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…..