When the tsunami struck southern Thailand three years ago to this day, Christian Thais asked me, “Is this it, the Apocalypse?” That’s what I want to know. You tell me. I felt that one, too, the earthquake that is, hundreds of miles away up close to the Golden Triangle. I was lying in bed on the upper floor of a house we’d just moved into. I thought it was falling down. Then I turned on the news a couple of hours later. Of course, other countries got hit much worse, but they were not major tourist destinations. Thailand had less than five thousand casualties, while Indonesia had more than one hundred thousand, but Thailand got the movie. Indonesia got dried food. India and Sri Lanka both had far more casualties than Thailand, but Thailand got the sympathy vote. Thailand markets itself so aggressively, that sometimes it’s hard to tell what’s real and what’s just publicity. It’s doubtful that half of what is taught in Thai schools as history is accurate. Immigrated from Mongolia? Huh? Why, because the region is called ‘Altai’? O-kay. Nobody’s sure who ruled the historical kingdom of Nanchao, so Thais claimed that, too. It’s like the old SNL ‘liar’ character played by Jon Lovitt. “Yeah, that’s right…” The psychology section of a typical Thai bookstore is filled with books on marketing. I shit you not. “I’m OK, you’re OK?” Naaa… How about, “I’m rich, you’re not.” The local Big C supermarket in Chiang Rai goes by the textbook in its marketing ‘techniques’ designed to confuse the customer, get him lost, and make him overpay. They’re evil. They’re the only game in town. I don’t want to talk about last week’s elections.
Then the next year a swath of coastline from Mobile to Houston was removed from most maps, and even worse than that in New Orleans, which got something of a double-bypass ‘soulectomy’, unlike anything seen since the War of Northern Aggression. I watched that from a stool in my favorite watering hole back home by the triangle. Let’s clear the air right here right now- nobody could have prevented the Katrina disaster, short of moving the entire city. I’m no big fan of the Bushmaster, but calling ‘racism’ because of N’awlins is a little irresponsible. He IS sleeping with Connie after all. It’s true; I read it on the Internet. But everybody ‘down there’ always knew that the Big Easy was a disaster waiting to happen, just a little too big and a little too easy for its own good. Maybe the people actually straddling that river of denial didn’t know, or care to acknowledge it, but in Mississippi we all knew. N’awlins was where you went to get lost, where you went to die if nobody loved you any more, where you went to do things ungodly. Sometimes those things ungodly would find you whether you went looking for them or not, part of the Napoleanic Code of Injustice. Everybody was in on the corruption. It can’t go back like it was before. Everything’s different now. Everybody’s watching. New Orleans will be re-born better, if not bigger. Global warming? Apocalypse? Why Aceh, New Orleans, and Phuket, home to thousands of jihadis, junkies, and other assorted pragmatists? Eschatology is the starting point of religion, mortality sandwiches.
But that’s not what I want to talk about. I want to talk about home. This is America. This is Christmas Day. Channel 28 here has nothing but a fire burning on TV all day. Talk about reality TV! But that triggers memories, just like it’s supposed to. You can go home again. Maybe Thomas Wolfe can’t, but I can. I have to, to see what I missed. Many histories are possible. How do you know which path you took until you actually arrive somewhere? Everything is relative to the point of measurement. That’s what time travel is all about, experiencing the same place at different times, without necessarily having to travel the entire distance to get there. You’re only limited by speed and memory. You can do it in pure memory alone or you can actually get up off your butt and go there. The only question is: what home? Americans have no ‘home of birth’ the way Asians do, the way Latinos do, the way most of the traditional world does. In Thailand you never lose that; that piece of land is your claim to nationality. Without a house registration, you are nothing. Rents are low, btw. A few years ago all Thais had to go to their ‘birth home’ to vote, like Mary riding Joseph’s ass all the way to Bedlam, belly full with baby and the future of the world. Fortunately it was a bright clear night. Except for the Deep South, America knows little or nothing of this. Up north the kids grow up and move out west while the old folks move to Florida. Nobody’s left on the old block except the second-string team, the ones who wanted to go somewhere and be something but couldn’t break the pull of gravity.
Hub and spoke traditional systems still hold sway only in the old South, so maybe you move away then move back, on and on in some succession of tentative pokes at the outside world, testing its limits against your own, with some sort of ‘breakthrough’ more to be feared than welcomed. This is possible largely because most ‘outsiders’ don’t especially want to move there in the first place, though that’s changing. Little by little the restless mobile virtual America is taking over, allowing people the freedom to fail without being subject to ridicule ‘back home’, simply because there is nothing there. Killers go berserk to seize their moment of fame simply because that’s all there is left in a virtual world, a body count and ads sold. In Mississippi everybody still knows everybody, and you can go back and find your best friend still sitting in the same old comfy chair you left him in ten years ago, older Budweiser. This conveys a certain responsibility upon all parties involved, kinda’ like village Communism, rule by jealousy and judgment.
But that’s still the dark side. This is not N’awlins, long drowning in the swamp, choked on its French roots and its Spanish moss, and Mississippi’s maybe a little too close to home. That’s the hand I was dealt, after all, not the one I chose. I still love it, of course, but with the love of family, not the love of spouse. I’m not Asian, my wife keeps reminding me. I’m American, forever young and rebelliousness by definition. After many trial runs, Flagstaff was the home I chose, or at least the US ‘home base’. It’s a dry cold. After ten years of semi-residence, I still keep a mailbox and a storage unit and a contingent of safe havens and various unresolved projects. Welcome to my world. After many more geodesic meanderings and tentative pokes and partial penetrations of South America, the elliptical orbits began to center around some ‘strange attractor’ in Asia. This took the form of a little brown-haired brown-eyed girl that could figure out a way to be a pain in the butt to the statue of Lincoln, all the while propping him up with enough faith and courage to keep coming around for more, though not enough to ever feel totally fat and sassy. I stay hungry. Who really knows what ol’ Abe is doing when not looking honest for the tourists, anyway? Scratching that pain in his butt, probably.
Well, the girl and I tied knots, literally wrapped at the wrist in white twine, and that meant that Thailand was to be the home I inherited, albeit with conditions. Chaotic love keeps you in random orbits that only appear normal when averaged. Call it the ‘flutter-by’ effect, related to the inverse ‘squared squared’ law of love in chaos, in which gravitational love is felt in direct proportion to the square of the distance from the source, not the opposite as in classical physics. Any closer and you crash on the rocks of bankruptcy and dependence; any farther and you drift into the ether, attached only in memory. The moon is slowly drifting away, after all. We just tend not to notice. It looks to be the same size as the Sun. That will change. This is a quantum world, after all, contrary to common sense, where familiarity breeds contempt, and everything is the opposite of what it seems. Your beer-drinking good-time buddies are the people who hold you back and you rely on the kindness of strangers to accept you at face value, your own best face. Only a few friends transcend the ordinary back-slap of gratuitous condescension and become a surrogate family, still there when the old man’s long gone and old age is coming on. This is my America, positively Fourth Street. Every city’s got one.
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