A Request

Dear Friends-

Without turning melodramatic, let's call the back of the ambulance rock bottom: any worse in mind, body, or spirit, and I would've collapsed into a gurney on the hospital plane home.

But I made it.

I hit bottom, and I'm still kicking. Any worse and it would've been curtains, but I'm rebounding enough to realize how far down I was. I'm looking around and thinking, "Cool! I'm in Thailand!"

I'm enjoying the occasional bit of enjoyment.

Forgive the melodrama (twice in one post-bad form, and I apologize, but as close to justified in this situation as in any [I tell myself]), but it came close enough to being my dead body shipped home that I'm not going back in any other state until I'm damn well ready.

It might not take much, but for the love, don't ask me to leave now that I'm coming back to life.

A confession and an argument

I'll confess it: I'm ready to come home.

Not to throw in the towel here, but to rest and recuperate.

It's not that I want to go home, but to say, "Help me. Take care of me until I'm strong enough to fight," and to rest without fear of further attack until I'm back in action.

No, that's an overstatement.

It would be enough to take a break from fighting, to feel protected. Another trip to the hospital would douse the spark--I'd collapse into the wheelchair or gurney until someone else made something else happen.

I've been sick, sore, and tired for months on end, and I'm exhausted from the effort to appear otherwise. To give up even that effort would be a blessing.

Home is not just that possibility, but of letting go the daily challenges of daily life--living on schedule and maintaining as close as I can come to respectability--and devoting full energies to recuperation.

"You feel okay? You're lookin' a little pale this morning."

Well, my liver and kidneys are shutting down, my blood doesn't have enough body to circulate, and I weigh as much as the average Thai fourth grader, but, "Yeah, running behind and low on caffeine, but by the time I finish a couple cups I'll be charging at the second grade."

It's not that I want to stop fighting, but that I want the chance to get on my feet before getting jump kicked again; home is not necessarily a safe house, but a place where they won't kick until you're at least up enough to feel disoriented.

I know I'm in Thailand because there are no sofas, the beds are made out of coconut husks, I'm dumb and illiterate, drool at the thought of a potato, let alone a french fry, and I can't understand a scrap of the gossip.

What about the booze and bimbos, narcotics and neurotics? Not that I want to partake, but to witness the Thailand that 's drawn generations of Americans.

I can honestly say that I have not been to any bars or restaurants in town, just roadside carts. It would be a point worth noting, perchance a matter of pride or shame, were it intentional. But the reality is that I just haven't had the energy; when I've been traveling, I've had no options but to eat out, and I've been in places with tourist menus. At home, it's easier to boil a bag of ramen.

What I'm after is a shot at success without being undercut by physical illness.

"You're just sitting there talking to the kids, but it'd be great if you were with them dancing and stuff."

Wouldn't I love to.

"Here's why I wasn't." Lift the pantlegs to show the swollen-shiny sausages of an elderly obese man.

When you're pushing thirty and weigh what you did at a zipper-thin twelve, stamina takes on a different meaning. Add to the oenus of smiling and gadding about the physical necessities of mending bone and tissue, compounded by the Thai diet, and it stirs into a horrible mess.

Last week, every class asked me if I really was the one who wrecked in front of Carrefour. Last night, the taxi driver who brought me home said, "You wreck in front of Carrefour, no? Bad news, farang and motocy. Bad news."

What's polite is to laugh. When do I get to sob? This culture so strongly emphasizes maintaining face that I've smile and limped through the past three months, but now I'm done. I just don't have the reserves. No more reaching deep down to pull up a fake smile.

I want to go home so that's not expected.

I want to go home so I will be allowed to feel miserable.

The only thing that scares me more than having to keep fighting is what would happen after I got home and back on my feet. Here, I have a respectable job in an institution I enjoy and a place I would love to explore. Even if I have a shitty job next term, I have a respectable paycheck and the opportunity to learn Reiki, Thai Massage, Reflexology, to explore this culture and climate. I'll certainly be in a position to learn the culture and awkwardly adolescent youth, and I might get the chance to work with kidlets before I come home. All of this would be wonderful, and it's all here. It's all available now, if only I was in a position to avail myself.

And if I flew home? What next?

"Something would come up. Something always does."

Great, but how's "something" compare to what I have here? Last time I tried to find a job, stepping up to a minimum wage deal took 6 months of applying. And now that I've whittled everything away here, if I leave I have memories of hospitals and sickness, pain and loneliness and loss and alienation, punctuated by a few glowing encounters with remarkable individuals. If I left now, I really would have no interest in returning.

Yet there is an inherent pride and beauty in the people, and I want to witness it outside the hospital. The stout nurse whose name would be Brunhilda elsewhere, the lady who at home would be a righteously obese soap opera primadonna, the jolly-fat girl working the grill station at a food court all have an inner glow, a spark in their demeanor, like the pageant queens parading in full costume. The male doctors smell of expensive cologne, and despite vests bleached unrecognizable by sun, rain, smog, and smoke, the taxi drivers, no matter what time of day, smell of fresh laundry.

And there were moments--the snaggle-toothed old woman smiling and spooning extra horseshoe crab eggs into my som tam, or driving through soft evening air after a thunderstorm, winding between rice paddies while egrets flew between towering palm trees toward sunbeams backlighting a towering thunderhead occasionally sparking lightning toward a mountain covered in primordial jungle--that make met want to see more.

So I'm sticking it out. I want this. Bad.

Just, sometimes, at the end of a long day, when I'm sore and tired, hungry and weary from keeping up the effort of appearing less slick and miserable, it's hard to chin up, especially when one of my higher-ups is saying, "No, really, YOU CAN GO HOME. It'd be okay." It's hard not to take it as a hint, not to want to act.

Good thing that's not an option.

The good part

The good thing is that I am living alone on the far side of the world and clinging to a hail mary of a career move, so falling apart or into the pit is simply not an option. At every point, at every moment is a choice, and I can either choose to laugh at the absurdity or cry at the tragedy. Either way, I will be forced to live with the consequences, so there is nothing to do but laugh, smile, ignore the depressing parts, and move forward optimistically.

Who cares that I have to move without having any idea where? Why worry about what will happen in another month? What will feeling bad about my accidents get me? How fortunate am I to have made it through without more significant damage, without an angry mob of locals out for farang blood/money?

Why even think about going home when I know it's just not an option right now?

How I choose to interpret the world around me will determine how the world interprets me, will shape the opportunities I am offered, so why would I be selfish and stupid enough to wallow in woe?

Notable aspects of left-handedness

When I first arrived, before the body collapsed, I was all charged up about using my left hand.

My karmic author has a good sense of humor, no? Just like the nurse who hands me a pen to fill out a form.

Particular notables:

Cooking. Spatulas are cut at a right-handed angle. No getting the cast in dish water. And all cutting is done with a clever.

Ever wield a clever with the wrong hand?

At least they don't believe in sharpeners, right?

One word: bathroom.

I'll confess that I'm still not accustomed to the spray nozzle, and now it's not just a matter of the nozzle and the left hand, it's the contortions involved in getting it from a mount invariably on the wall on the right hand side.

Need I mention silverware? At least it's not a chopstick culture, right?

And the protruding thumb really helps with typing. And buttons.

The fun part is that the CastEze spray the doc gave me to help keep clean and dry--taclum powder, tea tree oil, and alcohol in a WD-40 style aerosol--gives me a chemical burn just shy of blistering. Love it.

Regular Program

It's a four-story concrete block that was dated and institutional by the time its architect put pen to paper. It could be 60, it could be 80, it could be 15 years old: whitewashed concrete with rust stains is sort of timeless. Sometimes, I think that it could've been a bomb shelter, like the hospital, and one of the rust patches is from the “FALLOUT SHELTER” sign. Other times, I don't want to give it that much credit.

Each identical room holds about sixty small wooden desks lined up in tangled rows. I find the graffiti pretty exciting, but that's because it's all in Thai and I like looking at the little squiggles and pretending it's of more interest and intellectual merit than the scrawls on similar, depression-era wooden outposts of depression nostalgically glorified in junk shops and amid refurbished tchotchkies. Maybe if I learned Thai, I'd see into history: Rama VI can't swing, Rama V has big ears, Tappatedjiwann likes Proojiaviamandarrat, Pedawajamatakiariankowara Pride, Sukumowavaliko likes Limeys, Kanialimantirinsurapitwenanjumi Does the Dutch.

No mention that the desks are visible and the classrooms have only second-hand noise because most of the students, and most likely all the noisiest ones, are clustered around guitar players in the corridors; that's the extent of the incentive to be in class.

“If you see something going on that you don't think should be going on, just turn the other cheek and keep moving,” my boss said. Which is concerning when it comes from the guy who can't walk down a corridor in the English Program without stopping to intervene or roughhouse with at least 4 groups of kids.

Gulp.

But all is not lost: one classroom is completely full of silent and attentive students. Something about the broad-shouldered man wearing a starchy uniform and wielding a 2 cm dowel rod to slap on desks or other, more appealing targets that may or may not present themselves.

True hope lives at the top of the fourth flight: the English Department Office. Same concrete classroom, but retrofitted with metal office desks that jut into the room under stacks and piles of journals and papers, with a line of work tables, occupied by teachers assembling and cutting and stapling packets between baskets and bags of fruits, down the middle.

And, depending on the time, anywhere from 2-10 angels.

Aside from my boss and myself, the only males I've seen in the office were students kneeling on the tile floor. Otherwise, the angels are anywhere from college to retirement age, Thai ladies who speak proper English and wrangle classrooms with authority that puts students on their knees before entering the office. Not only do they have the authority, they have the experience and, crucially, attitude to teach absolutely anything to anyone.

And I will live and work in their midst.

If I fail, it is on me, because I have more help than I can poke a stick at, provided I'm smart and sociable enough to use it.

And God knows I'm going to need the help: in that building, I teach 15 classes of 48 students; in the other building, which is somehow more dilapidated, I only teach 6 classes of 60. Here's hoping I don't have to memorize names.

Teacher moments

One of those moments that will stand out in my teaching career: Julia, the 1^st grader, with her legs planted wide, one hand on her hip, and the other shaking an angry finger at me as she says, “No more motorbike for you!”

Another: turning away from the father of one of my G5 students to see a G3 student watching the said father wrap my right arm in a day-glo green cast.

The End

Not only was I feeling good physically, I found a killer market--all manner of protein and produce all available at Thai prices, even for the only farang to come through on a weekday. How cool! Brand-spankin-fresh eggs, 35B for half a grocery bag. Apples 20B/K, rambutans 15, the fish were still flopping around, some of the most beautiful tomatoes I've ever seen, and knowing it's there makes me happy. Almost as much as having health and energy to enjoy it.

Going home, I decided to stop at the hoity grocery store to investigate a rumor of old fashioned oats and pick up more of my amino-laced multivitamins. It was heavy, rush hour traffic, and I lucked into a parking spot someone was just vacating. I even had a hole in the oncoming traffic, and was toward the head of a knot of scooters, so even parking would be easy.

Top of the world, go me! I'm in Thailand, driving a scooter through rush hour with beautiful mushrooms, tomatoes, carrots, kale, and eggs in the basket, about to rub elbows with the upperest class, the parents of my students, before making the drive to the beautiful house in an expensive suburb

and from the knot of scooters comes a Yamaha Mio with a young male driver. He's doing maybe 80, maybe more, hard to tell, but whatever it is will not avoid me and my bike.

It was a perfect T-bone: most of the impact hit the right foot peg.

I went parabolic. It was a long enough fall to contemplate the landing and move on to picture myself shipped home to emergency reconstructive surgery.

There was time to appreciate the irony of a half-written essay on legs and the operational value thereof.

There was asphalt.

Someone standing me up.

My right pant leg shredded.

How am I standing?

Someone walking my bike off the road with a streamer of oil trailing it.

At least I'm not bleeding to death, neglected behind the crowds' backs.

Only one knot of people. Growing in a mass up the steps to the department store.

An ambulance. A raked Toyota pickup with a streamline shell. A streamlined, enclosed songtau. Covered in Cantonese characters.

You thought Thai drivers were bad--here in Thailand, the Chinese operate the volunteer EMS out of one of the temple compounds. Chinese fire drill anyone? Chinese heart attack?

And they made it to the scene before my bike bled out.

One ambulance. One crowd.

"Where's the other guy?"

Suddenly nobody speaks English.

I am sat on the tailgate while one of the EMS guys takes off my shoe and drapes up the shredded pant leg.

It's a bare metal pickup bed with vinyl-wrapped board benches like a songtau, but there's a red plastic stretcher in the middle.

My leg is ugly but superficially: lots and lots of abrasions, but the structure is intact.

How?

Someone's been in my face. The one who peeled off my helmet. He's been yelling and taking photos.

He's saying, "Girlfriend! Girlfriend! You call you girlfriend!"

Good idea--call my boss, bring in a Thai-speaker.

No answer. It's Ultimate night, of course.

No answer elsewhere.

NO GIRLFRIEND. NO BOSS. NO, NO BOYFRIEND. TAKE ME TO THE DOCTOR!

"Okey okey, you sleep here," the medic waves at the stretcher.

Sure, they clean and sterilize it regularly. ... At least I'll get to bleed and drip all over, give them something to do.

We're moving, bouncing, spinning through traffic with the siren blaring.

Send a blanket text message to bosses: enroute to hospital. Again. Sorry.

We stop and the tailgate opens. My stretcher is pulled out and I start yelling. Really yelling. I'm damn well going to make a fucking scene.

We're at the wrong hospital.

It might be bigger, it might be cheaper, but I do not want to wait in the swarm of mosquitos in the open-air breezeways/waiting rooms while people on the concrete moan and secrete the externalities of their problems.

By the time we bounce to the other end of town and the hospital that knows me, I'm sobbing. Quietly but without restraint.

It's not just the immediate pain of the trauma, not by half. I can feel myself draining into shock and endorphins have been buzzing me for a while. It's the way the hard plastic stretcher grinds my bones, the simple fact of being in an ambulance, that the ambulance is in Thailand and some guy is yelling at me over the noise of the siren and enunciating each word carefully as if that would help my vacuous knowledge. It's that I've already blown one teaching gig and expect the other to hit me like a train. It's that I haven't made it a week without a major medical issue--major meaning significant enough for me to take myself in for treatment--and now I'm going back. It's the quiet voice telling me the bike is toast and my commuting days with it, that I'll have to move back to town and explore by foot, songtau, bike taxi and minivan.

It's that I thought I had nothing left to give.

A gaggle of ER nurses goes to work with tonics and gauze. Nobody speaks English.

"Where you girlfriend?" barks the EMS guy.

"NOBODY, NOBODY, JUST ME. ME. HERE ALONE. OKAY? ME."

"Scooter with police."

"What about the other driver?"

Nobody speaks English.

"Half hour you get X-ray hand and see doctor."

Great, a half hour to enjoy the ER and not think about the H1N1 outbreak, not think about what might happen if....

My mouth is at the stage just past cotton. Tap a nurse's arm, "water? Water? Drink?" mime sipping.

"No, no."

"Pain tablet? Drug? Medicine? Jeb, jeb, help?"

"No. Doctor first."

My phone buzzes--it's my supervisor. "You poor, poor guy," she says.

I've made a point of being friendly and keeping away from her, but I wish she were here to hold the other hand and maybe give me a couple minutes to sob into someone's shoulder.

She puts her neighbor on the phone and there's a flurried exchange with the EMS guy.

My phone comes back, "they say your bike's in impound and we should come in half an hour. I'll send my boyfriend so you have someone Thai."

A sturdy porter wheels me to the X-ray room.

I can't sit up without help, and I'm reluctant to roll onto the Xray table.

It crosses my mind that I've been moving my back and neck a lot--what if?

I have to insist they Xray my leg.

"Twenty minutes," the ER nurse says.

"Doctor is having lunch?"

"Yes."

The one doc in the ER being downstairs eating lunch while a crash victim arrives on an ambulance, turns out to be a farang, waits for Xrays, and now waits for the doctor is evidently no cause for rush or second thoughts. What's my hangup? There's one doctor and he's eating.

Meantime, the nurses amuse themselves by swabbing me with alcohol and sniggering at the squirming whimpers.

It's almost as unpleasant a place as the back of the ambulance.

Malpractice must not be big in Thailand.

It takes the doctor two glances before he comes over, squeezes my thumb, (no more screams or whimpers, just cringing away with a silent scream) and says, "no break. Okay go home." And he turns to leave back to his dinner or siesta.

"Wait! Drink! I want a drink of water, and I need something for the pain!"

An exchange like, "Give the poor SOB some water" happens, and a nurse brings two sippy cups with a--A--Tylenol.

And now I am supposed to leave.

A guy in camo shorts, an Iron Maiden tee and dreds comes in. He's the boyfriend. An exchange, and he says, "you just need to sign the insurance slip.

In the waiting room, my supervisor is followed closely by my boss.

Brief explanations. My boss was indeed playing Ultimate, and one of the Thai teachers had stopped to ask if he'd heard about the teacher in a wreck--some parents had called the school with news that a teacher had been hit in front of Carrefour. My boss hadn't heard, and my texts had not yet reached him.

A receptionist calls me to scrawl my name, and the pharmacist gives me two packets--finally, relief! Tylenol and an antibiotic. Now go home.

And that night, it drained out of me. Whatever "it" is, the last drops seeped out as nauseating waves of pain wrung me around. If there were a conceivable future, not just "something will work out," I would've packed to go home in the morning. But here I have a job and income. In America, I would have family and the new depression. A trans-pacific flight wouldn't carry me away from the jutting bones, the painful guts, the battered body, and moving to 6,000 feet might not help things. I might have to move, but there's no more bike to worry about, and living in a converted hotel will remove the mental presences of cleaning up and doing laundry. Here, I have the damnable physicality that will follow me everywhere, I have the promise of a job (even if it promises to flatten me), I have someone to teach me Reiki and the promise of learning Thai massage and reflexology.

It's just a matter of how much more I'll be asked to give and whether my stores run that deep.

In the morning, another ER doc points out the fracture near the base of my thumb. He molds a plaster board to the bottom of my arm and secures the works with gauze and an ace bandage. I should come back on Saturday to see the osteologist.

Oh, and sorry about the medication last night. Here are some pills that should make up for it.

So here we are. Here I am. The end. Nothing left to give, so don't ask. My landlord rented the place already, there is nothing open in town, and I don't care. I just can't. Something will work out. There's a break coming up, a vacation with friends from back home, and the promise of a new job, new place, new start when I return. Here's hoping the promise starts accruing life. God knows there isn't much left to give, except resounding relief at the close of an incredibly challenging chapter of life.

New game...

Leftie Life

It's bad when the ER nurses are laughing at your wimpering as they wipe on alcohol, worse bleeding in the street while the rumor mill gets word that a farang teacher got sideswiped, not too good when the first doc says nothing's wrong, but the next day another doc says "Fractured thumb, but the leg is just tissue damage and will heal slowly," but the worst feeling is bleeding in the back of an ambulance wondering what'll happen and what already did happen while you can't reach anyone you know to say, "help!"

On Reiki

It has a certain sort of irony I'm still trying to accept as typical: here in Thailand, where massage is almost as integral as noodles, I've found myself compelled to define and defend Reiki to anyone I've told about it.

Unfortunately, I'm enough of a left-brained analyst to credit the doubts and think, "Correlation is not causation, and nothing works unless you want it to.:

Despite that, here's what I can say for Reiki: after my first treatment, I found my smile. I was given chlorophyll to help cleanse the system--1.5 liters of water with a packet of green per day--and meditation exercises to add to my current hour of walking and metta meditation.

I went back to learn Reiki, and after the second week, when I started practicing on myself every morning, my ankles returned to normal, provided aching twigs of bone and sinew can be called normal. But the edema subsided, and it is glorious.

After the third session, I found myself smiling and enjoying being alive while racing away from a black thundercloud. Even more bizarre was an urge to do something: for months, I have wanted only to go home, have a meal, and sleep. To think about visiting a waterfall, going for a walk, or simply putting laundry all the way away (which involves extra trips up the stairs), to feel interest in the world and an urge to experience it, is a welcome refrain from a bygone part of life.

So credit the chlorophyll, the daily decade of egg whites, the dream about a white lady carrying me away, meditation, Reiki, or my body simply trying to recover. I don't care. I'll take any relief I can get.

A good sign

Skip ahead about 4,000 words of past-due post updates. Suffice it to say, I've been spending this month's weekends in my beachside place and just finished a practice reiki session on my teacher. I'm guessing most anyone can infer the rest.

It was somewhat odd when he said, primarily to himself it seemed, "I can really feel the energy" afterward. Is it a surprise when a student is successful?

Anyway, I take it as a good sign that my teacher spent two thirds of the session snoring and twitching.

On adventure driving

I spent many years swearing by the therapeutic uses of Mario Kart and Cruisin' USA.

Somehow, the novelty of such games has worn off now that I live and commute in Nakhorn Sri Thammarat.

Granted, I'm on a hot little jobbie with a killer power to weight ratio and it can be a whole lot of fun zooming through traffic.

But every time I get on the bike, whether to get my late-running butt to campus, get eggs at the store, go out for a lark, limp to the doctor, drive a block or a couple hours, hell, before I even start the thing (how many times have I toppled after the kickstart kicks back?), the rest of the video game world is set to combat mode, and there is no reset or cheat code to change the settings.

So here's the question: next time I see Cruisin' USA, will I beat the sucker or run away screaming?

Perspective on HACCP

Hazard Analysis Critical Control Point: take the temperature of every cooler, every pot, every bowl, every low boy and reach in at least once per hour, record it, and if anything hits 40 degrees, the entire place is shutting down. End of story, capiche?

If you see a chicken breast, sanitize the cutting board. If you think about raw egg, go wash your hands.

Welcome to the commercial, corporate kitchen.

Which is probably the slippery part of the speedbump I can't seem to roll over.

I mentioned my eggy worries to my nutritional consultant.

"Okay, look. Statistically, you've got a 1 in 20,000 chance of finding an egg with salmonella. And here in Thailand, if something's not fresh, you can tell right away, right? If you're worried, keep your eggs in the fridge, but I've been drinking 6-12 eggs per day for fifteen, twenty years, and never had a problem with it. Just drink the eggs."

Picking battles

As it works out, I've been eating about twice as much protein as my body can use, but blood levels are still critical.

It also works out that I've drawn the attention and concern of the powers that be. What's with the farang who's sucking more insurance money than any other farang ever?

They are worried about me. I am so small and soft. Always pale. Too skinny.

I met with my BigBossLady. She is of the same stock as my German Aunt Annie, who I think was an old gray teenager for the allied invasion and has not aged appreciably since, despite beating breast cancer with a mimosa a day, losing her husband and son, and living on from an outright primitive girlhood to be a 21st century grandmother. Same same but different for my BigBossLady: she would wear the same expression whether a tidal wave swept through town, armageddon fell, there were hand grenades in the streets, or a kidlet puked on her new outfit. But she glows for students who do well.

She expressed her concerns, ending with, "I worry about you and your health and I worry that Thailand might not be the place for you."

Gulp.

I returned the next day to apologize for falling apart, for getting sick, for the bike wrecks, for being too sick and weak to hide it from the students. I expressed my enthusiasm for the school, for Thailand, that I have no intention of returning stateside anytime this side of a new economy, and even then, I really like it here.

Evidently, after our conversation, the DirectorOfTheSchoolHimself met with her to talk about me, the skinny guy with all the insurance claims: what on earth was my boss thinking with throwing me to the Regular Program?

A previous visit to a G1 class convinced her that I could broadcast as forcefully as needed, and she stood up for me (pfew).

Going back confirmed the suspicions on which she'd based her argument (double pfew) and granted some openness about the Regular Program and where I'm going with things.

[As I write, I realize how long it's been since I've done any substantive updating: both the Regular Program and Reiki still to come....]

I walked out with the bottom line that I'm doing better, I'm on the upswing, feel consistently better, and will not be visiting the doctor anytime soon, unless I'm in an accident (but I've had my three, so I should be done).

And that's that. Now it's the war for protein.

creepy?

Is it acculturation or resignation when I barely even register the hordes of ants?

Really, it's like trying to avoid nitrogen: why bother?

I tell myself they help keep the keyboard particle-free, but that makes me wonder if "Ant Clot" is a warranty issue.

When worlds meet

Ended up in conversation with a lonely German guy. He was excited because if you drive into the mountains, you can see durian trees. "Haff you try durian?"

No.

"Oh, is great. Has much body for a fruit. I haff some in ze morning and then I not hungry again whole rest of day."

Somehow, I find that easy to believe.

Oatmeal, I salute thee!

Had a realization: as much as I love it, I'm over the spicy. Sure, load up the som tam with chilis--I'll enjoy the heck out of it it without wincing and relish the last tastes I'm going to experience for the next hour or two.

Great, you can pour on enough fish and oyster sauce to make even that palatable (to a Thai).

Fruits get sour salt or spicy sugar.

Meat-cicles are drowned in either painfully sweet or spicy before hitting the grill or fryer, and then they're thrown in a bag with sweet chili, hot chili, sour chili, or sweet hot with a pinch of sour chili sauce ladled on top.

Even deep fried pork belly gets coated with sweet, spicy, or sweet-spicy sauce.

I've only found one, glorious exception: the lady with the AM grill cart next to the Buddhist temple/school grills corn. Usually, this means making a thick paste of palm oil and palm sugar to rub on before grilling--straight white sugar sprinkles afterward--but she grills it straight. And oh, is it fantastic.

Well, come to think of it, there's an odd exemption to the sugar thing: fried breakfast twists. It's the universal fried batter idea, but here in the land where it's impossible to buy coffee or tea without sugar, where you sprinkle sugar on any fruit and most noodles, in soup and over salads, these fresh-fried little donut twists are light and crispy and deep-fried goodness for about half a minute before they cool and start tasting of the grease that's been cooking up deep-fried goodness while soaking up street pollution for all of the past three days.

Bottom line, though, is that it's food that tastes like food, that's not designed to bite back or defend itself or exact revenge, that doesn't have all kinds of crazy additives and enhancers, and when the rest of the morning world comes in "3 in 1" mixes--sugar, creamer, a pinch of coffee--that's close enough. Besides, who doesn't like a little shot of exhaust in the morning?

But at least I didn't scream

Despite my fervent wishes for it to be wild hyperbole, the rumor of Thai dentists not using--i.e. having--Novocaine proved itself true Monday afternoon. But that one I was at least marginally prepared for. What I did not expect was the laugh-track comedy VCD, on which I was fascinated to hear the stereotypical *Ba dum dum* playing in the background and drawing the attention of the doc and his aide, at one point while there was a drill screaming inside my maw. I just about lost it when the aide lost my cheek as she started laughing and I got to choke on a mouthful of spit and drill detritus while she fumbled and got suction going again.

NOT a confidence-builder.

And then the dentist focused in and started drilling in earnest. I used to say that Novocaine doesn't really do much for me, and I believed it--I could still feel everything that was going on.

Boy oh boy how I wish I'd been right.

Still, to fill a cavity cost just over $10, so what do I expect?

This might explain

Numbers might help explain things: we worked out that I need about 1800 calories per day to maintain and drew up a 3000 calorie plan. Later, I worked out that I've been averaging well above that, but the malabsorption factors in hugely--we worked out that I've been living, on average, a 1,500 calorie daily debt. Which explains a lot, it seems.

Time to rethink the 4 eggs in milk three times per day.

On dates

Right now, it's the year 2553. I kinda like the look, but I keep getting confused whether it's the '53 of Duck Dodgers or June Clever. What's endearing is to see the number of kids who write, "2510" on papers.

More dental fun

So I was gnawing on a carrot. A big, crispy, sweet, fantastic carrot. And the little plastic tooth insert snapped in half.

I was rather surprised.

In fact, I was so surprised I swallowed the mouthful instead of spraying it over a market crowd packed in front of a lineup of deep-frying goodness.

I did not attempt to retrieve the plastic tooth insert.

"You first man I see swallow teeth!" said the dentist.

"It has been many years since I've been in for a checkup. Do I need cleaning, too?"

"You come in every six month for cleaning and filling."

"Yes, I know, but it has been a very long time since I've been in. Do I need cleaning or fillings?"

"I give you new teeth and two filling next Monday."

"No cleaning?"

"No. You need brush not so hard. Short strokes for receding gums. Otherwise you get filling to protect roots."

And that was what happened when, after five or so years, I went in for a checkup.

On finding square one

One of my coworkers, a fitness buff who studies diet and is freakish about protein (diced bits of raw beef in a tupperware for munching on over the course of the day), is on the case, and he's already had some great ideas.

He had me write down what I ate yesterday: a few canned coffees, corn and bean salad with quail eggs and sesame dressing, about a pound of the beef and potato sweet curry--the beef was a bad cut in big chunks that were leathery tough, and it was GLORIOUS--fried peas and peanuts, a few fried things on sticks--porkcicles, tofucicles, wonton-wrapped quail eggs, fish and tofu, calamari, and I think there was a fermented fish one--green mango/horseshoe crab salad, fried chicken, a splurge of wine, some chocolate-coated almonds in yogurt.

He opens a page on digestion. First line: "Avoid fat, spice, and sugar. Foods that commonly trigger digestive sensitivities include coffee (got it) spicy food (got it) tofu (got it) acidic foods such as tomatoes or citruses (got it) dairy (got it) soy (got it) peanuts (got it) and fried or processed foods (got it)."

Maybe here's a place to start.

Breakfast?

Is a banana still breakfast if it's in the form of crinkle-cut, deep-fried chips and coated with ground pork cracklins?

On Supervisors

I can say in all honesty that it's great working for someone with my own worst teacher faults--the ego, laziness, hypocritical corner cutting--because it helps me understand how important they are to leave behind.

More medical misadventures! WHEEEEE staircase

I actually felt good yesterday. After the weekend away with a healing session, the prospect of learning the practice next week, legs limber and edema-free (if weak), I even had some bounce when I walked out of the bathroom.

It wasn't anywhere near a swan dive. Not even a faceplant. Just an ohfuckmethisisgonnahurt as I lost it on the top step and toppled down the metal staircase toward the tile landing.

I did miss the stairs themselves, mainly. And my landing grunt wasn't loud enough to rouse any of the classrooms. I was able to stand up and gimp into the library, where I fell into blubbering while my left elbow—the one that's been broken and chipped already, the side of the broken thumb, collar bone, sprained ankle, sprained wrist—began throbbing and swelling in equal measure, although the pain soon pulled ahead in the camel race.

Once I was composed enough, I gimped up to my boss's office: something wrong with a leg, too. “Fell down the staircase. Going to the hospital.”

“You okay, man? Need a ride?”

“No, I'm okay to drive. Please let Teacher Brooke know I'll be gone. I'll leave a DVD of the final exam for Teacher Lakhona.”

Heh, okay to drive. Visions of my not inconveniencing anyone popped: the pain camel made it to the end and popped the balloon first. I was starting to gray out.

“Boss? Gonna need a ride. I'm at your truck.”

I cried and bellyached all the way to the hospital—the helplessness of falling apart coupled with the inconvenience of covering my weaknesses compounded by falling apart in a country on the far side of the world where my support group consists of the very people for whom, back home, I would hold the stiff upper pucker, as it were.

Now here I am, two months in-country, on about the tenth visit to the hospital, this time driven by my boss for what's promising to be my third physiology-altering accident.

He drops me off and returns to find me in the ER staging area. But then a nurse takes me to the packed waiting room and waves for me to sit to be weighed and pulsed. I promise to call with results and for a ride back and my boss splits.

At first, I failed the BP test—too low. So I sat up and got angry and things spiked: 88/58, pulse up to 66. Temperature normal but I've lost weight. Damn.

She waves me to another nurse, who says, “Surgeon doctor come see you soon.”

“Surgeon? Surgeon? Mai, mai, mai surgery. Jeb. Jeb jeb. Big pain,” pointing to the elbow tucked into my side.

She nods and waves for me to sit not in the waiting area but in one of the comfy chairs just outside the doctors' office bank, where typically you sit for extremely short-term stagings. Good news.

The throbbing caught up and popped the other balloon after about 30, maybe 40 minutes. I'm not too sure. I was going gray, had been for a while, and then I was out, and then another nurse was there with a bitty little safety cup of water.

“Surgeon doctor be half an hour.”

I guess I was out for a while, because the clock said an hour had elapsed. I started getting angry. “Jeb! Tablet? Something? I HURT!”

An angry farang in the waiting room, yelling about pain in a horrible accent, turns out to be some great motivation. I was in the ER, trying to talk with a doc, in under a minute.

When it gets down to it, you'd think an ashen-faced person pointing and saying, “pain, pain PAIN!” would get the message across. But this guy is reading my chart. I might be the first farang he's seen come walking in, or the first farang he's seen with a record at the hospital. Or maybe he's just that sort of guy.

He started out pointing at my weight: too low.

Right. We've been here.

So we go through my history, and the questions roll like the Miranda Rights from a cop approaching retirement: an exact repeat of the transcriptions in front of him, save that now the edemas have subsided, with, “Oh, hmmm, hmm, protein... loosing, protein-loosing... en, en, enter, enter-o-pa-ty; protein-losing enteropathy, hmmm, hmmmm.” Finally he comes to the present page, which has my sketch of a staircase with acceleration lines leading to a splat.

He points to his head, “Jeb, mai?” Pain in the head?

“Mai,” no, but I'm ready to hurt the greased coif.

Then the neck.

No.

Then the head.

“Trauma to the lateral side of the left ulnar tuberosity, minor contusion to the lateral side of the right radius.”

He looks at me and I hand him my elbow. “Jeb.”

He pats his ribs, his stomach, “Jeb, mai?”

“Mai. Jeb,” I wiggle my elbow.

He pokes the various bones and muscles and finds the lateral side of the tuberosity, where the tendons from the forearm connect. “JEB!”

I start browning out while waiting for the X-ray, haze off after getting waved back to the hot, crowded sitting area. Meditate: focus on the breath, in and out and in and out. Focus. Acknowledge the pain but let it pass. Concentrate on the airflow.

A nurse comes up and takes me back to the ER, where the doc has my elbow up on his vertically-oriented widescreen monitor.

“No broken. Sprained in tendon, bruised in bone.” He waves for my right arm. “Same same: bruised in bone.” And then he waves me to a gurney, which I hate. During the last significant procedures, the array of IV and vital sign monitors, plus the heft of the auto recline features, made the gurneys look less obviously like corpse transport. Nothing hiding the Thai version, or the neighbors who are bleeding profusely inside rings of nurses. Did I forget to mention that it's an open ER and there are three patients with sundry gore hanging out? It helps the ambience, really.

Despite the stir of climbing up with shoes on, they get me situated on the gurney and begin the poke-n-prod.

Head: rock hard.

Neck: intact.

Ribs: protrude *wince* and are tender.

DON'T TOUCH THE LEFT ARM.

Right arm: distal tenderness.

Abdomen: “You need eat more.” Old abrasion from the bike wreck. New minor abrasion from the stairs. Who knew?

Left leg: intact.

Right leg: intact, intact, oh. Abrasion the length of the tibia. Huh. Who knew? Much ado about cleaning and closing it, and an inch-thick gauze shinguard before they release me. And I'm still waiting for pain medication.

“Okay, you good go home!” says the doc.

“Pain medicine. Please. Pain. Tablet.”

“Oh, you hurting? Okay.”

And with that, I went home. My boss picked me up, I picked up my computer, and went home to a movie I bought from a discount counter: Me and the Ugly Duckling, by a Scandahoovian group reminiscent of Pixar before they went Disney. Great movie.

Took a nap from 3-5, went to bed at 6:30, woke up with the neighbor at 4:45.

And today I am functional. Hurt like hell, and I'm beyond sick and tired of hurting, but I'm functional. Here's hoping my body kicks in before the drugs give out.

Destination: paradise. Location: unnamed

Email or ask me and I'll recommend the hell out of it, but I will not post this place on the Internet. Unless I was getting paid, in which case I would write, “sleepy backwater staging area without much to offer, especially in light of the opportunities for which it is a launch point.” Not a lie, but not the entire truth by even a partial stretch.

It hit me this morning while I took my morning float in the ocean: this is where I'd send my grandparents, were they still of the traveling vintage. Oma would've loved the beach, the mountains, the markets, the everything, and Opa would've been happy with the golfing, caves, and waterfalls. All within a few minutes' drive. More on those later, after I do some exploring.

With a full weekend and light pack, it would be possible to walk most of the beach, staying either in a hammock or stopping at one of the populated areas for a $20ish bungalow. While miles and miles of open beach might present trespassing or food-packing thoughts in the States, this is Thailand. Just start walking. True, there might be a stretch of a few miles without readily-accessible stirfry, but if you're nervous, take lunch to go wherever you get breakfast. Or second lunch wherever you stop for the first edition. And the entire walk will be only as interesting as you can make a Thai version of whitesand, speckled with myriad seashells and sundry washed-ashore critters, punctuated by archetypal beachside bar and grils, bungallows, and luxury resorts. If you're the sort who can very legitimately say : whitesand? Seen better, done that, give me ______” this is not the place. If you can be excited by a seashell, the impression of a starfish, a swarm of crabs devouring a jellyfish, a jellyfish, or simply spending a day determining whether it's more fun to walk where the sand bleaches as your feet compress out the moisture or where the wave action tickles your toes, or if the novelty of such stretching out a hammock or sleeping bag just somewhere along a stretch of such beach is enough to justify a sidetrip, this is paradise.

My grandparents would be hung up on the lack of a supermarket in town: elsewhere, they would make daily trips for fruit or yogurt or laundry detergent or toenail clippers or whatever else—consider it a geriatric form of barhopping. In many places, they would be absolutely crippled by a Thai-style market. Here, though, there is enough tourist infrastructure that the vendors are accustomed to farangs, if not always English, and arecompletely prepared to make gestural transactions without a common language.

And the fruit is fresh and the seafood is still flopping and there are pigs heads being chopped up right next to fermenting mounds of fish and it's all very grand and exciting to farang eyes, but it takes up half a block, not half a section, and, as I said, they speak English. And if they don't, it's for good reason: you don't want it (say, the partially dried fish you pound and mash into fish paste: you can't eat it plain, and if you've been around long enough to know how it's made, you know it's worth it to buy pre-made by someone's grandmother who's been doing it since the last Rama's reign, or if not her, someone who grew up listening to and smelling her process and product). On their own, Oma and Opa would've found the food carts on the sidewalk (sidewalks are for drawing revenue and parking, streets are for overflow parking and walking) and within a day or two would've ventured into the dark depths. Carts are easy because what they have is what you see: if someone were pushing a cart large enough for an actual refrigeration unit, the only reason they would want to hide a product would be to protect its unsalable state. And here in Thailand, if you find, say, a packet of hotdogs “on special” you check for mold first, the date second, give a detailed and scrupulous sniff-check third, and if you still can't figure out why the company wouldn't want to make a profit on them, you take them home and plan on cooking the possibility of life out of them in the most literal sense; if there meat cooler has a “clearance sale” area, it's fascinating to poke at in the same way it's fascinating to poke at a decomposing something that washed in on the tide, except you probably would never intentionally eat a mound of jellyfish plasma or beached whale.

Not to say my grandparents would gravitate to the cart selling whatnot cuts, although Oma grew up in Germany and loves blood sausage, headcheese, and lung soup, or that they wouldn't balk at the lack of American levels of sanitation.

What I do believe is that if my geriatric little grandparents made the effort to shuffle into the market, the proprietors would more than reply in kind.

And for the hard days, the raining days, travel-weary days, they would be in a place they consider comfortable at a price even they consider reasonable; they could stay in and not regret it for want of comfort. What's remarkable is that this one, main stretch of beach, the developed 6 or 8 K, has everything from a beach bar where you show up with your hammock or sleeping bag and leave after your noontime breakfast beer to a resort where James Bond would stay while tracking a supervillain in one of the nearby islands; wait, that was Goldfinger, wasn't it?

A neighboring town, close enough to confuse or render geographically identical, the town I would write about in my guidebook article because it's a port that has long since sold itself to making the easiest nickel, so it has the handbag and movie sellers, the Guci and Pradda and CK jeans that have one leg three inches short, the shops selling half-emptied bottles of designer fragrances, all that stuff usually associated with Thailand street markets, but it's still small enough to be safe for people like my grandparents. Maybe they get taken, but that means spending $5 on something that should've cost $3.

And the wats and temples are all over, the caves and waterfalls and islands, and the museums and cultural centers are within a short distance and, more importantly, easy drive. Not a cross-Bangkok commute, just hopping on the highway and getting off when the signs say so.

So if you're in southern Thailand and looking for places, I have a recommendation for you. But if you're one of the faceless millions looking for insider info on “The Real” Thailand, go have some fun with yourself and read a map. Maybe you'll luck out and get lost in a horribly uncomfortable backwater slum; there's the real Thailand. Or maybe you'll end up in a hyperdeveloped prostitute paradise; there's the real Thailand. Or maybe you'll luck out and strike the perfect balance. That's also Thailand.

The culinary oddity post

It's me, so you knew this was coming.

Town has a great market. Score. Deep fried on a stick, barbecued in a bag, and seafood from the port across the street.

Generally, seafood in a port town, especially when fresh-caught and just-fried, is pretty amazing. I'll confess to going out of my way for it. And the shrimp cakes didn't disappoint: shrimp with lemongrass and chili in a thick egg batter fried into fritters most comparable in size and texture—although about antithetical in flavor—to my grandmother's potato pancakes, with a bit of extra crunch from the shell.

Fresh baby shrimp, lemongrass, chili, some leafy greens (maybe mustard?) a dash of Waugh's curry powder, and enough egg to hold it together until the protein sets up in a bath of nearly-smoking oil.

But then there were the fish: most of the fish on sale is not quite dead. I figured I'd be safe with whole fried skates, a big side fillet of white meat and some little, cooked looking jobbies in a reddish sauce.

Well, the little jobbies were sundried, bone-in sardines with the sweet barbecue that goes on Chinese pork ribs. And the hank of whitefish was, well, hard to describe: I can't really call it a spitter because it would've been easier to gnaw off a mouthful of steel-belted radial. By the time I did finally get a mouthful, all the flavor had been leeched and I found myself sucking on a hunk of proteinish resilience.

Based on the skin, I thought it was a big mackerel. But it might've been a shark, as one end was solid and crunchy with cartilaginous resilience.

I joke that I'm the human garbage disposal, but it really has been a long time since I've thrown away much food. Usually, I'd rather suffer through eating something I've botched than give up on it.

But I couldn't find any redeeming aspects of the whatever it was. It wasn't crispy fried, it didn't have great dried-beef flavor, it wasn't even horribly alluring and pungent. It was a bland, rubbery, jaw-aching challenge to gnaw into a mouthful, and by then it was a lump of flavorless.

Call the skates a victory, although even that was mixed: they fry up with a texture similar to, say, turkey jerky. But there's a catch. Of course. The skin: they have one-way teeth on their skin, and nasty little nubbins run down their tails. If they are either mature enough to be growing the tail spikes, or the processing didn't quite get the bigger nubbins on the skin, it's kind of like biting into turkey jerky through a nice layer of sandpaper.

Here's where the Thais nail it as well as French cooking: tap the local flora for anything that could reduce or counteract the negative characteristics of the local fauna, marinade the hell out of it in spicy sweet acidic something, then throw it either on extreme heat to kill any undesireables without compromising flavor, or slow-cook it until any of the originally undesirable characteristics have been reduced to tender morsels of flavor.

Chicken intestines (which is my best guess of what exactly they were) are succulent and have a creamy finish. Pig lung has the texture of organ meat but the flavor of a shoulder roast. Heart and tongue are just good, dark meat. And jellied blood is as expected: not the inherent flavor nearly so much as the culmination of what went into it; would be great with camembert cheese, in the edition I tried.

What's odd is that chicken whatnots are more expensive than trimmed-up strips of chicken breast: flavor-wise, there's no comparison. But it's odd to come from the Americophobic world and see boneless, skinless (flavorless) breast for less than the weirdo whatnots that usually get thrown away.

Crashing on other halves

I decided to splurge and booked a bungalow on the beach with a healing treatment. It makes me feel better to think that part of the music position went because I'm so darn draggy from being so darn sick. So maybe, if I get well... and since so many therapies have done so little good... and here I am.

Town needs some more time before I say anything about it. It's an off-track tourist trap that isn't, and I'm not quite sure why. What matters for the present narrative is that I'm here, anticipating a rejuvenating experience, heading for the bar/grill the proprietor recommended, anticipating being home by 6 and out by 8. But then a beautiful blonde girl walks up and tells me my name, where I work, and my closest coworkers. Eh?

Gotta love the information age.

She sits and we talk and it's very nice, and she mentions a concert she's here for and alarm bells go off. It's not that I'm so curmudeonly that a concert on a Thai beach is unappealing, it's that a long sleep in a seaside bungalow without neighbors or alarms sounds beautiful enough to justify handing over more than I'm comfortable putting in print.

Another NST farang shows up and relieves some conversational burden. It's good to know that I'm still painfully, socially fatally awkward when it comes to small talk with attractive members of the opposite sex.

I figured there would be a crowd of farangs going to this bigtime show, and I'd have an easy time slipping out. But no: I was 20% of the population.

And how fascinating: It was a solid five hours of sitting on the beach while beer flowed; one of the later arrivals pulled out a bottle of whiskey and ordered cokes; shots of tequilla; the liberal distribution and partaking of mind-altering substances. And I nursed on beers chewed with buckets of ice cubes, snuck to the bathroom to pee and have another Coke Light while pointedly not thinking about the culinary goodies I could be ordering for the same cost.

Go figure: at the same time I order a sugar-free soda, I'm thinking about french fried potatoes with ample ketchup, chicken wings, or maybe a cheeseburger with an egg sunny side up. I can honestly say I've been off it for so long that I just don't like the syrupy blanket of regular sodas, but there you go.

I digress.

We were, as I said, at a beachside bar and grill, which is to say, we were sitting around a plywood platform with sand in our toes and crevices.

A word on sand: the Thai beaches I've seen have all disappointed my whitesand expectations. My beach experience—limited to the West Coast and Hawaii—has been of either finely decomposed and powdered sand that occasionally has striations of darker or lighter minerals but is otherwise homogenous, or of wild conglomerations of barely-decomposed rocks and shells; the former are beaches for sunning and swimming, the latter for combing and poking.

Everyone seems to talk about Thailand's whitesand beaches, which to me carries the connotation of pure white, pulverized talc or pumice without a blemish beyond footsteps. In reality, the beaches are a homogenous blend of sand, rock, and shell in all states of decomposition. Depending on the tidal forces, you can walk in sand soft enough to host a naked baby's bum, or broken shell fragments that will shred even callused feet. And as with everything in Thailand, they're not really white: could've been, maybe even recently, but there's a pervasive layer of grody turning it a dull off-brown.

Same with the crystal water and clear blue sky: it could happen, but the pervasive reality is that it's too humid for the sky to turn what my Alpine eyes would consider a clear blue, even when the overcast burns off. Let's not mention the pollution.

And the nice, sandy bottom means that the shallow water looks dirty brown unless you're seeing it from straight above on an unnaturally clear day, when it would appear crystal clear and sandy instead of adding a sandy brown tint to a reflection of the tan-brown sky.

As the hours drag, at least for me (nothing against watching mentally altered people, especially intelligent ones whose conversation gets quite fascinatingly fragmented, but sometimes it falls a little flat, like when you have a nice patch of sand and could very happily fall asleep on it) I found myself mostly silent. I have very little to add to conversations about beach parties, the advantages of certain hookups, the latest movies on the home-recorded circuit. I kept thinking that someone was missing something somewhere, trying to figure out where I diverged from what seemed to be the accepted path, and failing in the process But it was too late to bail, and too early to believably quit, so I was there through many rounds of debate—is the group really coming? Really? You think they would actually play this gig?

Apparently, I've come to the area on the opening of a swanky resort, and they're having this band perform on a stage set up on the beach. It's an invite-only dinner for owners and the big shakers of the local economy, with fireworks kicking off the post-dinner gala. Fireworks and a band with a guy playing Kenny G style riffs on an alto and occasional Enya covers. I've never heard of this reggae group, wouldn't know what to make of it if I had, but I'm having serious doubts a respectable group would show up for the gig.

It is finally decided that we should go check out the place—stash our bags under the tables and mosey on down the beach. Enroute, my compatriots discuss the merits of various sleeping accommodations: behind the fence at the bar and grill is popular, but there's another bar down the beach where a bunch of Rastas live in hammocks anyway, so it's a great place to crash.

After a phone call from his wife/girlfriend, Charlie, who owns the B&G walks down to meet us and get us in past the security guards who've been hanging out behind the stage, smoking.

A small group could fit comfortably on the stage, and, based on the swanky sorts of charity benefit concerts I've worked, a couple hundred beach chairs could be set on the beach in front of the resort/condos.

Instead, the stage lights flash down on a dozen grass mats with tamarind rounds placed to keep their vacant selves in place. At the top of the beach, little pagodas with sheer white curtains and white leather couches have offset lighting designed to compliment the evening formalwear within. Behind the pagodas, the condominiums.

Walking to the bar is disconcerting. On one level, the house pours are Johnnie Black, Sapphire, Chopin, and Bacardi Superior. And they're free. And when I order a Johnnie and soda, thinking it will make for the most enjoyable nursing, especially with ice, the bartender gets it backwards from the get-go. He pulls out a tumbler, drops in an ice cube, melts it with about eight shots of the good stuff, and floats a splash of soda on the nee-ice cube.

Never in my life have I seen such a drink from a professional.

This drink is what my grandmother poured herself on a bad night, but she didn't use a pint glass. This drink is what you don't make at home when you realize that a glass is just a formality and there's nobody around to care.

And the smiling man in traditional Thai finery just handed it to me.

I'm not sure if it's a good or a bad thing, but it's a trip.

Also odd is the racial breakdown: men in cabanas are white and either robustly larger than reality or trimmed superlatively sleek. Each has at least one woman with him, and she is either breathtakingly a beautiful Thai doing shame to Western evening wear or a Scandahoovian blonde with enough money to amplify already preternaturally-attractive features.

Accents vary between the universal off-Oxford, Germanic, and Scandahoovian. Nobody around the cabanas speaks Thai audibly.

Behind the bar, passing enroute to the lounges, Thai people exchange whispered snippets as they glide in oppressively-sumptuous looking silky things. As I rove, I find them in back rooms and segregated corners; here are the locals, the people making a life in paradise by leeching from rich tourists, but the ones with class enough to hide it; here are the people with wear calluses and grill burns on their hands, people whose steps do not jiggle the boards as they walk; here are my people, but as I stand in the graceful light from poolside candles and subtle track lighting from behind swank picture windows, effectively illiterate and dumb, wearing road-weary athletic pants and a 100B polo, obviously crashing the culture and the party and without the know-how to say otherwise, I am completely unwelcome.

First time that's happened in Thailand. Usually, my farang skin and a stupid smile get me in. In America, listing my pedigree would do the trick. Here, I failed.

I am of neither the working nor luxury class, though part of me wants to prove that I am accustomed to rubbing shoulders with each. I am a backpacking farang without interest in drugs or parties. I am an instructor, a respected and upright position in this culture, educating elite children, and I'm doing so because it seemed more interesting than what I was doing back home.

Who am I? What identity am I chasing? What do I hope to find? Why am I here? And not in the Big Question sense—what the hell am I doing in Thailand?

No, I did not make any progress toward any answers. But I did realize where I'd seen this place before: every single James Bond movie in a tropical setting. Teak sidewalks, glowing candles set in polished stones in thick glass vases, swimming pools gently overflowing and cascading into filters buried under natural stone, beautiful and brightly-colored, if not necessarily colorful, locals serving bottomless top-shelf cocktails, and me walking through it toward a crowd of farangs who brought in 40s of cheap beer and are the only ones hooting at a woman gyrating under two flaming hula hoops.

It was indeed the big, famous reggae group. I might recognize the name if I saw them, and I would definitely not recognize the music. But I have no doubt it was the best group the more-than-considerable funds of those 48 people in attendance could drum up. So maybe, were I inclined, I could brag about seeing one of the biggest reggae groups in Southeast Asia, or about crashing the opening gala in a new and uber exclusive resort, or I could brag about the amount of drugs going on around me. I certainly do wonder how it happened, or why, but for now, it's worth marveling that here's me, in Thailand, in a job that allows a weekend spent in a beach bungalow for a curative round of Eastern medicine.

Huh?

Welcome to Thailand?

(PS: photos taken on my cell phone did not come out: black backgrounds with globs of light that not even I can distinguish. Go figure, I left my camera with the conviction I would be back home, in bed, early.)

An upside to the rainy season?

I called my landlady. "There's no water--I came home, washed my face in the bathroom, and the water stopped. I can hear the neighbors' pumps running, so I think there's water in the system, but I don't have any of it."

"You mean you've used up the blue barrels of rainwater?"

"No, when I turn on the faucet, no water comes out. The pump doesn't come on. The filter has no pressure. No water."

"Oh, so there is water in the buckets?"

"Yes. I haven't been using it. All the buckets are full."

"Okay, then. You'll be okay tomorrow, and I'll call if i need to come out tonight."

And that's that. The water's off, so there's rainwater.

Welcome to Thailand.

Thou shalt not

Go figure: I'm in a Buddhist country that shares geography with one of the largest Muslim nations in the world (I'm on the Malay peninsula, so I somehow feel justified in claiming Indonesia as a neighbor), in a town with one of the oldest Buddhist sites in this Buddhist country, a town that shuts down for every Buddhist holiday because the streets become impassable and 90% of the businesses vacate.

Before one such day, I asked a senior faculty member who was born here and has lived here all her life if she knew of a good spot to watch the parades and processions. I received an extremely terse, "I am Christian! I not know such things!"

Then I asked someone, less senior, about the Quaran. I'm fascinated by its linguistic beauty, but I'm thrown by the historical aspects of its creation: at any given point, there seems to be one of four narrators who cycle without any narrative indicators, and I'm curious who's talking and to what audience.

Heh.

Just imagine walking around Texas wearing a banner that says, "Beware, infidel scum! Jihadi in Training!"

He really did seem like a nice enough, reasonable enough, reasoned enough guy.

I guess I should listen to the students during our morning patriotic/propaganda sessions: "The School Motto: The Fear of the Lord is the Beginning of Wisdom. The School Philosophy: Knowledge and Righteousness will Guide our Lives."

Fear, not questioning, of the Lord, with Righteousness, not inquiry or curiosity or investigation, will guide our lives.

On Gear

I guess I am feeling better--I'm dreaming of camping on the beach. And I'm just half a pinch away from doing it; all I need is the equipment to satisfy my type-A self that I'm being smart about sleeping out in an area prone to mosquito-borne diseases and monsoon rains.

I left my gear at home, thinking (rightly, it proves) that I'd be packed to the max with a tuba and the gear for everyday life. I also thought (wrongly, it proves) that I'd be able to find dirt cheap, if low quality, gear over here; who cares if a tent only lasts a dozen trips if you only pay $30?

Well, half wrong.

Running on piss and vinegar, I priced out camping gear last night. Turns out, I was only half wrong about the gear here--it is flimsy crap, but it costs half again as much as name-brand back home. I cringe at the thought of what I would consider quality equipment, and I'm just not ready to sling a hammock under a banana tree and weather out whatever comes. (Locals camp with a hammock, maybe a tarp, and one of those pincher grill baskets for cooking over the fire. It's not the same, at all, but serious rains in the Alps turned me off just getting rained on, and I'm too conditioned to be paranoid of malaria and dengue to trust just sleeping out.)

Which brings up the issue of gear: at home, I'm equipped for ultralight, cool and dry backpacking, or ultrawarm arctic outings. What's not goose down is wool, or here with me, save for my pad, packs, tent and bivvy sack.

But I'm in the tropics. Wool? HELLS no!

Ultra-lightweight down sleeping bag? Mold.

Water-resistant down sleeping bag? Death under -40 insulation.

Bivvy sack? Unventilated e-vent material: mold. Plus it's too small to comfortably weather a monsoon.

Tent? Non-freestanding, not to be trusted with serious rain or camping outside of nice, firm, packed dirt surfaces.

Which comes to the things I could use: my pack and pad. But to ship them, from what I recall of international flat-rate, would again cost more than the international flat rate on the rei.com order.

And with that, I think I've talked myself into a new tent, pad, bag, and pack, shipped from America, for just over what I would pay for a Thai-grade tent here in the cheap part of the country.

Welcome to Thailand, I guess.