai, right? At least it's quiet (a couple of men having a heated debate while thumping Quar'ans justified the unexpected price of a berth in the aircon class). And save for the frequent stops and regular passers-by, I joined them almost all they way to the 6:00 wakeup, when one of the guys, considerably worse for wear than when I'd last seen him—cackling so merrily about the farang—came through slamming open the bunks.

An Odd Sort of Homecoming

Halfway down the "off the beaten" drag, hang a left into a fantastically dense hallway. Squeeze past the tea stand, between Gucki and Parada accoutrements, past electronics and swords and knives so obviously inferior they don't even sport a knockoff brand name, and you'll begin glimpsing the worthwhile. Don't stop, though; if you're too oblivious to catch the glares, they do not want you here where the locals shop, just close enough to the touristicana's gravitation to pick up some monetary velocity but not so close the stench of scam can't be avoided. You might've come halfway around the world to see something just like this, but you are the problem with the world, the thorn in every eye that sees you because you are the tourist in the turf locals who deal with tourists call their own. You are global warming. You are crop spoilage. You are the sick kid at home. The broken parents. Aching back.

Smile and wave with the conviction that the scowls carry the same meaning as an invitation to a special dinner granny cooked. You might have to come back, perchance hastily, and you want it to be on the least antipathetic terms possible. And whatever you do, keep moving.

You'll eventually hit open air of sorts--the garden inside an apartment block, an alleyway between tenements, a onetime temple or park or otherwise reduced erstwhile sanctuary. Here you'll find the twisted wretches shunned by the lowest levels of society and shat upon by time. Here, where the maze leading off a minor route in the labyrinth off the beaten, you'll emerge into the culture, find the people, who find you as inherently interesting and bizarre as you find them.

You'll find incentive to get your lazy ass in language-learning gear, too.

Count on finding what you would least expect. Anything you see is available and relatively affordable; everything has a price, and if you weren't so oblivious you'd know it. And if you don't mind sticking through being the spectacle, you might luck into the sublime: someone considered too wretched to join the streetside world, to be part of the public reality, engaged in a private act so routine and unconscious it is done with complete and unconscious perfection; beauty: the octogenarian pounding fish paste, the septuagenarian stirring fried chicken with half the remaining eye while yelling at grandchildren scrutinized over the shoulder with the other; the man with a forlorn basset hound of a torso sagging over a stained-brown sarong sinking into the worn-through cushion of what was once a proud new leather sofa in his living room/shop floor or the way his wife seems to defy all laws of physics as she navigates what must be an anti-gravity toothpick around her vacant maw; a mother corralling her kid who's fascinated by the grate in the street; an early adolescent who grew up idolizing dad leaning back on his bike and taking a drag of Marlborough; dad wrenching on a bike and pretending not to notice; something so small it is unconscious, and in that disregard absolutely perfect: beautiful.

And halfway down the block, I found it: the rippled and dented pockmark tin tables that no longer fold with stackable plastic chairs twined intact with cellophane baggies (which are for Thailand what the union of duct tape and bailing wire would produce for America), the cart with off-round wheels and no pretense of refrigeration around a mirror-polished wok resting in a smooth lake of grease splatter and a knurled mangrove root o a woman operating the works.

Instead of sitting down and waiting for her to hobble her club-footed way over to me, as is the local custom, I hobbled my edema-swelled legs to the cart and pointed, as is my custom. When she saw me about to say something, the lady spoke magic: "Pad thai, chai mai?" Pad Thai, yes or no?

I have never before found pad thai noodles in Thailand.

It's as if they're too commonplace for photo slots on menu-boards (cartsides), and my illiterate luck has a knack for picking out either pho noodle or bizarre local favorites (funny thing, perspective: just as I was about to mention how happy I was to find an offal cart and getting little bits of everything, someone else in the lunch room me==went raving about how disgusting it is to see intestines anywhere near food).

Lots of nods, eager smiles, thumbs up: pad thai, all the way back here. Pad thai in the heart of a Thai area: this is not the tourist version. I sit as she heats oil in the pan, tosses in a handful of noodles without paying attention to measuring the absolutely perfect amount of oil, noodle, sauce, and water.

Pinches and ladelfuls and finally a couple of cracked eggs: here come my pad thai noodles.

And I know that smell.

There's an odd scent in the meet. An odd meat, actually.

Last time I encountered it was a little town in the Italian alps.

It might take a minute to recall, but you don't forget the smell of overcooked and salted horse.

I haven't seen a horse since I was last in Nevada, haven't seem horse meat since Italy, but I ate horse in some of the only pad thai I've had in Thailand. What is there to do but enjoy it and move on?

And somehow, as I made my way around the cramped square, hoping to find a less overpacked retreat route and started noticing the roar and honk of traffic outside the square, it feels like a return home: tired feet scraping as they drag me to and through places frequented by few farangs, the pasted-on smile as I choke down something few farangs attempt, and the attempt at a dignified retreat as my stomach reminds me why few farangs eat such things.

Three Month Review

A story of numbers

3 months in Thailand, and so far I've:

lost my music gig

trained in Reiki

driven 4500 kliks

visited 3 other cities

moved 3 times

made it through 3 wrecks

totaled the bike (T-boned in a hit and run)

collapsed my zygomatic arch (1st scooter incident)

popped a couple of ribs, tweaked my diaphragm, damaged my rotator cuff, collected significant abrasions (2nd scooter incident)

fell down a concrete stairway with one scrape and no bruises

eaten some fantastic and fantastically bizarre food

lost 15 kilos

My authorial side can't take it, so let the numbers break into narrative:

After the third scooter incident, I was bleeding on the asphalt while a crowd--including a significant number of my students' parents--watched an ambulance come and haul my 40 kilos of defeat to a hospital, where they said nothing was wrong and gave me Tylenol. When I went back, the morning doctor confirmed a fractured thumb, wrapped me in a cast, and sent me home with mild narcotics.

It broke me.

I would've come home, was told I could go home, was encouraged to leave, but I love the potential of what I have here, and if I were to go home, I can't imagine what would happen after I could stand upright without my blood separating. Another 6 month search for a dead-end job? Why would I leave a respectable job with a respectable salary in a fascinating culture in a spectacular country for the chance to fight my way back into the American economy?

I hit bottom, but there was still enough resilience, still enough incentive to bounce, if only slightly.

Bad luck, injury, illness, so?

I'm in Thailand. I have a job. I have friends. I can practice Reiki and will learn Thai massage--in Thailand, while staying in a beachside bungalow.

And damn it, I've given a helluva lot to be here, and now that I'm enroute to enjoying it again, no way in hell do I want to leave. It might be inappropriately close to reality, but since it did come so close, I'll venture to say "over my dead body" will I leave Thailand before I'm either ready to or am back on a gurney. And if that happens, all I ask is for enough morphine to sleep until the coming of a new economy.