GREAT TRAVELS, GREAT WRITERS: Stephens & Leonowens

Have you ever noticed that the best travel writers never really considered themselves as such?  Look at anybody’s list of favorites and you’ll see names like Kerouac, Bowles, Matthiessen, etc. quite often, along with names like Theroux and Iyer, writers who certainly consider themselves travel writers, but not exclusively.  You’ll only rarely if ever see a guidebook writer.  But there is a historical tradition which goes back directly to Marco Polo and Ibn Battutah , and even Tacitus and Herodotus, before them. 

TO REFLECT IS HUMAN, TO SHINE IS DIVINE

America can be brutal, a little bit of Gitmo in all of us and waiting around every corner. This morning was a good example. It’s never fun being awoken at 6am by bangings on the door and bargings on in by what sound like Israeli storm troopers. It’s small consolation that it’s only (?!) the landlord, doing his job without proxy nor finesse. Such are the trials of renting, or rather sub-leasing, an apartment, borrowing a piece of the rock rather than buying it. That’s the problem with cheap hotels also, not the funkiness itself which can be lovable, but the funky attitudes of your neighbors, who can be self-centered and petty, no matter how politically correct. You can hardly blame the landlord being pissed at irregularities in his complexes, though the methods may be a bit heavy-handed. For all he knows I may be cooking up meth in the bathtub, our modern alternative to gin. There’s more than one way to beat Depression. Myself I feel like the junkie whose life revolves around that one all-consuming fix, whether good or bad, in this case my wife, something of a soup Nazi herself on bad days. If she has a bad day, then so do I; she’ll make sure of that. She’s perennially concerned that my minimalistic lifestyle vis a vis possessions, or lack thereof, is basically a smokescreen for the fact that I’m a loser and she’ll end up penniless and faceless. She may be right. Financial statements mean nothing to her. Actually I feel like my main accomplishment in life is that I’ve been at least marginally successful without becoming the victim of it all, possessed by my possessions. How do you explain that to a Buddhist? It should be easy. It’s not. Shacking up in Hollywood I feel literally like a kid with his first apartment. At my age that’s cool….

Right now might be a good time to thank you, my faithful readers, who heeded my call to subscribe, for what I promised would be a thrill-a-minute through the wacky ways of Thailand and assorted arcane geographic locations. How did I know that the visa papers for my wife would show up at the door in Thailand all of a sudden calling her to interview? A few short months later, here we are, far from Thailand and even farther from the open road and open skies of travel. Actually if you consider LA the 77^th province of Thailand, then I guess we aren’t so far away after all, for what that’s worth, on the surface probably not much. By reputation that’s all there is, surface. LA loses itself, or finds itself, in chockablock development, strip mall after car lot after weenie palace after homeless hovel, 1056 shades of nothingness all somehow blending itself into something quintessentially American and marketing itself to the world as ‘the dream.’ Go figure. So here I’m stuck in superficial LA, the epitome of everything I’ve ever held useless, all the while wishing it cared about me more than I cared about it. It’s a love/hate relationship you see, the fact that I’ve never been very successful here defining the logic by which I fail to see its benefit, that and the fact that it can be one goddawful lonely place. That’s what Tang’s here for. She thinks I’m here for her. After all Thailand gives superficiality a good name, or at least a better one. They love it here and in Las Vegas, the more mindless the better. So as we dig our heels in here, sketchy at best are my goals for this blog because there’s no mo’ Thailand in the immediate future nor more travel either. My God! I’m stuck! So far from God, so close to Mexico! I’ll find other writing projects. That’s why I started this blog anyway; I was doing so much travel and had no other current writing projects. So what do I do here now? If you wanted to hear ruminations on individual pasts and collective futures, you’d be reading the other blog. You’re not.

It’s funny, not this blog or the other one either, but the fact that this blog has more subscribers, mostly friends, but hardly any comment. My friends are like that. The other ‘time travel blog’ has more comment, especially whenever I talk about Guatemala. They’re different from Thailand’s fans. I don’t want a forum anyway, so illiterate is the general populace, and I wouldn’t have the heart to tell people to learn how to spell before sending in comments. So what do I do now, talk about Obama? If life is partially defined by those moments of epiphany when you realize ‘I’m not alone,’ then Barack’s ascension has yielded one. I was always skeptical of his halo effect, unsure whether it was naturally settling upon him every time he spoke or whether he was consciously invoking it, or whether like lightning on its way to the ground, a spark leaps up to greet it, a mutuality confirmable only in slow motion. I still don’t know, but others have also noticed. In the ‘Onion,’ an LA-based humor rag, it’s current headline reads, “Obama Practices Looking off into Future Pose,” going into detail about his 54-degree chin tilt, his 1.43cm eye aperture and his head rotated 37 degrees to the left. “When you look to the future, you look to the left.” It’s hilarious. Considering that my previous moments of epiphany with artistic media included the songs “Positively Fourth Street” by Bob Dylan and “Waiting ‘Round to Die” by Townes Van Zandt, I guess I’m mellowing out in my old age, though many people miss the close connection between horror and humor.

So where does that leave us? Still looking for a theme for this blog I guess. Ads for single Thai girls still pop up, so I guess that’s a cosmological constant. Frankly I’m not sure why they’re such a hot commodity, given the generally pathetic level of their English and their suitors’ Thai language skills. Here’s a hint-- actually that’s a help, not a hindrance. They’re out of their minds. Fortunately they’re into their bodies. But others are getting into the game fast. Colombia’s got some girls on the market guaranteed to melt your hardened heart or money back. Just take your pick: doctor, lawyer, or architect; brunette, brunette or brunette; Cali, Bogota’ or a smaller city called Manizales that seems to have little else to distinguish itself. We’re not talking about funky TJ border-town behemoths cheaper-by-the-kilo, either, but some forty-five kilo cuties that could charm the pants off a diplomat. So where does this blog stand in the rankings now? Well, we’re averaging fifteen to twenty subscribers according to Feedburner (I don’t know why it should fluctuate, but it does) and somewhere in the lower 600,000’s in the Technorati ‘authority’ rankings (hey, we started in the lower nine millions), so that says something. If you Google the words ‘Thailand’ and ‘Timbuktu’ together, then I’ll still come up number one, for what that’s worth. Perhaps more importantly, these blogs do get picked up by other websites for use, kind of like a poor man’s syndicated column. You shop XYZ’s website for underwear and below there’s the first few lines of my blog selected by one of their, uh, selectors. If you like then you click and voila!, you’re back here with the guy in his over-the-pub compartment out by Heathrow with planes flying over and pretending it’s his own private 9-11 mini-moment. It might as well be LA.

So I’ll still do this blog when the inspiration strikes, though its goals are now murky. I’ll do the other already-written blog every day regardless. Sound sketchy? Lit’s a wide-open ballgame now, the publishing business following the lead of the recording industry, or lack thereof, MySpace-type sites for writers springing up like mushrooms in cow shit. When I can not only publish my own stuff, but get it listed and sold on Amazon made-to-order, why wait a year for a return to my query letter from some agent who’s overworked and underpaid already? There’s food for thought. Publishing companies themselves haven’t read new work in years. But in the meantime I think I’ll do a blog on world music. Though I’m not really qualified (who is?), I can certainly review the many shows scheduled for California Plaza here in LA this summer- including Seun Kuti, Tcheka, Son de Madera, and Ricardo Lemvo, one big world music festival scattered throughout the summer, and all for free. The opening show, ‘Miles from India,’ featuring the music of Miles Davis played by a combination of Jazz and Indian musicians, was incredible. Stay tuned. There’s more.

MISSISSIPPI SAMADHI: YOU CAN GO HOME AGAIN… BUT YOU CAN’T STAY

Don’t go looking through your cookbooks for this one, trying to find what comes after masala, trying to figure out just how this guy might mix and mash a single metaphor for public consumption without resorting to various linguistic chutneys and high-flying adjectives that might be seldom used and therefore perfect for describing the indescribable, the little upward-flowing diverticula of consciousness and lapses in synapses that occur when a sentient being becomes caught in the cross-fire between his responsibilities and his desires, his past and his future. No, samadhi is meditation, pure and simple, hopefully, and more than a little appropriate considering my own Asian leanings, precariously toward the horizontal, and the birthplace and birth race of my wife. Every people get the religion they need I suspect, and meditation founded in Hinduism and grounded with Buddhism, certainly fills the bill. If anybody needs to stop the internal dialog and take a chill without taking a pill, it’s them, and by extension me. It could have been disastrous, after all, taking my copper-toned slanty-eyed succubus of a wife home to meet the homies after years of whisperings and wonderings and educated guesses gleaned from the pages of National Geographic and the Discovery Channel. Of course most people don’t know the difference between Thailand and Taiwan, so facts tend to be half-baked at best, three minutes in the microwave of public opinion, stir, then serve liberally, for Mississippi at least, with ketchup, as in catching up with the present. She charmed them of course, just like she charmed the pants off me seven years ago. The Asian dragon-lady image is the stuff of downtown Hollywood after all, not Thai Town, and anybody who has tasted the forbidden fruit of inter-racial Biblical knowledge knows that those fetching displays of exotic product are much more likely to have a stuffed animal lying on the bed back home than whips and chains or pipes and papers.

Broken English itself can even be charming at first byte, full of wild gesticulations and broad non-grammatical vocal inflections full of heartfelt if inarticulate meaning, washed down with frothy smiles. That shit gets old of course and there’s no substitute for correct grammar, something few Asian immigrants over the age of thirteen ever accomplish. It’s a female thing, the old-fashioned type, climbing ladders and accomplishing through wiles and intuition what she lacks in vision and technical expertise, gaining more by standing under than by understanding. That’s not the history they teach in books of course, full of wars and conflicts, generals and majors, general snafus and major disasters. It’s the history of cultural drift, following paths of least resistance and imitating successes, long before anybody thought about writing it down and claiming credit. The Industrial Revolution may have had its heroes, but the Agricultural one didn’t, just people following their instincts and their neighbors, to better pastures and a better future. Governments notwithstanding and frequently falling, Asia is more a continent and culture of accommodation than enforcement. That’s what’s held China together for millennia, the culture in continuous transmission, outlasting and even absorbing hostile governments. That’s the basis of ancestor-worship, essentially time-worship, dedication to a lineage extending back into time immemorial, all converging on a single point presumably. If many cultures pride themselves on their individuality, Asia prides itself on its conformity. It’s a female thing, the old-fashioned type, favoring compromise and conciliation over conflict, the perfect breeding ground for either Buddhism or Communism; take your pick. Asia’s pretty cool, but can become stifling and over-stuffed, silly and superstitious. It can become full of itself and full of IT, the smell of decay overwhelming.

So can Mississippi. If LA reminds my wife Tang of Bangkok, then Mississippi reminds her of Chiang Rai, my home of birth reminding her of hers. I guess there’s some poetic justice there. Her parents didn’t come from there originally any more than mine came from Mississippi. My grandmother was born in Harlem back when it was full of German immigrants. They came south for opportunity and land. Tang’s probably did the same, except north, and from Lampang. Ironically while Chiang Rai is relatively prosperous nowadays by Thai standards, Mississippi still lags in most standards of US development. That’s not all bad of course. Land prices in Mississippi and Chiang Rai are similar right now. Wages are not. If anything Mississippi is more beautiful, probably the greenest place I’ve ever seen, including Brazil and Ireland. It has its problems of course, not the least of which is a crime rate in Jackson that must rival that of Johannesburg in creativity, if not sheer numbers. The latest fad is car-jacking. The thief pirates your car while you’re still in it. That way the engine’s running and you can open the door for the new recipient of your old car. It saves time that way and you get to inspect the sidewalk. That somewhat mitigates the circumstances of the other major problem: a police-state attitude toward law enforcement. If that only applied to the mugger fuggers of course then no problem. But no, it applies to me. They wait on the highways at night like fishermen monitoring a pole for any slight wiggles in an imaginary line which represents your trajectory from the immediate present into an indeterminate but well-defined future. They can help you with that; no meaningless infinities allowed here. Ever had a gun held on you by Bozos in Blue talking like the characters on ‘King of the Hill?’ I have. I’ve got a witness. It ain’t pretty. They had the wrong guy. Imagine what it would’ve been like if I’d been the right guy. Imagine infinity.

Mississippi has come a long way since ‘the nigra problem’ and its attendant bifurcation of society into rednecks, blacks and so-called ‘nigger-lovers,’ i.e. me and a few others with errant DNA. There were also a few ‘Uncle Toms’ but they usually didn’t last long. It’s truly gratifying to see blacks and whites working together at all levels of public service and if they aren’t mixed together at all levels of society, that’s mostly an economic problem, not a racial one. White flight to the suburbs didn’t start in Jackson nor will it end there and many blacks are counted in those numbers also. As a friend says, “every murder in Jackson means six new residents of Brandon,” my old country home and now suburb. Still old habits die hard and some whites just don’t know how to act around blacks as equals. Mexicans have arrived in heavy numbers also, presumably doing many of the jobs that blacks used to do, or as the president of Mexico once famously said, “even blacks won’t do.” Old habits die hard. Thais are routinely scared of black people and excess body hair. It’s as much esthetic as racial. Thai women spend millions trying to whiten their skin and pluck those pesky underarm hairs religiously. You heard it here first. They’re scared of ghosts, too. As for Mississippi, the few Thais there pretty much got the run of the place. There’s only one Thai restaurant in Jackson so sales are good while the food is uneventful by Thai standards, ditto with Mexican food. Good things take time. Coming back to LA is like landing in Bangkok for Tang, Thai Town a half-way house for recent immigrants. She can even speak northern Thai dialect there, eat Northern food, and talk Northern gossip. I can even be an ex-pat in my own country of birth, hell of a deal. It saves on flight costs. It’s a way of life, crossing borders in minds if not on maps.

NOMAD BY TRADE

Transient! The word rolls off downward-curled lips in a sneer usually reserved for such lower-castes as prostitutes, shit sweepers, backpackers, and attorneys. Some people seem to think that to live a mobile lifestyle is to be a shiftless lazy no-good bum. Maybe they’re right. Certainly the pan-handlers on the street don’t advance the cause. I’m referring to the people that you tend to smell first, like it or not, before you even realize that what they’re selling is guilt. Thank God for the sense of smell. Bio-molecular scuttlebutt is that half our genes are devoted to it, apparently to know what’s good to eat. It was probably more important in the old days when such things were not written down in cookbooks and therefore much more crucial for survival. Now it tends to have a more negative connotation, i.e. if ‘it smells,’ then it smells bad, at least in most languages, though not Thai. Thai has separate distinct verbs for ‘to smell good,’ ‘to smell bad,’ to simply have a smell at all, and of course the act of sniffing itself. The same verb for ‘to smell good’ also doubles for the act of pressing cheeks with your lover, which in Thailand takes on special importance, judging from the impression Tang’s bony skull leaves in the side of my face every morning. Thais are certainly the most olfactory people I’ve ever seen, addicted as they are to those stupid inhalants which occupy the remote corners of the shopping aisles in most countries, but pay big ad bucks in Thailand, along with multiple products to lighten female skin in six weeks. Where would we be without that? We might be fooled into thinking our spouses live healthy outdoor lifestyles, like all the Western women using products to darken their skin. Nevertheless Tang sniffed me up long before she ever kissed me, so I guess I passed the smell test. Don’t try that with the junkies in Vancouver’s Gas Town.

I can remember when there were still real hoboes, long before beatniks, hippies, or hitchhikers without a cause, hoboes who grew up with the railroad, like Chinese using it as a rite of passage into the country, getting a foot in the door and a leg up the ladder long after anyone worried about Chinese junks landing on the shores and long before anyone worried about Chinese junk landing in the stores. I saw them as a child of the 60’s wandering up the hill below my grandparents’ house in Fort Worth, but I’ve never seen them since. I guess they’ve been supplanted by ‘the homeless’ as the romance of the rails fades. You don’t see many hitch-hikers any more either, but you see plenty of homeless, and the romance is long gone. They’ve moved downtown, too, no longer relegated to the trackside or ‘under the bridge.’ I guess hitchhikers were the cultural link between the two, as I can remember some from my 70’s adventures who had actually ridden rails, though I never really did myself, nothing more than jumping on then jumping off just to prove I could. Though that was probably the heyday of mobile society, there were quickly signs that the bloom was off the rose as those same people frequently succumbed to alcohol and drug excess, replacing TV with cheap thrills at a fairly poor exchange rate I’d say. I know my own wake-up call came when I saw people drinking Sterno ‘canned heat’ to get a buzz rather than buy a six-pack of beer. For those of you who don’t know, Sterno was the jellied alcohol in a can that you simply opened and lit a match to for heat in your little portable stove. It’s worth mentioning but little compensation that the beer then wasn’t much good, either, long before micro-brews and their pubs. In those days I’d drive back from the West to Mississippi with a trunk full of Coors for the Homies, a beer that I would generously compare to piss now.

But I didn’t freak out and go sell real estate or anything. I just decided there must be some way to travel and make money, too. They said it couldn’t be done, and they were right. It can’t… any more. It’s funny that I made my living most of my life doing something that hadn’t been done before and probably won’t be done again on any large scale, dealing folk art and ethnic handicrafts. The process of tourism promoting handicrafts promoting cottage industry promoting import/exports has pretty much run its course and left native cultures more or less where they started, usually with improved local economies. That’s all they wanted after all. It’s the northern Europeans and their cousins who have the wanderlust. It’s in our Indo-Aryan speaking blood. We stayed out there on the steppes long after our southern cousins started hanging out with the Semites down on Club Med, learning how to be civilized and corrupt in towns and cities, climbing society’s ladders and jockeying for positions. They act like city people are smarter but anyone knows that’s cow poop. City people are just weaker. They’re servants and store clerks huddling together for safety against the ghosts and fears of their own pathetic imaginations, that they use to substitute for the real lives that they lost long ago, replaced by pictures on walls and silly love songs stuck in the head. The real poetry comes with the wind by the campfire; the real pictures are painted on the sky at sunset, lasting but a moment before the lights turn to darkness and souls take their rest. People of the steppes are hunters and herders, moving with the seasons and changing for their own reasons. They only need cities to prey on, to take what they need and leave the rest. A city of hunters only happens where a campsite becomes permanent and only then by convenience and circumstance, never necessity, for while a hunter may be IN the city, he is never OF the city. He’ll still have a little plot and a few animals, a view of the sky and a view of the future, ready to pack his bags at the slightest provocation, a roadmap etched in permanent memory.

The new landscape includes the web, of course, threatening to catch anything and everything in its sticky filaments. It’s hard to believe now that a computer was ever anything other than an Internet machine. Spreadsheets and databases gave way to e-mail and spam gave way to e-bay and e-banks gave way to MySpace and FaceBook. Now Second Life looks to take up where dreams leave off, a world inside the box, complete with land and money, milk and honey. For the conspiracy-minded this conjures up visions of bio-pods attached to TV screens by wires and tubes, getting their dreams and visions spoon–fed with oatmeal to produce fart-forced bio-gas for the cars in the real world upstairs. This should be where you look for losers and hustlers, a drug-like life for those who have none, hardly the place you find real men, the hunters and horsemen recently arrived from the steppes, right? The Next Big Thing may be fun and fashionable, good for Hollywood and Bollywood, maybe, but not much else, right? Business is done in tall towers; ‘firm’ people wear suits, right? Wrong. This is exactly where you find the hunters, along the borders, the frontiers where fear and boredom stop and Nature and creativity start, a line that crawls along the outskirts of towns and through the subconscious of individuals, fluid and flowing, shifting and re-shaping, to fit circumstance and forge the future. The Way is the main thing, not the bottom line, but the process and the progress. That is the American dream, civilization without cities.

Thai Food Conspiracy: Back to Rehab… Again…

My wife Tang is in hot dog heaven. Think all Thais are ladling creamy curries over rice three times a day? Think again. You wouldn’t believe some of the s**** that passes as Thai food in country. One of them should be very familiar, though—hot dogs (that’s a Thai word btw). Hot dogs are an exotic item in Thailand, along with buttered bread and waffles (I’m serious). So to actually be in a New World country in common descent from the Northern European hot dog homes of Germany, Austria and Poland is like a culinary Mecca for her (go ahead, issue a fatwa, you humorless mullahf***ers; I could use the publicity). Normally I would protest, given the 30% fat content of your typical weiner and Tang’s ongoing middle-age battles of bulges, but given the high costs of travel and restaurants these days and the ease of nuking a unit of encased meat for lunch, I’ve signed off on this one albeit with prejudice. I’ve even got her going for the turkey wieners, since she doesn’t eat beef out of respect for Kuan Yin, and the fact that the cost of beef is prohibitive in Thailand. A good Buddhist eats pork of course, as do many Hindus. You can even find the little babis all over Bali in a predominant Muslim country, but I wouldn’t look elsewhere down there. It even seems proscribed in Malaysia, and that’s barely 50% Muslim. For Muslims in Thailand, that’s generally the threshold of the religion, little else rating a mention, even alcoholic beverages. Malaysians cross the border into Thailand regularly to do the things that are outlawed at home, even advising that “you’re wasting your money” to merely drink a beer or three since it’s not enough to get you totally plastered. Welcome to Mississippi and the universal law of Overcompensation on Prohibitions.

America is a food court, little Italy ceding to Chinatown in both New York and San Francisco, giving typical ‘American’ food like pizza and spaghetti a run for its money. Actually I can remember when pizzas were called ‘pies’ and pesto was pig Latin for someone you didn’t like but we’ve come a long way since then. In the Flagstaff Mall the no-name Chinese food easily outsells Sbarro, so that’s encouraging for us Asiaphiles who start going into withdrawal without rice. Tang’s hot-dog thing is a mutation in the culinary DNA, a nine-item deletion on chromosome 14 if I remember correctly. Hotdogs notwithstanding, broadly speaking there are basically only two kinds of Asian food, rice or noodles. Everything else are local variations on regional Asian themes, Thailand being the point where hot-wok Chinese food and slow-simmer Indian curries mix and mingle into something greater than the sum of its parts. Their transplantation to America is a boon for us frequent travelers, since you’ve got to eat a real meal once in a while; sandwiches and instant noodles only go so far. Asian food is almost the only cuisine that places any emphasis on vegetables, too, so that’s necessary to avoid blurry-eyed ‘camp-out malaise’, unless you want to pop vitamins instead of trail mix. Even in New York Chinese food is cheap as dirt, like a five-item meal going for less than five bucks at the little place where Chinatown meets Soho. I doubt you could beat that in Beijing. This is especially important in high-altitude places like Flagstaff where the high-pressure oxygen in every cell is in constant expansion against the low-pressure oxygen outside, resulting in some internal discomfort for many of us. In other words you don’t need any extra help from Mexican food. Santa Fe, though, at the same altitude is a real temptation with its creative take on variations of corn, beans, dairy, meat, and chile a la Mexicaine.

So Tang takes the new culinary realities in stride, though old habits die hard, like baby dried shrimp for use in soups and stews. Fortunately Mexicans like them also, so being in a place like Arizona helps the adjustment. The cashier almost gagged looking at them, but that’s her problem. They came from Thailand anyway, the small print reveals. Mexico certainly has plenty of chiles available for perusal, being their native place of evolution, but that’s overkill. Thais will only eat the three or four types that made it across the ocean presumably with the Portuguese or Spanish galleons a few centuries ago, though they hardly believe that story, they being so attached to spicy food nowadays that they assume they invented it. If avoidance of pork is the test of Islam, the ability to endure spicy food is the test of your ‘Thai-ness’. It’s hard to believe that they’re enjoying the flavors, so busy they are fanning their mouths and chugging water, but they swear by it, typically the first question they’ll inquire about a Farang. “Can he eat hot food?” Hey, you gotta’ have priorities. Things crossed the ocean in the other direction also, especially silk, but also the ikat weaving technique, notable in that it was picked up by the lower and indigenous classes of society, hardly the same market as for silk, though it may have indeed been copied from silk products. I have a cotton weaving from East Timor part of which is the spitting image of weavings from the town of Solola’, Guatemala, and weavings from West Timor are much more similar to those of Guatemala than they are to those of its Indonesian neighbors. I’d be hard pressed to hazard a guess as to the flow of influence, though the origins of ikat (a Malay word) in the South Pacific are well-known, and the Portuguese presence in Timor ditto.

Back when I was single, Thais used to ask me, “Which do you like, white meat or dark?” But they were talking about women, not chicken, though the word for chicken is frequently used for women in Asia, usually of the looser variety, i.e. falling off the bone. But I digress. Tang informs me that the eggs I just bought are duck eggs. That’s because in Thailand the only white eggs are from ducks. All the chicken eggs are brown. Why should the US be any different? The funny thing is that she says this with such country-girl authority, not realizing that she’s talking to a guy who had a purple ribbon winner in the laying-hen category in the Mississippi State Fair and who knows that leghorn is more than some town in Italy, however bastardized the English name, and that Rhode Island Reds are not a baseball team. They assume that the US is a nation of modern technology and that only, not realizing that agriculture is a major US export and our historical legacy. But tell that to someone from an agricultural third-world country that must borrow the English word ‘farm’ for everyday use. Old habits and notions die hard. Tang refuses to use a washing machine and can be seen in hotel bathrooms washing clothes by hand and hanging them to dry. We should charge admission to watch, extra if you want your own clothes actually washed in the process. If you want Thai food, though, go to your local eatery. Tang is no expert cook (pronounced kook, a Thai word meaning ‘a person who prepares food for eating’). But if they have hot dogs on the menu, run for your life, and don’t look back. You could get lost in there.

Overseas Siamese, not so Chinese

“Thai society is pretentious,” or so says my wife, a quote I remind her of periodically. All the little one-on-one-up-man-ships become rigidified into a vast social stratum of Creoles, half-breeds, and Interzone clones just dying to meet you, Anglicized and Westernized to order. Then there are everybody else, the regular folk that make up the vast country-side. And if citified Thais are pretentious enough in country, they take it to new extremes overseas. Unlike their Chinese and other Asian cousins overseas, they rush to assimilate at a speed that would make your head spin. But those regular folk are the Thai people that I like best, for at its best Thailand is a village, not a city. What does Bangkok really have to offer anyway? Most of the worst and little of the best that cities tend to offer in general. There’s plenty of traffic, pollution, and noise, but little of the art, science, and culture that define modern cities. It’s better than it used to be, what with the new sky train and underground train. At least now you can get around without hours in traffic, but that still begs the question, “Why?” Thai culture at the village and small town level is a thing of beauty, friendly beautiful and welcoming. Take this one step further to the tribal ‘Tai’ culture that still exists in Laos, Vietnam, Burma, and China (everywhere in SE Asia except Thailand), and the results are extraordinary. Tai ‘Dams’ (Black Tai), though maligned by their Lao cousins and exploited by their Vietnamese neighbors, are some of my favorite people in the world, a living link between modern Thailand and the tribal past that once dominated all of Southeast Asia. That tribalism is still to be found in the well-documented-and-touristed H’mongs and Yaos and Akhas and Lahus and Lisus centered on the five-country Mekong corridor where China, Vietnam, Laos, Burma, and Thailand almost meet and the lesser-known Bahnars, Gia Rais, and many other Chamic and Khmeric groups in the Annamite Highlands where Vietnam, Laos, and Kampuchea do meet. In the former the Tai Dam are radiant and even elegant in their self-styled traditional costumes, a cut above the others for whom they often mediate with the larger surrounding cultures, doing business and even governing within historical times. In them you can see direct antecedents with the culture that became modern Thailand, the Lao language being somewhat central and mutually intelligible to both.

Take that progressive tribal culture, militarily competent and in southward migration a thousand years ago away from advancing Han Chinese, mix with renegade Chinese themselves, either disaffected or Hindu/Buddhist religious or just opportunistic businessmen, put them in a cultural context dominated by the classic-era Khmers, and you have the origins of modern Siamese culture, only recently re-christened ‘Thai’ in back-formation homage to their cultural roots, both to unify a country composed of a not-so-Siamese north and northeast, and to send a clear message to the hordes of Chinese flooding into the country at the turn of last century following the Taiping and Boxer Rebellions in China. Fast-forward to the present and you’ve got a quirky modern culture, equal parts hot-and-spicy, sweet-and-sour, and pungent-curry, and that’s just the women. Overall you’ve got a vigorous hybrid of Chinese business acumen, agricultural bounty, and village friendliness, a culture with a decent standard of living not because of vast wealth but because of multiplicity of services. Every Thai has a second job and a handful of scams, however redundant and unimaginative. This keeps prices low but diversity limited. Thus Bangkok is little more than one mega-village, any culture of international note achieved largely by imitation of Western models if not by Westerners themselves. Just like the villages there is little or no centrality to the urban planning and infrastructure always comes last, in a constant struggle to keep up with development that must be retro-fitted hodge-podge. In a culture where conformity is prized above all else, this results in a city with reasonable costs, ample services, but little or no character, a city monstrous in size but a midget in culture.

Take that generic urban Thai culture and transplant it to America and you’ve got something that’s hardly recognizable as ‘Thai’, almost a perversion of the original. If chattiness is one of the most desirable of Thai qualities in-country, it suffers horribly overseas. Presumably part of a linguistic caste system of English-language ‘haves’ and ‘have-nots’, Thais in America seem to make a concerted effort to avoid speaking Thai except to intimates. While this is not unusual in Thailand, especially when Farangs are involved, in America it even applies to Thais themselves. This is sad, because language is the DNA of culture. Once you’ve lost it, you’ve lost your culture. Language was always intended to be something evoking magic and power, literally casting its ‘spell’ over the psychological landscape, but it was never intended to be a weapon. Overseas Thais jockey for position in a caste system of the soul, clinging to their nuclear families while largely ignoring their culture. This is ironic because Thailand itself enforces a nationalism second to none, even refusing to register a name that’s not on the list of acceptable Thai names. Not surprisingly many Thais, and all women, have nicknames, frequently similar to those of pets, not infrequently derived from English sources. In the US they rush to ‘become American’ without realizing that to transplant their doctrine of conformity into a culture of individuality is largely contradictory and difficult to accomplish. But this is very similar to the way that Chinese immigrants ‘become Thai’ in Thailand by simply learning the language and either marrying in or buying in. By the second or third generation, they’re ‘Thai’, if they stay that long. Many use Thailand as a marshalling yard to gather themselves a grubstake to move on to America. It’s not uncommon for a nuclear Thai family in the US to consist of grandparents whose first language is Chinese, parents whose first language is Thai, and children whose first language is English.

Chinese proper in America have a totally different history, dating back to the gold rush days in California, and enduring much hardship and discrimination in the process. This must encourage solidarity, because to this day Chinese maintain their names and languages and lineages in America. Chinese still preside over chop suey kitchens dating from the old West, especially along the old highways and rail routes. This is a dying breed of restaurant, because the food sucks. But they’re still counted back in China and presumably counted on. That may sound conspiratorial and paranoid, but no, it’s just good old fashioned racism, the history of our species, getting there ‘firstest with the mostest’. I can appreciate their maintenance of traditions culturally while deploring the racist separatism psychologically. To this day there are laws on the books in Arizona outlawing parking in front of an opium den. Fortunately you can park in front of a Thai restaurant, the last line of cultural self-defense for many Thais. For a long time in Thailand I likened my experience to the peeling back of layers on an onion. Only later did I realize that I was getting no deeper, that the surface just kept refreshing its screen in a self-healing safety of face. Thailand takes superficiality to a high art. What it sacrifices culturally, it gains back in economic progress I suppose. The Interzone clones that I tend to avoid are viewed by many foreigners as the apex of Thai culture. They fall in love with the interface and hybrid vigor resumes its path of evolution by economic selection. Thailand is a woman, looking for a husband to take on his name accordingly. For that it only takes a village, not a city.

Hitched and Harnessed… Have Siamese Twin, Will Travel

I’ve done my own taxes all my life, Schedule C and SE, 1099’s and 1040 long forms, estimated tax and exempt foreign income ad infintum ad nauseam. So big deal, but I also did my own Customs brokering back in the halcyon days when business was my disease, Forms 3461 and 7501, formal entries and intensive exams, textile quotas and certificates of origin. I’ve done Customs entries in different cities on the same day, leaving Flagstaff at 3am to drive to Nogales, Mexico, picking up goods at the train station there and crossing back over the border, doing the paperwork and awaiting my release, then driving to Phoenix and getting my papers submitted there in time to clear my goods before the day’s over, then driving back to Flagstaff as the sun sets over the purple sage, all in a day’s work. It’s hard to appreciate if you haven’t been there, not to mention the anxiety of ‘crossing the border’ every couple of weeks and having to clear Customs. The point is that none of this compares to getting a visa for your foreign fiancée, all by yourself and starting from scratch. ‘Scratch’ in this case is the forms you submit to CIS (formerly INS) in the US. This includes bank statements and verifications, pictures of you and the lady taken within the last thirty days, and evidence of your relationship, all in addition to the multiple application forms and biographical information. We had a picture taken of ourselves reading the Bangkok Post with a big picture of the Korean-American mass murderer on the front just to date us and place us and send a little signal about the absurdity of their requirements. I feel sure they smiled.

If you’re lucky they’ll send you an acknowledgement of receipt. If you’re unlucky they’ll tell you some info is lacking and they’ll need more forms. All this is rather sketchy and dependent on the uncertainties of the US postal system, but fortunately you can track it somewhat on their website, assuming you know your code. When your forms are all in order within a few months they’ll kick it over to the National Visa Center where, once again if your forms are in order, they’ll kick it to the country where the visa will be issued, in this case Thailand, who will process the applications and initiate the continuing process over there. Once again this step is rather sketchy though somewhat traceable, but hopefully the mail won’t get lost. The first time we did all this five years ago, all the US paperwork went like clockwork but we never got the paperwork on the Thailand side. Presumably the mail got lost over there. For better or worse our circumstances had changed a bit over the year-long process, so after a couple of tentative phone calls with limited results, I decided to forfeit rather than pursue it at that time. This time started off even worse. I never received any acknowledge of receipt at any point. I traced it to the point that it went to the National Visa Center, but then could find no record of it. As I was waiting for their two-month deadline to expire to officially conclude the papers lost, suddenly it shows up, not there, but at my fiancée’s doorstep in Thailand, the whole package of forms from the US embassy in Bangkok shuttled down a humble middle-class alley by the Royal Thai Mail. I couldn’t believe it; still can’t.

At least at that point it’s my wife’s turn to do some work. There are medical exams to be done, by pre-approved doctors only, half a dozen in Bangkok, one or two in Chiang Mai. Fortunately Chiang Mai’s only a few hours from Chiang Rai. Unfortunately my lady’s had TB, probably had it in fact when we met, though the diagnosis came about a year later. TB is a slow burn, almost winning by robbing you of the will to fight it. I’ve often accused my wife of putting herself on the market because she thought she was going to die and wanted to suck(er) someone into taking care of her family. She denies it, but I don’t know… She thinks about death almost more than I do. Anyway after three Thai doctors fumbled the diagnosis and she had had enough Aids tests to supply Africa for a year and her father had started making little black magic shrines in auspicious corners of the property, I finally said something cursory, spent an hour on the Internet, and told her I thought she had TB. The (fourth) official diagnosis came in within a day later. Then followed six months of four different antibiotics, enough presumably so that no bacteria could outsmart them all. So it’s a big deal. The new doctor, while approving her current health, made her carry fresh X-rays around with her, just begging a challenge. In fact TB is making a big comeback on the world stage, simply because people don’t eradicate the disease completely, so it comes back. She needed a police clearance also, for which she had to make a special trip to Bangkok. You have to apply for the actual visa online, in English, and then pay for the bloody thing at the Thai post office. After researching further I Skyped her from the US and told her to pay the fee before year-end 2007, when the price was to go up. When you get the forms in order, you send a checklist telling them the forms are in order and await a date for the interview.

They finally set her date at March 10, which was good, since I could be there, too. There was only one problem. Her passport expires November 9, and you need at least eight months validity. So I Skyped her from Senegal and told her to get a new passport before the interview. For those of you who don’t know already, one of the latest nicest and most inexpensive developments for the traveler is the rise of Skype’s Internet-based telephone service. Unlike previous services like Net2Phone, etc. the lag-time between transmission and reception is down so low that unless someone is a really fast talker and the signal is good, it’s usually not much of a problem. You certainly don’t have to say “over” walkie-talkie-like after each side is finished speaking so the other party won’t overlap. Just speak at a normal unhurried rate. As they tell you repeatedly, this service is not designed for emergencies anyway. But Thailand doesn’t do passports locally anymore, so she had to make another trip to Chiang Mai. This runaround is wearing me out just thinking about it. If companies do all this work for you they charge $1000- $2000 depending on the level of service. I’d probably recommend it unless you’re a pro bono lawyer by profession.

So when the day finally came the tension was running high. Her appointment note told her to submit papers at 7:30 am, which I thought was pretty absurd, but not half as absurd as the line that was already there a full half hour before that. It looked like a security line at LAX airport. I guess they were mostly tourists, first come first serve, because we got to bypass them with our fancy little card with an actual date on it. In our category was a motley crew, including one little twenty-ish Bimbette with a sixty-ish Farang in tow and one older woman with her entire family there. They were shuffling papers and swearing oaths and moving on to other windows and suffering other ignominies that only stiffened my resolve to push this thing through, if for no other reason than to avoid ever having to go through it again. When my wife finally got her turn, they told me to please have a seat, then put her through the paces with the help of an interpreter. In fact, they dismissed her so quickly that I was sure she’d failed. But no, she was told to come pick up the passport with visa in two days. When she did, they strongly advised her to enter the US as soon as possible since her medical exam was due to expire in two months. That was the glitch we needed, since I had wanted to look for an immediate flight but her mother had forbade it due to her father’s health. Well we rushed home and Pa looked okay to us so we booked a flight the next day to leave in three. I usually eat what’s put before me, even on airplanes, but the boiled rice didn’t inspire me, and as the plane began its final descent into LAX the wife suddenly felt ill and started puking, something I’ve never seen her do before. This continued all the while the plane taxied to the terminal, an awkward start to a new country, to say the least. I think it was just nervous jitters, because from there things went smoothly, immigration, customs, rental car, etc., at least until we got to Kingman, where I-40 was closed because of a 139-car pile-up by Flagstaff, our destination. Two days later we got married, officially, only six days after receiving her visa, all in a day’s, I mean a week’s, I mean a year’s work.

Bye Bye Thai, Hello Uncle Sam

All good things have to come to an end some time, don’t they? After almost exactly ten years in Thailand, maybe it’s time for me to move on to other things, or maybe not. Since the Thai government seems to at least want to roll back the avalanche of ‘Farangs’ that have flooded into the country for the last fifteen to twenty years, maybe we should get a clue, or maybe not. Certainly if you’ve got you’re papers in order and have a good reason to be here, such as retirement, then it’s done easily enough. Considering that you only have to be at least fifty years old to retire, that’s not draconian. The $25K you have to deposit in a local account is a fairly serious means of testing your viability, but in times of low interest the actual loss of interest is not great. In times of decent interest it’s a thousand bucks a year. More than that, it’s a commitment, not so easy for someone who’s still traveling and exploring. Frankly if I didn’t have a relationship to maintain, I’d have probably been long gone before now, i.e. been here done this. Only next door Cambodia is alive and fresh and undergoing a renaissance. Their women don’t look bad either. Then there are other attractive locations around the world, both known- Peru, Dominican Republic, Spain, Morocco, and unknown- Ethiopia, Madagascar, Mozambique, Egypt, Greece, and Central Asia. But at heart I’m as much a worker as a traveler, and that defines my decisions. I have to work, and it’s nice when I can combine travel and work. The hardest part is living in two places, which is what I’ve been doing, having never cut my ties with the ‘real world.’ It’s been pretty hectic the last couple years, the back-and-forth increasing as I make motions ‘back home.’ Fortunately there’s no statute of limitations, so I can always come back, right?

I’ll miss family the most, the in-laws and my dog. My wife’s son and I have had our scrapes, but nothing that time can’t heal. Time heals all. The ma-and-pa-in-law are pretty cool, if a bit superstitious. He’s a star reader. When he read mine before his daughter and I tied knots, he told me that Thai women were not in my stars. He may have had an axe to grind. I thought his old ticker was on its last legs last week, but he’s bounced back. I didn’t know he’d been out digging pits to make charcoal. He needs to work, too. I tell them he and his daughter should do a massage-and-fortunes double act, but they won’t listen to me. They’re always skeptical of new ideas until someone does it and succeeds. Then they copy like kitty cats at a row of tits. For every individual doing someone creative in Thailand, there are ten copy cats and another ten making jokes about it. For most Thai people to copy a known formula is to succeed, like the human juke-boxes on stage. Pa’s got clients nearly every day, queuing up to see what the future holds, rather than simply going out and creating it. Mae’s okay, too, if a bit domineering. If Pa’s the one doing the lion’s share of physical work, it’s Mae calling the shots. I’m the only one who dares offer a dissenting opinion. She makes pretty good northern Thai food, too, if such is your pleasure. It’s an acquired taste, best when done with herbs from the yard, worst when over-stoking the spicy, salty, or sweet taste buds. There is no taste bud for greasy fortunately. Mae also names the cats, creative names like black one, gray one, white one, etc. They use similar names for the kids, like first one, pretty one, etc. So does everybody else.

I guess I’ll miss my dog most, man’s best friend and all that, though my laptop runs a close second. Joey’s a yellow dog, which is what all dogs would be if allowed to breed freely away from man’s artificial selection. Yellow dogs are best anyway for general all-purpose use, hybrid vigor and all that. He’d talk if he could. He tries really hard. He likes to wander up to the big road and chase big cars, better than the tame action down the soi where we live, like dullsville man. He was a temple dog, dropped off to fend for him self. That’s where we found him. He tries to imagine himself the Alpha male of the neighborhood, but the other dogs just laugh. He can hold his own, but so can they. Mae claims to hate Joey, but I notice she likes to make him omelettes and curries and such. I’m surprised dog food in Thailand doesn’t have such elaborate flavors. Many dogs fare better than the poorer classes of society. Joey’s so spoiled now that he won’t touch regular dog food unless he’s really hungry or just has a hankering for bar munchies. We used to have a cat named Bang, but he disappeared about a year ago, and it still hurts. He was a miracle cat of sorts, from the temple with Joey, but barely big enough to be viable at the time. He learned to crawl up the steps really quick to get in the bed with us where it was warm, though. That was right after the tsunami. After about a year he finally got his growth spurt and his balls, turning into the prettiest sweetest most loveable cat you’ve ever seen. He could never get rid of Mae’s rival cat, though, that tortured him constantly. One day Bang just disappeared, never to be heard from again. About half a dozen people were shell-shocked. Cats do things like that. They go off to the woods to die and such. I used to have a litter of four at my cabin in Mississippi almost thirty years ago. Then suddenly they started disappearing one by one, about a week apart, until the last one was gone. Then I left, too.

I’ll even miss the big fat multi-colored gecko that’s become an uninvited guest in our home. I have a friend in Arizona who makes ceramic psychedelic lizards that I always thought were purely works of imagination until I met these geckos in Thailand. They’re surreal, right out of a Dali painting or something, pinks and chartreuses and turquoises blended geometrically precise. They’re not bad house guests either, hanging by the lights ready to eat bugs by the billions. They can even remain unmoving for hours if threatened, like someone’s Hawaiian souvenir on the wall. I’ll even miss the silly Thais standing up at attention to pledge allegiance every day at eight in the morning and six in the evening as every bus in the terminal comes to a complete stop and even cars on the street. At first I didn’t know if they were more like Nazis or school children. Now I do. I’ll even miss the short attention span and relentless consumerism of Thai culture, always looking for the Next Big Thing while simultaneously invoking tradition and divine descent. Sensations are primary in Thailand, sight sound taste touch of course, but especially and surprisingly, the sense of smell, as if straight from an ol’ factory tradition. I’ve never seen so many inhalants in use. Of course they have different words for good smells and bad smells and the act of sniffing itself. My wife sniffed me all over before we ever touched lips, weird. Maybe we should stay. But I won’t miss the cloud of smoggy haze that hangs over northern Thailand this time of year simply because people would rather burn the wild than enjoy it, along with their morning trash. Nor will I miss the superstition and old wives’ tales that pass for health advice while people pop pills and drop like flies. Still they have life expectancies almost equal to those of Europe and America, and reasonable hospital rates to boot. So I’ll be back.

The Incredible Sinking Dollar

Just when you think the dollar couldn’t suck any more or any worse than it already does, then it starts going down again, kind of like London Bridge, I guess. You stateside people could care less, right? I can’t blame you. Any effect there only shows up in higher prices, especially oil, whose producers are very aware of ‘real’, that is, stable Euro-based, value. Considering that the US has some of the lower free-market prices around anyway, those effects are somewhat mitigated. So what’s the cause of the once-almighty dollar’s slide into oblivion? That’s the $64K question. The simple answer is that people are buying fewer of them. So why are people buying fewer of them? There are many reasons, including lower interest rates, better options elsewhere, and the likelihood that China has bought about as many dollar-denominated securities as it can reasonably justify. Another reason is that the US is spending them like crazy, and borrowing like crazy, the other side of the flow chart. This is largely due to ‘the war’, always a pricey expenditure, hardly the economic justification of war that conspiracy people like to make it out as. Then there are the low-tax policies that are doctrine for the Bush administration in general. Unfortunately low taxes mean high borrowing. The resulting flow makes the dollar weaker and creditors richer, trickle-up economics. Republicans like to pretend they’re rewarding entrepreneurship and fiscal responsibility by keeping taxes and welfare benefits low, but there’s no shortage of welfare for the rich when Bear Stearns is about to go belly up, nor any excess responsibility when predatory lending practices create a mortgage and credit crisis that ends up affecting us all, innocent bystanders included. Fortunately talk is cheap, but knowledge short, and scuttlebutt thicker than Beijing smog when it comes to economics. How are we supposed to figure it out when the ‘experts’ are just making it up as they go along? There is no science of economics, only theory.

I think the main thrust of capitalist theory is that as long as the economy keeps growing, then any wrinkles will get smoothed out with time if not inflation. In other words, it’s a confidence game. As long as everyone keeps the faith, then the economy keeps growing. They may very well be right. I used to be very skeptical of such theory; after all how can an economy keep growing when resources are limited? I tried to imagine our culture spreading through outer space in some sort of metaphorical expanding universe, but no matter how romantic the image in its appeal to me, space travel is probably more of a drain than a boon to the economy. The advent of the Information Age has shown the limitations of my skepticism and earlier lack of vision. In the computer age knowledge truly is power and there are no limits to resources when you’re talking about intellectual property. But without Communism to keep it honest, capitalism no longer is. Europe’s even getting in on the act now, with eight-figure annual CEO disbursements, predatory lending practices, mortgage scandals, the whole schmear. Not surprisingly England is at the lead in this, but others are learning quickly. Ironically Russia, hardly the richest country in Europe, has by far the most billionaires, highlighting the inherent injustices. This makes you wonder what their Communist era was really all about, apparently little more than a police state to reign in the wildest impulses of the rich and corrupt. France and Germany both have conservative business-oriented governments anxious to dismantle suffocating welfare states that took years to build. For their part labor unions are famous for claiming their piece of the pie without ever really considering the possibility that maybe they should share a piece of the investment risk also. The labor/management dichotomy is critical to labor’s dinosaur way of thinking.

So what does all this have to do with the shrinking dollar? Maybe we should be asking why the dollar was so high in the first place. It hasn’t always been in fact. During the last war, yes the famous V-fingered war, the dollar fell as low or lower than this, and inflation rose much faster. This followed the Bretton Woods agreement of 1972 in which exchange rates were allowed to float instead of being fixed rates. This was after previous B-W agreements pegging rates to the dollar as opposed to gold, which some diehards still long for as currency as if its value were transcendent. In reality it only became useful as currency when there was plenty of it and its value well known, like silver before it, beads and shells before that, and tobacco in times of war. So dollars became world currency after WWII, but it wasn’t until the ‘Reagan Revolution’ that the dollar rose to new stellar heights. Whether the US wanted it that way is debatable I guess. Does a queen bee ask for workers to stuff her with royal jelly? It’s a privileged position, but entails loss of freedom for the royal fat-butt, not to mention the nauseating task of laying eggs for the whole world’s use. In the currency metaphor, the royal jelly is consumer goods and the eggs are dollars. To export to the US was to mine for gold. The US is the only country in the world that can’t re-value its currency, at the total mercy of the others, who need dollars to do business. Increasingly that means China, the modern world’s workhorse whose own currency is virtually useless outside its own borders. China has always demanded one-sided trade, payment in currency rather than a two-way flow of trade. This is what provoked the Opium Wars of the 1800’s, since that was the only other currency acceptable to the celestials, however illegal. I guess it made them more celestial. In all fairness opium was routinely given to British children in the early 1800’s to quiet them down. It worked like a charm. Things only came to a head when the balance of trade turned in Britain’s favor.

Now China buys T-bills and other US securities denominated in US dollars. Though much scuttlebutt has been bandied about Internet and conspiracy circles about ‘the loan’ or ‘loans’ ‘propping up’ the US economy which they can ‘call in’ anytime they want, I can’t find any of this anywhere, just one-way trade and large holdings in specie. Call it Chinese-style communism. So what’s the bottom line here at Ground Zero? Well, with China saturated with dollars and the Thai baht stable, you can bet they’re buying plenty of these now, too, strengthening the local currency. That and high oil prices are fueling inflation like I’ve never seen here, at the same time that the economy is flat from governmental neglect. Thus with the dollar weak and the Thai baht strong, a simultaneous double whammy, much of the economic advantages here have faded. Couple that with increasingly restrictive and arbitrary visa policies, and the bloom is off the rose. With the US real estate boom now faded and hotel rates moderating accordingly from their highs of a year or two ago, while prices in Thailand are inflating rapidly, a room in LA doesn’t cost much more than one in Bangkok. Food costs are less here, but so are portions. The buffet lunch in downtown Chiang Rai isn’t much cheaper than a Chinese buffet in Flagstaff, AZ, cities of similar size. Gasoline in Thailand is about four bucks a gallon, the US cheaper, depending on your location. Most traditional Third World countries have gasoline prices higher than the US, so who’s complaining? Everybody, of course. More importantly, who’s doing anything to change it? I notice a lot of new LP gas stations popping up in Thailand. I haven’t noticed them anywhere else.

So Thailand is not so cheap anymore and the US is not so expensive. The US is in fact looking better all the time. US wages are getting a boost for the first time in years and we might very well have a responsible presidency on the horizon. Interest rates are dropping drastically, so it’s a bad time for saving, but a good time for doing business. Housing prices are lower than they have been for several years. Foreclosures are rampant, bad for the original owners, but good for someone looking to pick up a bargain. A cheap dollar makes US products more attractive overseas, possibly moving it to a more favorable balance of trade. Maybe it’s time to give the US another look. Since my wife just got a K-1 visa, I think I will, for a while at least. There are still places there I haven’t been, like Puerto Rico, maybe? Hmmm…..

CR in CR- Death by Thai Food

My father-in-law is dying. I tell him he’s not, but he is. They’re killing him, not some vast faceless conspiratorial capital ‘T’ “They”, but the very faceful wife, daughter, and doctors surrounding him. I took him to Chiang Rai general hospital five days ago complaining of chest pains. They checked him over, declared him normal, invoked the diabetes clause (anything they don’t know the cause of they blame on Diabetes, a family of musicians in Mali I think), and then released him, in and out in less than two hours. How’s that for service? Would we have taken him in if he were normal? Yesterday he complained again of the same chest pains, only worse. We took him to a different private hospital, where they put him on a pacemaker after a pulse reading dipping below forty and a blood pressure reading up to a hundred-ninety-plus over a hundred. Did I mention that he’s been in the hospital at least once a month for the last six months with the same symptoms? So what does he do when he gets one of these attacks? Typically he’ll start walking down the street, clutching his chest all the while, ignoring my commands to lie down, as if he’d rather see the Homies one last time than actually try to ease the offending condition. If there’s anything worse than watching someone grow old, it’s watching someone refuse to, a warning to myself included. When someone goes into the hospital with the symptoms of old age at sixty and then gets the brilliant idea to start exercising, it’s probably better to save the brilliance for something else. It’s too late for anything but tai chi. Anything else and you could hurt yourself.

Stupidity and stubbornness are not usually listed as causes of death, but they probably should be, along with denial. That’s the longest river in the world, and seems to run through every country, drowning millions in its frothy waters. Thai food could even be considered a contributing cause of death in many cases I think. I told them all the first time that he’d have to give up salt, including fish sauce, totally- anybody knows that- and cut sugar and oil back sharply too. That means Thai food in general. For you people down south the local food up here’s a bit raunchier, hotter and nastier. Central Thai food can pass as health food in the US. Don’t try that with northern food. If you don’t believe me try some nam ngieow sometime. The doctors didn’t say anything about diet, either for his heart condition or diabetes. They never do, even though anybody who knows anything about diabetes knows that diet is the crucial factor. They gave him pills. They always do. He takes them religiously as his condition worsens. Guess what they feed him in the hospital? You guessed it, Thai food. That’ll keep ‘em coming back. Every kind of Thai food has sugar in it btw, in case you were wondering what that secret ingredient is. Variations on the combinations of sugar, salt, and red pepper pretty much define Thai food and are condiments ladled liberally on everything, even sugar in noodle soup, yes that’s right. Every one of those delicious curries has sugar in it, as does even fried rice. If it’s too hot, add sugar. If it’s too sweet, add chile or salt. It’s a vicious circle. Why not just add little or nothing and concentrate on creative combinations? After a trip to Penang, northern Malaysia, with food very similar to Thai, obviously a branch off the same culinary DNA, my wife’s only complaint was that it was too jeut, not sweet enough, salty enough, or hot enough. Guess what my complaint was? Thai food’s too much of all of those.

I told them I’d foot the bills for my father-in-law’s medical treatment if they’ll keep all the salt and sugar out of his diet, added salt and sugar, that is. It’d be almost impossible to totally remove it of course. I’ll probably keep my part of the bargain with a simple promise, but I doubt they’ll keep their end. Most Thais would probably rather die than eat ‘Farang’ food. I can understand the sentiment but it wouldn’t have to be so extreme if they could just cut back and the lower the ‘intensity’ of flavor in their food. In general they can’t. They live for that intensity, so even de-fanged Thai food won’t work. They pride themselves and compete with each other on threshold levels of intensity. They don’t eat for health; they eat for entertainment. Welcome to Italy. The idea that food has anything to do with health is totally foreign to their way of thinking. If you want to take something for health, you take pills, simple. Old men walk around villages selling out-of-date pills that they’re not even qualified to throw away, much less prescribe. Sales are brisk. Aside from that everybody’s got a favorite home remedy, ranging from the bizarre to the bazaar. In Hammurabi’s day in ancient Babylon patients had to run the gauntlet of people giving cheap advice, they say. Actually it was the other way around and the patient had to sit or lie there and endure these quasi-eulogistic epithets, whether as punishment or sincere advice would be hard to determine. I firmly believe in self diagnosis. Who knows your symptoms better than yourself, after all? But that doesn’t extend to the advice of any Barney or Betty who claims to be able to cure gout with apple cider vinegar. It’s not that easy. Self-diagnosis only goes so far also. At some point you have to surrender to the long loving arms of- not conspiracy, not science, but faith- and hope for the best.

If you go into (the) hospital in the US with kidney pains, the first thing they’ll ask is, “Do you have health insurance?” “No.” “Drink lots of water.” That’s it, cold and brutal. They don’t even ask, “Visa or Mastercard?” The credit limits don’t go that high. Thais have a more unnerving way of objectifying your health conditions- you don’t exist when you’re incapacitated. When I was laid up with a cracked coccyx, the little neighborhood girls who used to play with the hairs on my chest (shut your dirty mind) wouldn’t even look at me, kind of like ex-lovers forced to share the same old friends, even when I called to them in the same room. I finally had to make jokes about the diapers I was wearing- I prefer foreign-made Pampers over the local Momy Poko’s- just to break the ice with girls I’d known for months if not years (shut it, I said). The diapers were there ‘just in case’, since I couldn’t feel anything ‘down there’ any way. I’m better now. Ever wonder what it’d be like experiencing ‘the first time’ all over again? Ever see ‘Dante’s Peak?’ Actually being laid up half conscious in a hospital in Thailand for a Thai is probably a lot like being a Farang. They like to talk about you behind your back right to your face. It’s unnerving. Hospitals in Thailand are surrounded by coffin shops. Sales are good, even though they’ll only be burnt in the fires of cremation as the corporeal body (redundancy intended to simulate three dimensions) reverts to primordial hydrogen, carbon, and oxygen- one or six or eight electrons to an Adam- in preparation for the Big Recycle/Reincarnation/Rebirth.

The Big Moment for any Thai cremation is the moment when they open the coffin right before sliding it into the fire and anybody who can, the younger the better, rushes up for one last look at the body, imitating the facial gestures and bodily contortions of that ‘mere vessel.’ The coffin’s usually been on display for a week by now btw, if the family can afford the party. Carbohydrates or hydrocarbons? Alive or dead? Consumed or consuming? On the rocks or straight up? These are the choices for organic chemistry. You draw the lines and choose sides. As I watch the lines on my pa-in-law’s bedside EKG- I’ve never seen one before btw- I explain to the village people about the pulse and pressure readings. I might as well have been pointing to ancient hieroglyphics. They’re telling him to eat hotter spicier saltier food to ensure good health. Just for fun we each try the pulse-o’-meter on our own index fingers. I’m in fine shape in the high sixties and the wife’s okay for a woman in the low eighties. Her mother tops ninety, going going going… uh oh, it’s looking like another rehab, but I say no no no... Suicidal tendencies might help cut health costs, true, but it really shouldn’t have to come to that now really, should it?