Our cab driver liked the new Prime Minister so much he periodically let go of the steering wheel to emphasize his praises with stabbing hand motions.

“Abhisit good. Corruption…down down!”

Jab Jab

“Thaksin…Samak! Corruption up up!”

Pointer finger pokes at heaven.

“Now corruption, a littin’ bit (pointer finger and thumb become a set of tweezers holding a nugget of air). Okay okay. Not so bad!”

I asked him if the Red Shirts would be coming into Bangkok to shut down the city as their PAD rivals ( the yellow shirts) had done just two months before.

“[No. They will not come here],” he assured me with three dramatic sweeps of his head.

Good, I thought. The Red Shirts number even greater than the Yellows; the latter populates the city where the former finds its power in the countryside. It’s rumored they could pour down in the thousands. But the unreliability of rumors in Thailand is the only reliable quality about them.

November, Fresh and Spicy (a local restaraunt):

The lunch time conversation has taken a turn towards pathos. Dressed in ties and white blouses we worry about the escalating anti-government protests as dishes of fried rice and stir fried noodles make their steaming debuts from the kitchen, and we stare into the food or exchange strained looks with each other. For two days scenes in the news have shown young men carrying metal rods and machetes as they protect road blocks and shake their fists at television cameras. A motorcycle driver has either rushed or crashed into the road block and more young men hold him on his knees with a machete to his neck, his face tear stained, his lips imploring silently from the muted television screen which hangs in the corner of the restaurant and we shake our heads some more. Elsewhere women are holding up their children to give flowers and food to the police dressed in black riot gear as a thank you (or insentive) for not charging the protester barricades with tear gas.

I’m staring at my reflection in the mirror, which is actually the wall, and there are mirrors on the opposite wall as well, so my reflection goes on and on, smaller and smaller until I stop looking and eat my fried egg noodles with chicken, instead. Everything in the restaurant is white and pictures of red, yellow and blue flowers hang on the wall above the mirrors, which is white clapboard. Outside the sun is screaming and a lucky breeze pushes the baked leaves along the gray brick tiled sidewalk into the road that is heavy with “lunch-time traffic” from 11 a.m. – 2 p.m. That is only a rehearsal for the epic “after-school traffic” from 3 p.m. to 6 p.m. That in turn very impolitely infringes on the “after-work traffic” that gets started at 5 p.m. and wraps up six hours later — just in time for the nighttime street sweepers to come out and push the leaves and trash into the gutters with hoses that spray horizontal jets of water, arcing out from the center like plumage.

“Did you hear the protesters have taken over the airport?” Cho asked me after lunch. Jettapat is trying to show me the poem he’s written for Father’s Day about the King but he has written a paragraph by mistake. Since I don’t want to talk to Cho about the seizure of the airport, I ignore him and try to think of how a real teacher might convey the difference between a paragraph and a poem. Cho sees a boy without his book who is standing on his desk so he bellows off to the other side of the room. Jettapat just grins, and I can’t help but feel grateful that he smiles all the time.

December, Railay Beach, Hotel Room:

“Wow, these beds are much smaller than what I had last time,” says Ashley.

The room we’ve managed to arrange after days of failed phone calls to hotels all over Railay beach contains two comfortable looking twin beds — a paradigm of comfort for two people — which will have to support four of us.

“That’s okay,” Arlee says. “We’ll fit.”

Unfortunately I have a bright idea, and like all of my bright ideas ( which seem to have the suddenness of a cough or sneeze) I have a compulsion to express them out loud.

“Let’s push the beds together and make one big one!”

“That won’t do anything,” says Arlee. “At least with the two beds each person as an edge.”

As it dawns on the other girls that I had somehow meant for the surface area of the two beds to increase as we pushed them together — an impossibility — the giggling starts.

I blush, probably, and feel suddenly tired because being an idiot can really take it out of you.
“Well I guess I would have slept in the crack,” I offered.

December, The road home from Christmas dinner:

The cab driver left the car and slammed the door. Nervous laughter rattled in the backseat where Maria, Christi, and Erin paused their conversation to see what he would do. We had refused to let him use the expressway — a faster, much more expensive route — and now the traffic was impossible. It was Christmas. How could so many cars squeeze into this one lane road? How could so many drivers push, push, push so stubbornly like fat building up in an artery until it explodes? It’s traffic like this that made people dream of flying cars. Or replacing headlights with rocket launchers. Or the power to sleep on command, because I was obnoxiously, unforgivably tired, tired like…dreaming while awake. On our left the beer gardens of Central World Mall writhed with people. They ran across the road in twos and threes, drunk and laughing, holding hands. Revellers seemed to be climbing over each other. (I thought of bees in a hive) Music thumped at our windows. Jokes were made about abandoning our cab and its vexing driver for the beer garden. I chuckled unenthusiastically. I was broke. I was borrowing money from Christi just to get home. An ATM ate my card and the last baht in my wallet went to pay for a Christmas dinner I hadn’t really wanted to attend. But I felt like I would be seen as cheap and miserly if I didn’t. Besides, pay day was tomorrow.

The cab driver paced back and forth like a caged animal, throwing wild looks at the winding river of metal, rubber, and glass ahead. It was strange how nobody seemed to be using their horns.

“This guy’s just a little crazy,” said Maria.

“Maybe we should have let him take the expressway,” I said.

“Have him turn back. Make a right and then another,” Christi offered.

“Traffic’s the same in every direction. We just have to live with it and so does he,” said Maria.

“Exactly,” I thought.

The door opened and he sat back down behind the wheel (heavily) stirring up the air which smelled like baby powder and slightly sour…like a person who shook baby powder on himself to cover up his sourness. His head was balding. He wore jeans and a flannel pattern collared shirt with a white beater underneath. His hands grabbed the steering wheel turning his knuckles white; he cursed in Thai under his breath: “Tlaffick, tlaffick…[indecipherable]…mai mai tlaffic, too mutch.” Frustration. I felt a wary tingling in my muscles. I imagine if I had fur it would be getting ready to stand.

There are points when a person needs to release what is inside of them. Slowly is preferable, but immediate release happens. I like to think I understand this about people — their resemblance to teapots. Nevertheless, when the cab driver screamed “Fuck!” (the word carried a spike of elation, as if he were trying it out, searching out new niches of feckless foul-mouthedness) I still reached for the pen in my shirt pocket to stick in his eye in self-defense.

“Right. We’re getting out now,” Maria said.

“Uh huh. I think that’s what’s gonna happen,” I said.

We put money on the front seat and evacuated the vehicle, entering the metal river as revellers waded across to the other side.

Upon waking late and not attending the 8:30 a.m. English mass as I had intended, I ran the coffee maker and showered in the automatic way that denotes habit. I ran a mental catalog of the possible events that would fill my day. The stickered sign for breakfast hung at the top of my list, and under it the overheard discussion that we would exchange Secret Santa gifts at breakfast or after breakfast floated beside number two, and number three, the event I was looking forward to the most, which was also the event that might be number 4 or number 8 on the list depending on consensus, was the stocking exchange that a few of us agreed to do in addition to the Secret Santa, because we at least considered that each of us would be enthusiastic and earnest about the gifts we gave. You want that on Christmas Day, after all.  As much as taking things seriously in Thailand is almost considered a faux pas, we wanted to create as much of a family atmosphere as possible on this day of all days, even if we didn’t say it out loud, and that is hard to create if there isn’t a certain level of enthusiasm held for making each other happy. In fact, I remember with happiness picking out gifts for my Secret Stockingee, and fastidiously wrapping them on my tile floor late into the night, finally reveling in a tingling sensation of looking forward to Christmas which had alluded me before, just to see someone else smile at something you had done for them.

I wrestled with the idea of going to church all day. I missed my 8:30 appointment because I had stayed up until 2 a.m. talking with friends about the holidays and their lives at home; I slept more because I dreaded being exhausted by the afternoon. After that it seemed over-the-top to trek all the way across the city and attend mass alone, as everyone else was enjoying breakfast. There would be a mass at five o’clock which I would hastily dress for after a nap in the afternoon. I would go to the bus stop after missing the bus a few other people had climbed onto before me, ‘Just take the next 16 to the BTS,’ Arlee said on the phone. I waited by the bus stop and worried if my black pants looked too baggy, scrunched at the top from the belt being pulled tighter and puffed out at the sides like a depression era clown; Thailand is where waists go to shrink. After the 16 didn’t come for 15 minutes, I was wondering again if I was going to church because I wanted to or because it was just what I felt obligated to do. The bus vigil was abandoned and I returned to our building, disrobed and climbed back into bed and began reading a story from the collection of McSweeny’s short stories that Tina had given me as my Secret Stockinger.

Faith, as it stands with me, is collected in packets, like mail from senders from far away or long ago. If I need a little, much of the time I have to go looking for the packets, open them, and relearn what I have faith in if there is anything left in in the pages to be gleaned. Or, there will be moments of clarity in the street as I walk to get food and the light is excusing itself through the leaves and the smells in the air are pungent and fruity and I have to stop and wonder why I was thinking about anything instead of seeing what it was I was seeing then.

I’m not sure when I lost my ability to enter religion’s comfortable shroud and to be able feel like I am apart a part of something larger than myself. Even in high school I had moments where in the ex-corpus realm, God, Love, and Justice seemed to flow through my existence, I just needed to extend myself to them in order to be apart of them; but since then life has become much more personal — in Church I see a lot of people coming together to sing to pieces of bread, some praying earnestly to the part of the brain that listens to itself, and those are just the people who aren’t there out of some social obligation, or who come back to a place in order to be reminded of what they felt there once, but feel no more, not really, because out of consciousness of their own person they cannot project themselves to a place they don’t believe is there. Like the boy who eventually loses his ability to hear Santa’s bell, divine voices have become too faint to my ear to consider them present. But then again the boy had his trip to the North Pole to give him conviction in his faith, even if the wonder obscured with time. But that is where the mind can get in the way.

Anecdotally, consider that moments of clarity often seem to be revealed to the mind, and not the other way around. The light through the leaves and the smells of the neighborhood had only to be realized in order to clear away the old preoccupations: ‘where am I eating, how am I going to get all my grading done before tomorrow, how can I get around my co-teacher’s reservations and teach the kids something I feel will actually benefit them, in turn giving my own time a sense of purpose it gratingly lacks, what is it exactly that I’m doing now? am I getting food or am I looking for something to do so I am not doing nothing, so I am not thinking that I am doing nothing?’ Those daily paranoias.

Children inevitably go through a period where they begin to question the world that has been created for them in which Santa Clause Claus blesses the space around their bedazzled conifers with gifts and cookie crumbs in the comforting silence of Christmas night. During this period in my own life I asked my grandfather once to give it to me straight: Yes or No, does Santa Claus exist or is he a giant adulthood conspiracy manifested to create wonder and love of gift giving in the hearts of children (and to sell coca-cola)?

‘Of course he’s real,’ he said in our living room. ‘Me and him talk when he comes. He asks about you and your brother and I always put in a good word for you.’

This made perfect sense to me because my grandfather was old and so was Santa so of course they would have conversations, as I often saw old people doing, and I was also proud that I had a grandfather who could influence Santa Claus! My grandfather successfully kept my faith in Santa alive for at least a few years. But, inevitably I would again question the validity of the adults’ earnest claims that it was not them who put the presents out, as was beginning to dawn on me made the most sense (I was also comparing Santa’s handwriting to my mother’s, both of which were similar enough to be incriminating.) One day I confronted my mother from the back seat of the van and laid out all the evidence of the conspiracy I had gathered through careful observation, which included hiding a tape recorder under a table and finding my scotch tape bridge intact inside of the chimney, Christmas morning. She sighed and looked at me with eyes that could only be described as vexed; marked by hesitation; and can’t-you-just-cooperate-and-accept-that-you-get-free-stuff-from-a-jolly-man-in-red. I imagine pulling back the veil of Christmas is a difficult line to cross for any parent, as it means that their child has begun moving down a slope that they know will only gather speed. “Do you really want to know this?” she asked. I said yes.

‘Santa is real,’ said Grandpa on the phone. ‘Does he need to be physical? No. It’s stupid for people to try to convince you something isn’t real just because you can’t see it.’

The night before the Christmas Fair I called my grandpa to catch up. We traversed the three epic topics of our conversations: life news, political news (‘the problem with government is that we have career politicians. Every four years you need to vote the suckers out and get new blood in there. Take away the time they need to be corrupted’), and memory. Memory worked its way down to Christmas and the holiday’s own corruptions, subtle and not so subtle.

‘He’s more than the person that you were told brought you presents when you were little. Christmas is more than what these commercials have you believing. Everything has become about what you’re getting, why aren’t you buying more? Why aren’t you doing more? These companies make you feel guilty in order to make money. Guilt my ass! Christmas is celebration with your family and the people you love.  Matt, believe in Santa, would you? Don’t listen to their crap.’

We had buffet at the Landmark Hotel on Christmas Day. Roast beef, chicken on top of coleslaw, sushi with oysters, minestrone soup, vinagrette over romaine lettuce, cheese platters, bread, garlic pickles, thai noodles in chili paste, penne pasta in marinara sauce, fondue. I called my parents half way through dinner and they had not even begun to open presents, yet. Mom laughed when I learned she bought Brian a hello kitty apron. Brian’s friends’ gave him two four-foot swords, one of which was a replica of a sword from the video game, “Zelda: Twightlight Princess.” Given that the Zelda series has influenced my family more than almost any other form of entertainment I told Mom that she should display it proudly in a place of purpose in the house, perhaps over the fire place or in the master bedroom. Brian informed me in a dead pan voice that Dad had just started a fire with a blow torch. Connor lamented that it would probably be noon before he would be able to open his first present. Soon, there would be the smell of coffee wafting through the dining room, into the living room where the tree resided in the corner, surrounded by gift wrapped boxes. Breakfast might be pancakes and bacon with the 40 percent chance of home fries if Brian made the case with enough passion. Despite that Christmas songs wafting from the house band back in the restaurant, the beautiful lights and snow flake statues in the avenues, Christmas would not be imported to that hotel so easily.  A little managed to travel there anyhow on the back of familiar voices, and I was grateful for that: to be a little bit outside of myself so that the pretension of leather chairs and chandeliers, sides of buildings blinking in frenzied white and red light,  the novelty of Christmas carols without the convenience of r’s could dissipate a bit, and I could be someplace between where I’m going and where I’ve been.

Take care all.

I went to Singapore to take a break from Bangkok: from the chaos of it, the smell of trash and poo when you pass a street corner, the lack of visibility, the tall buildings with nothing in them, traffic-blocking protesters who are not quite sure what they’re protesting about, good laws that aren’t enforced and bad laws that make you boil, dirty windows, the charcoal and dust that brown the sweat on your forehead, the constant certainty that nothing is certain, the omnipresent language barrier — all that attracts me to this place normally. But one needs a vacation.

Our start was shaky. My plane, a small machine of tin and hydraulics and porthole windows, had not even taken off and the airport had already thrown away my toothpaste. I wrote in my notebook: “6:30 a.m. Tooth paste trash canned. Not an auspicious sign.”

Start Digression
I understand the reasons for the aggressive action taken against liquids in quantity in a dangerous world. It is still funny to think of my 170 milliliter tube of toothpaste with dread. On one hand the plane was abstractly safer; on the other, my teeth and the olfactory centers of those around me would be made to actually suffer. The sacrifices we make for the greater good…

Terrorism awareness continued its lonely braying inside Singapore’s heralded subway system, the MRT. Cameras perched on walls and atop subway maps like cyclops gargoyles. PSAs looping on plasma screens encouraged MRT travelers to be wary of solitary bags or people that look suspicious. One particularly stark PSA shows a man with a baseball cap pulled low over his brow leaving a very square bag under his seat. He exits the train and casts a malevolent look over his shoulder, before clandestinely pulling a cellphone from his jacket. The train carries the rest of its unwitting passengers into a tunnel, and a moment later a fireball blooms from the tunnel’s mouth. Only you can prevent terrorism. Report suspicious bags or individuals. I miss the days when I was only responsible for forest fires.
End Digression

Signs auspicious or not, my time in Singapore was wonderful. Singapore is clean, organized, efficient…expensive. I spent about as much in a weekend in Singapore as I did on my entire trip in October. A U.S. dollar is about $1.50 Singapore dollars. A guesthouse for one night is SG $85. A meal runs your anywhere from SG $7 to $12. Two dollars buys you a small dollar of water. Let’s not talk about beer. For one beer you could see a movie in New York City with enough left over to buy a packet of Dentine. Living on the Thai baht is satisfactory enough in Bangkok, but in Singapore the exchange rate becomes suffocating.

I stayed in Little India, away from which you had to walk a mile to escape the menace of curry and the all the energetic ampage of Bollywood bounced from store fronts into the wee hours of the morning making your hips dance in your sleep, because most of the budget places were located there. From there the MRT took you most of the places you wanted to be within twenty minutes. Trains arrived every 6 minutes. There were maps showing the blue, green, red, purple, and orange routes clearly in every train car. To pay you simply told a machine where you wanted to go and it issued you a card which you could reuse on the return trip.

Indeed, in every way that Bangkok is chaotic, Singapore is controlled; and in every sense that my city seems to have been designed by urban developers with Jackson Pollock aspirations, Singapore boasts a DaVinci-esque grace in its simplicity and efficiency that makes you stop and wonder, who did this? Let’s place the exciting fact that English is spoken everywhere in a drawer for the moment, additionally that most signs display three other languages besides English, including Hindi, Chinese, and Malawi can stay temporarily in the same drawer. Besides the ample display of languages, signs exist in such floral magnitude that it makes losing your way a difficult feat even for a l’incompetent such as myself.

Honestly, I don’t feel like continuing on about Singapore. Friday found us settling in a hotel and exploring our surroundings, Saturday was spent at the Singapore Zoo (easily the best zoo in Asia, if not the best I’ve been to, period) and that evening we took in “Avenue Q.” Peed myself, folks. That’s right. I urinated in my trousers. Sunday was a visual art exhibition at an art museum. Flew home, opened my wallet and listened with some consternation to the echos within. Ate noodles for dinner. Pay day is tomorrow. So no worries on that front.

I sat in one of the wicker chairs in the concrete lobby next to the shelves of books where it smelled like wet cigarettes and there was a lingering sweetness of mildew.
“Yessir. Those are my buddies,” I confirmed, but in the way one might claim an errant pet. (“Yessir, that’s my dog who just shat on your porch.”)

I couldn’t tell if he was American or Canadian, or if he remembered I was American, despite that he had asked me whe we first met, “American or Canadian?” (To which I answered American.) The owner of the guest house was Scottish and the thin sixtyish man was one of a cadre of expats who I saw coming and going from the rooms where people stayed for a few weeks to a few years. There was a healthy expat community in the neighborhood which owned guest houses, bars, used book stores and liked to use “we” in recognition of some brand of expat solidarity. Most were wizened and wrinkled from constant baking in the South East Asian sun, and they dressed comfortably in linen and cotton and drank often. It seemed like a nice way to live, though most looked much older than they were or much younger – I couldn’t quite tell for sure. But there was always a bit of the so-you’re-still-living-in-your-parents’-garage type of feeling to their life style from my point of view – which has unfortunately been influenced by my experience and opinions derived from the latter.

The sixtyish man and I had been discussing a book by Steven Pinker on language as a window into meaning (don’t ask me how we got onto that topic) when the man put a succinct period on our conversation by trying to make racial joke concerning inner city black people. It was one of those truly awkward moments when the generation gap widens to a chasm as worn and weary racial stereotypes are dragged up and presented as humor with a good natured grin. Crickets chirped, the wind blew, and there was a nervous cough off in the bushes. When I failed to take up his cue the conversation collapsed. He said his good byes and good lucks and went up stairs to pack his bag for a two-week excursion south. Good luck to you, too, I said, and turned back to my reading.

A few of the Americans had showers and quality time with the head as the rest of us took in snooker at a local hole called “Friends Bar.” With cooperation from the beers, an open discussion on traveling with diarrhea, and how the gods of pool had blessed us with neither luck nor talent, I enjoyed the good fortune of familiar company after a week of solo travels (in Thai, bai pom diao — going as a man alone). Somebody scratched the eight-ball, bringing another excruciating game to a close, Kyle began smoking his cigarettes, and the floor was opened to the recounting of travel stories.

The six of them had lived large on the island Koh Pi Pi and the mass of their wallets and brain cells (due to alcohol intake) took a collaborative nose dive, which leveled out shortly after arriving in Chiang Mai by train. On their trip to Pi Pi, Gwin told of how their group of strapping lads met a pair of elegant ladies who hailed from the emerald isle of Bridgette on their fast boat from the coast.

“They were hot, dude,” Gwin explained. “They said they lost their cameras and they wanted pictures. So they asked us if we could take pictures of them and then send them along via Facebook. So basically I was like, ‘You want us to take a bunch of pictures of you… AND be Facebook friends?” he paused and then looked around at his audience for affect.

“So I was like fuck yeah! I’ll take a bunch of pictures of you! Well, I didn’t say that, exactly. But, I started shooting pictures of these girls and they were just posing away. I was eating it up. I mean these two were attractive. We invited them to hang out later that night. You know, we told them a bar, told them we’d show them a good time. They actually showed up! Everything was going great until Kyle and Gregg met these Irish dudes. I was talking to one of the Irish girls and for some reason I was just like, ‘Dudes!’ and I went to drink with the guys. So these two beautiful Irish girls are just drinking alone at the bar while we’re bro’ing out with these drunk Irish guys, howzing Bacardi mixers, and they’re telling us to come stay with them in Ireland and we’re saying yeah yeah of course we’ll stay with you and then finally the girls are like, “Peace, I guess” and they left. We didn’t even care! We were such idiots. But, whatever dude, we had f’in fun. We have so many places to stay in Ireland, now.”

In Chiang Mai, they planned to participate in the local foreigner tradition of securing rubberbands to their feet in order to launch themselves from an elevated platform and bounce jubilantly from earth to sky earnestly yelping, “Shit! Shit! Shit! Shit!” I participated in just such an activity two years before, thus I opted to travel further north to a town called Pai, in order to hire a guide who would take me into the jungle where the hill tribes dwelled. On the third morning after they had arrived I rented a motorbike and road the four hours north into Mae Hong Son province.

I took a road that was curved and green. Rice paddies floated by in panorama. Rain fell and made the road sizzle and then steam. Thick mountain trees paused and separated to reveal more mountains that filled everything below a sky that resembled gobs of soap foam thrown on an azure tile floor. The sun was warm and the air was even cold in places. Four hours folded into passing. Pai was right there, just like I had stepped into the next room, and I sat down to have a coffee and thought: “I would very much like to experience that again, if not for a little longer.”

I’ve described Pai in many ways – artists’ enclave, quirky darling of backpackers, and foreign food capital of Thailand – but it’s also darn friendly. After I procured a room from a lovely gentleman named Mr. Jan I went to town in search of grub. A blond tallish (taller than me that is) backpacker passed me on the road and nodded,

“Hi,” he said, smiled, and walked on.

“Howdy,” I said and tried remember if I had passed him on the road, but I had not. He was just pleasant enough to say hey to a stranger – well that was nice. A dread-headed girl the height of a bar stool passed on my left and offered another hello, which I returned with a smile. On the corner a Thai bedecked in dreads down to his belt was selling Bob Marley related objects from a small table. He sat on a low stool below a small square mirror with a caption that read, “Are you ting-tong?”

I placed my hands together and offered him a wai, which he returned and I decided I liked Pai people. I should tell you that in Bangkok if two white people pass each other more often than not they avoid eye contact, as if seeing another white face reminds you of your own foreignness, perhaps it destroys one’s sense of originality. I don’t know. Anyway, people don’t say hi as much.

I dropped by a trekking office I had researched the week before and set up a meeting for the next day with one of the guides. The owner was a Thai. His features struck me as Native American (or at least the image of Native Americans I have: long black hair, strong jaw, and athletically muscled). Later on I’d see him riding a dirt bike as if it were a horse, putting him a head taller over every other person on the road and with a growl and a spit of dust he was off on some type of business. I ate a burrito for dinner and watched a live jazz band made of Thais who dressed with sixties-hippy-sensibility, and the singer was the most beautiful 40/50-something woman I’ve ever seen. She wore a long white cotton dress and tied a piece of white cloth around her hair and there was something faintly Parisian about how her lips wrapped themselves around her words. She held the microphone like you or I might hold a flower as you empty its vase in order to replace the water. I left before the jazz was over, quite content to go to bed after a long day.

Chah was short with close-cropped hair and a round cookie kind of face. He smiled easily and even as we were bargaining over a price for the trek on which he was going to lead me, his eyes could not hide his effervescent nature, his plain kind of good will.

“You have no more people on your trek? Just you?”

“Just me.”

“You have no more friend who maybe would like to go?”

“Khun diao krap. Just me.”

“Oah! You speak Thai?” Cha spoke Thai and English deep in his throat giving his accent a heavy pleasantness.

“I speak Thai.”

“[Something in Thai]”

“Yep, you bet.” I hoped I hadn’t just agreed to a hundred bucks a day.

“Oh good. Most foreigners don’t like to eat that. Makes them very sick in the belly — throw up everywhere.”

“Oh jeez, yeah, I eat that all the time.” What am I going to have to eat?

“Actually you’re the only person that likes that I’ve met, I think.”

“The only one?”

“Yep. Just you.”

“No one else?”

“Khun diao. Just you.”

Chah quizzed me further on my limits: what I would and would not eat (anything), did I enjoy walking (which we would do much of), sleeping (very little of), did I own a sleeping bag (I did not), had I been on a trek before (this would be my third), and did I really enjoy eating [thai phrase] (oh yes, yes, yes — very much!). Chah preferred sleeping outdoors to sleeping in the villages. He went hunting and grilled or boiled his prizes in the jungle using bamboo for both cooking pots and utensils. He was born in a Karen village, and could speak each of the three major hill tribe languages: Karen, Lahu, and Lisu (Definitions). I, on the other hand, spoke enough Thai to usually find myself in situations of gastronomical distress (No I love it, I do! Mmmm mm!). Alas, in the quest to be understood the joke is most often on you, but it’s also a major ingredient of the fun.

If you had been privy to the journal I kept on the trek — say you were one of the rangers who reported to the hypothetical sight where my last words would have been something like, “Oh, this critter seems friendly!” — your investigation may have been hampered by this dribble:

“Dark now. Two candles in a Karen hut reserved for tourists.(1) Second trek.(2) Tired. Thinking of home.
Six hours of walking. Started in Pai, Chah and I; the trail was hardly a trail most of the time. Pushed and tore through fibrous underbrush – twigs, thorns, burrs, barbs, etc — mud and leaves clinging to my legs. By the river we checked ourselves for leeches, the oozing brown and white leeches with teeth, small at first, but then they grow with the intake of your blood. Mostly they itch. On the top of the mountain we ate Pad Thai from plastic sandwich bags. Cha fashioned chopsticks out of green bamboo. After lunch we walk, walk, walk. No more leeches but plenty more mud. Around two we come to a place in the jungle where I hear a machine working away in off in the blinding trees. Chah says it’s for making homes, he does not know the English word for it. Do I want to see it? Tired, but I say okay. We leave the trail and descend onto a slope, I walk carefully because I’ve already fallen six times. After five minutes we come upon the machine. Two men standing on and under a platform made from tree logs and lashed together with sapling bark, working a large two-handed saw. They are cutting a felled tree trunk into beams. Chah seems to know them. They talk. I try to keep my footing on the muddy slope. We leave after a few moments, back into the trees and onto the trail.

We come to a village in a clearing. Smells of cow dung, sounds of pigs and poultry…roosters. I shower in a latrine stall, water is icy, floor is a concrete puddle. Wash my hair, my legs, my feet, wash my sandals. Dry with my damp towel. I still feel dirty, but very much refreshed.

Only 3 p.m., we walked to quickly, but it was only the two of us. Tomorrow there will be three, Chah says. His friend has a long gun. We’ll hunt. We’ll sleep in a hut out in the corn field. I will cook for you — locun(4) food. Now, I will take you to the Karen caves. Chilly, damp. In and out with our flashlights. I’m sweating again. It’s getting dark now. Chah takes me to watch a Muay Thai fight on his uncle’s television. The electricity comes from solar power. Five or so Thai men are in the hut, most without shirts; I can’t tell who Chah’s uncle is, or if he is even there. We don’t watch for long.
Dinner is yellow curry soup with potatoes, a pumpkin bread/omelette sort of dish, sweet and sour chicken with vegetables, and pineapple, tea, two glasses of Lao Lao whiskey, the local moonshine. After dinner, Chah takes me to his friend’s hut. He and his wife sit on the floor. His wife is dressed in a traditional smock of red, green, and blue vertical and horizontal patterns on black. A cloth is piled on top of her head. She cooks hahmoo — food for pigs — consisting of pumpkin, cucumber, and corn grinds. It’s dark so the only light is that from the coals and two candles. She plunges a wooden stirring stick into the charred pot which is boiling over festive coals. The hahmoo is stirred, it bubbles, breaking fissures in the heavy concoction like hot mud as steam rises. Water spills over the lip and hisses on the burning wood below. We drink green tea in bamboo cups, poured from a tin kettle, also charred black.

We returned to Chah’s uncle’s hut, which was a bit larger than the last. Same cooking apparatus: a raised, rectangular base, bordered by wood moulding, inside contained sand and a ring of charcoals. Four posts at each end of the rectangle support a platform above the fire, through which the smoke pours; pots are stored on top. Lao Lao is brought out along with boiled peanuts. We take shots from a measuring glass and eat the peanuts.

An older woman opens a pot that has been on the fire and takes out a chicken, its feathers shiny and lustrous with orange light. A half hour later a young girl — pretty, wearing a Lee Jeans pink shirt — returns with the chicken de-feathered, now a scrawny, drawn looking creature with a beak agape and dark holes for eyes. She holds it over the fire until its skin roasts brown. We pass whisky around until we are drunk, and we go to bed.

Second day and there are three. This is Cha’s friend who owns the long rifle. Cha has been talking about him (the long rifle and drinking whisky, usually together) since yesterday. This rifle is about as long as its owner, Somchai, 23, wooden stock, long thin black barrel, barrel loaded with birdshot, spring locked breach, wadding paper, percussion cap, ram rod — a modern musket. When the gun is shot there is a loud, satisfying boom.

Thick pancakes, bananas, dragon fruit, and melon for breakfast. We load up and amble into the forest around 10 a.m. (much better than our 7 a.m. start the day before). Somchai and his long rifle leads. The trail which is wide enough for a pick up truck goes steep and the sweat pours in. Somchai, me, then Chah, we march — flat foot after flat foot on the steep upward slope. Once it levels out we stop and Chah cuts down a young sapling to fashion a sling shot. He ties on a pre-fab rubber band with strips of sapling bark. With the sling shot Chah is able to kill a song bird, which we’ll have for lunch he says. The bird is tiny in Chah’s large hand: yellow and green feathers, a wet, red wound on its belly where the stone struck it. I look at it and I’m glad I didn’t kill it.

Somchai spots something in the trees and starts off in a crouch with his rifle. I hunt him with the lens of my camera. He flits in and out of the trees periodically through the LSD screen. He makes multiple stops to aim before he stops one final time, takes aim and boom, smoke. He runs and I lose him in the bramble. A few moments later he returns to the trail with a large black bird held up triumphantly in his hand. He lays his rifle against a tree and begins the task of removing its feathers right there on the trail. It strikes me how small the bird is without its proud plumage.

We come to a waterfall and a stream where Somchai and Chah build a fire to roast the birds, boil water for tea, and cook a canned soup in hallow bamboo Chah has cut from off the path. Chah cuts the now featherless black bird from its neck to its bottom with a pocket knife and pries open the ribcage. The heart, lungs, stomach, and intestines are revealed in surprising anatomical correctness and completeness.
When the birds are roasted and the soup boiling we wash our hands in the stream and begin to eat, using broad jungle leaves as a ground cloth, and half sections of bamboo as food containers. The birds taste like chicken, the soup tastes like potatoes and beef with a dash of red curry. The tea tastes like hot water. We clean up and set off.

We arrive at the field where we are to sleep that night some hours later. Darkness will not come for at least another three hours. We wash ourselves in the stream. When we are done there is a fence to be climbed, a hundred yards or more of winding path through the middle of a corn field — corn stalks seven to eight feet high — and a shack in the middle of the clearing. An old man and his wife live in the shack, three dogs, a cat, and a cluckery of chickens (including a few roosters) to keep them company. The shack is lean-to type construction with a slanted roof, wooden boards nailed horizontally and vertically make the walls, and raised off the ground to leave a space large enough for the animals to crawl under for protection against the elements and the old woman.

The old woman is a small creature, maybe four-feet tall, and hunched from years of heavy work. She is small, but she wields a terrible stick, which she holds high above her head like a rushing samurai to drive off the dogs when they try to get into the hut to investigate the wonderful smells within. When she grabs her weapon she clucks at them, “Shud, shud, shud!” and often the sound is enough to make the animals scatter. Every once in a while a dog will venture too near and the thwack of the stick on their back sends them howling into the cornfield. But they always return shortly thereafter.
Money changes hands and Chah tells me we’ll have chicken for dinner. Would you like to shoot it? I say yes. I just want to shoot the gun. He shows me the hen which is underneath the hut pecking at dirt. Do you see it? I cannot, because there is some obstruction blocking my view. I say no. At this point Chah says nothing more, probably waiting for me to see it, but I’m not sure of what to do. Do I drive it out? Is spying the chicken some kind of test? I stand motionless and then its clear I won’t be shooting this chicken. The old woman grabs feed as Chah, the old man, and I stand back. Somchai takes up his rifle and waits as the chickens are lured out to peck at the feed the old woman has strewn about in the open.

My heart beats in my throat as Somchai takes aim at a particular hen who is pecking at the edge of the corn. BOOM and the chicken screams and the rest of the animals scatter momentarily, but they are all back feeding in the same places in a short amount of time, as if nothing at all had happened. Maybe I was the only one who saw something new.
We go inside to have tea and the body of the hen is tossed by fire pit. The old woman takes up her perch by the door and lets fall her stick every time a curious snout pokes through the door to take stock of the dark blood on the floor.
It’s dark by the time we finish dinner and a tarp is placed outside the hut and two candles are lit. The old man has left to get more Lao Lao, which we finished during dinner. It’s more than an hour before he returns, by which time to moon has climbed into the sky and everything is bathed azure. From the hut we can see the entire clearing below, blue and clear and cold. I’m swathed in a blanket and I wear my rain jacket. We pass around shots of Lao Lao in age order: the old man, Chah, myself, then Somchai. Before long we begin singing. First the old man sings a haunting Lahu song in a raspy voice that resembles a goose honking. Chah takes up the song in his smooth tenor, backed up by Somchai, and I’m haunted by it. I try to learn the words but the melody reminds me of what the Who’s sing in “The Grinch Who Stole Christmas.” I sing a few English songs for them. By midnight we’re well drunken and in bed. By 2:30 a.m. I’m up again with the roosters. They’ve climbed onto the roof and they are cockadoodling at the moon. “Cockadoodledoo! Listen to me, I’m a rooster! I’m a rooster who crows at the moon! Cockadoodle-fucking-doo!” By 3 a.m., my dreams turn from walking through glades to brutally murdering roosters.

The next day finds us walking through more fields. Periodically we stop and Chah cuts up cucumbers that are growing in the fields for us to eat. They’re cool and refreshing. Somchai leaves us to return home after lunch, and we arrive at another village after six hours of walking at 3 p.m. It is considerably easier than our first day, but we are still bone tired. My sandals are mud caked and my feet scratched up and bleeding in places, but I’m worse for wear. We wash up and I spend the afternoon talking to a cadre of village girls who are quizzing me in their best Thai where I’m from and who my family is. I answer them as best I can, which is surprisingly well, considering how badly I can butcher the language.

We kill nothing else for dinner. Instead we eat ramen noodles with fruit and sticky rice. We’re staying a beautiful house. Stairs from the road lead to a platform that’s open, where dishes are washed and laundry hangs. Another set of stairs leads to a raised part of the house where the family sleeps in three separate rooms, and there is a space where meals are prepared and eaten. Like other villages the electricity for this house is provided by solar power. The family has a small television and dvd player. After dinner we are in the kitchen room, smoke from the fire pit wafts into the rafters, and we are drinking green tea with the father. The father speaks a little English but mostly falls back on Thai when he cannot say something. I am getting most of what he is saying to me, but I ask Chah to help me with translations some of the time. The father asks me if I have a girlfriend, and I say I do — though his daughter is very beautiful — I’m not looking to leave this trek with a bride. (Sometimes it is merely easier to bend the truth than to explain why you can’t marry their daughters, despite their beauty.)”

The next morning only the two of us would walk to the road where we would find our bus back to Pai. I’m sorry young daughter of the nice man who hosted us. Yes you were beautiful, but we walk much faster with only two. Three would only slow us down, and surely you would have wanted to bring your things with you, slowing us down even more. In the end the way it was proved better, more beautiful even. Two began and with two it ended. Two plus a bride-to-be could never have provided the necessarily balance. Furthermore, such a development would require another entry and I am out of words.

John McCain also proved himself to be the moral and upstanding leader I found him to be prior to the election madness. He recaptured some of his former self tonight, and maybe even came upon something greater, in his concession speech. Here are a few choice passages from the speech.

“It is natural. It’s natural, tonight, to feel some disappointment. But tomorrow, we must move beyond it and work together to get our country moving again.

“Tonight — tonight, more than any night, I hold in my heart nothing but love for this country and for all its citizens, whether they supported me or Senator Obama — whether they supported me or Senator Obama.

I wish Godspeed to the man who was my former opponent and will be my president. And I call on all Americans, as I have often in this campaign, to not despair of our present difficulties, but to believe, always, in the promise and greatness of America, because nothing is inevitable here.

Americans never quit. We never surrender. (APPLAUSE)

We never hide from history. We make history.

Thank you, and God bless you, and God bless America.”

- Senator John McCain

I hope this kind of thinking lasts. If it does, we certainly have better days ahead.

A new Dan (we had one already) arrived in Bangkok the night before, a Tuesday, (rumors of his arrival trickled down into the lounge coffee/tea gathering the next morning) and on Wednesday most of my students wanted nothing of the riddles that I was giving them on the white board. “First day,” an Eighth grader complained, and I could see that the zero he received last semester had faded from his memory like the English that we hadn’t taught him might have over the October break, if he had learned it.

Keeping consistent the quality of the Matt Lindeboom brand, I spent the entire morning messing up the two riddles I had memorized — only one of which I could solve without clues — and my kids responded to the internationally recognized Brand in kind by correcting my mistakes for me once they had solved the riddles despite them.

“Mr. Matthew the farmer went across the river four times, not three.”

“I know,” I said, gazing nonchalantly at the white board, stuffing my panic back down into my intestines with a swallow. “It’s what we like to call a riddle wrapped in conundrum. I was just testing you.”

An important lesson of being a teacher is never admitting to your students that you’re fallible. Because once you show even the most intangible iota of weakness, you will be eaten. Not in the hyperbolic sense, like you say you’ll be eaten when they are actually just going to make fun of you. No. Your students will actually consume you for nutrients — bone marrow in particular.

I taught three sections in the morning and I let my fourth period class out ten minutes early for lunch. Ms. Pat took me and Steve to a local place to eat. Two other Thai teachers were in the restaurant and one remarked on the way Steve and I looked upon returning from our month vacation.

“Steven you look older, but the same!”

To me: “You look younger, but you are fatter.”

Straight forward no fuss and with that they glided out the door and shortly after new Dan came through the door, visibly overwhelmed, but I was still contemplating being fatter despite having actually lost more weight in October.

Dan worked with another man named Dan who was a teacher at St. Gabes last year. New Dan heard Last-Year Dan’s stories and decided this life sounded pretty good, so he quit his job and flew out here with about a couple shirts, some pants, and no toiletries whatsoever. His first questions were about where to find soap and shampoo.

“I also need shaving cream,” he said, rubbing in his five ‘clock shadow in the manner one who has been inside a pressurized tube for twenty-two hours.

This-Year Dan (who had only arrived September) told him he should secure a cell phone. Steve and I did our best to tell him where he could find supplies. We explained how the class schedules worked, places to scavenge for food, bus routes, night life, and some basic Thai which he had studied from a book and CD for a month before he arrived. New Dan took it all in and seemed to grasp it well. In his own words he never been outside the country except for Canada. “This isn’t Canada,” he observed and I could only agree with him.

After school New Dan (I will shed the “New” here and he will just be known as Dan) and I went for a stroll down Samsen Road to give Dan a sense of the scene. We walked down to a large intersection called Thewet, and we caught the number 30 bus to Khao Sarn Road, the backpacker haven. We sat down and immediately a woman in the seat next to us began motioning frantically to Dan’s wrist and then her own, which supported a watch. Dan realized before I did that a watch he borrowed from me must have fallen off his wrist as we got on the bus. Before I could tell him don’t worry about it, it’s a cheap watch I don’t really need, Dan headed for the door and it was all I could do to leap from the bus at the same time as him. What followed was a moment which reminded me of the first days of my own arrival here, which I have mostly forgotten, but I remember their franticness, living up to some set of expectations I’m not even really sure exists, of constant first impressions and needing to make them right. So as I watched Dan run down the crowded street, buses and motorbikes and cars to his left and throngs of carts and covered stalls selling fruit and fish to his right, to retrieve my cheap watch which fell off his wrist, I wondered if he too would forget this first-day-in-country moment as I have forgotten many of my own.

Mae Hong Song Province

Pai

At request of concerned parties, here is a vague representation of where I may or may not be at any given time. I’m on my eighth or ninth day in the north. Tomorrow, I jump into one more five day trek before returning back to surly Bangkok, where the trumpets of the once smoldering confrontation between the democratic government and monarchist reformers are spitting fire again. I would easily stay up here for longer, mingling with the linen clad expats over green tea and the free world, but ole’ mister wallet is feeling the strain — echoes of the conflagration back home, perhaps. More likely the lightening of my monetary load is due to my undisciplined spending habits when some of the American teachers came to Chiang Mai for a few days: coca cola, whiskey and beer, oh my… A spartan lifestyle will resume once I’m engrossed in the big B again, no doubt.

I’m doing my best to keep a notebook on this trip –  I was good in the beginning — but now I’m leaving more and more to memory, a writing strategy which never fails to leave me grasping the air for necessary details. I’ll leave you with my impressions on my first day in Chiang Mai.

10/1/2008

“Clouds have the run of things in Chiang Mai, this morning. I’m holed up in a budget place, a room with a fan called Supreme Guest House that isn’t without its pleasantries. The bed is big enough for two people and I’ve horded both pillows the center of this expansive mattress with hedonistic glee. Downstairs, a woman who mans the desk is very nice and she’s willing to speak in Thai with me. She could be thirty for fifty, I can’t tell. Thais age so differently from what I’m used to. Forever young isn’t just a song lyric here. Shelves of old, bedraggled books in the lobby invite the lonely bibliophile. The entrance hangs a great sign: “No Entrance for Drug Dealers, Missionaries or Pedophiles.”  I chuckle, imagining that unfortunate missionary who learns, upon seeing the sign, that he’s fallen in with a lot of drug dealers and pedophiles, and all the requisite praying that would follow. My room is on the the third floor with a nice view of the surrounding neighborhood. Roofs are tiled red and gray, strewn with discarded bricks, satellite dishes, and rusted water reservoirs. Buildings are painted pink and the clear green-blue hue of the Caribbean water you see in calendars but never quite believe. Of course, the color of the buildings is not so naturally stunning, rather, vague and neutral beneath the harshly burnt red of the roof tiles above. Earthy cafes advertising western breakfast and espresso, wilted-looking used book stores, and garish travel offices populate the street below. Supreme House is nested away in a pocket of lanes off the main road where most budget guest houses tend to be found. My budget is BHT 150 a night, or about $4.50.

Chiang Mai itself can be explored by foot, and I obliged it for the first few hours after my train arrived this morning — two hours late — and I can assure you if you don’t like walking, plenty of taxi and tuk tuk drivers will solicit you as you walk. When it gets dark, you can be equally as sure, that certain woman (even men dressed as women) will solicit you for a different kind of ride.

Night is quiet. What I think were fireworks crackled off in the distance somewhere, but only briefly. In an era past I might have called them bombs.

My wandering took me past the night bazaar. For some obnoxious reason the night bazaar, a brightly lit wonderland of silk, wood carvings and paintings on thin strips of canvas of Buddha and Bodhi Trees; elephants and serene Buddha faces, eyes closed and mouth formed into an easy, satisfied smile; stone and metal amulets, fake jade, fake rubies, fake Adidas, fake watches and authentically pirated DVDs; jewelry that dangles, bracelets of wood, rainbow knit caps, t-shirts with pithy catch phrases that make your teeth grind, Billabong shorts, and Von Dutch trucker hats; bamboo lamps, bamboo walking sticks, bamboo mirrors, bamboo picture frames bamboo bath tubs, bamboo bamboo, and bamboo bamboo inlaid with exotic gold leafed bamboo; what of the people? sweaty pits, beat pink faces beaded with heat, charcoal burning stoves and chicken flavored smoke where foreign children want grilled poultry on a stick, breath on breath, hands on hands, fabric against fabric, and a nauseating amble by stall after countless stall, pressed up against the sidewalks and the buildings on either side of the main street for a mile or more; the merchants and merchants’ salutations, exultation, manipulation, meditation, begging, jostling, giggling, smiling, calling, and finally you either buy or you shove away saying, “Sorry, sorry, sorry” as a desperate sounding woman drops the price lower and lower, made me depressed.

But I had been to this bazaar before, when I was a student at the very end of my semester in Asia. In this bazaar, I felt as if I had been brought back to Chiang Mai merely to observe, or asked to meditate on what had been here in my memory. I found myself seeking out the guest house where we stayed. I spent an hour peeking in and out of lanes off the main road, looking for familiar land marks. I just wanted to see it. It found me, finally. Like a musical resonance a few of the familiar landmarks vibrated a little louder as I passed them. Mad Dog’s Bar: Pizza and Beer. 5 pm – Midnight, a tailor shop next to a beauty parlor that situated next to each other too perfectly to be coincidence. Then the lane itself curved off the the left as soon as you entered it. I had memorized these features so I didn’t get lost in the dark. My sense of direction is infamous. It was dark by now and I walked into the lane and I felt strange, as if these memories had perched themselves on my shoulder and were watching with me. A few bars and a laundry shop to the left, including a place called, “The Smallest Bar in the World” which announced that it was not recommended by Lonely Planet, the backpacker bible. I passed the sports bar where Falko, Dylan, and I played Joeys and I beat a man who had once been a woman, who called himself Tay, at darts. I was proud because I have never played a full game of darts.  On the right around another corner was an italian restaurant we ate at and found the food cold, but the service completely unpleasant. Once more left and the guest house came into view, for the most part unchanged, but there nonetheless.

What had I expected to find here? Us, sitting by the pool as we did? Unchanged and together against times blind march? No, of course, not. Nor did I expect to find myself in some silly new age way. Revisiting the past does what it is supposed to do: reminds you of what was, but affirms that it is gone from the present. We are gone, some of us back here but not in the same way. Others are blown to the wind, finding themselves in deeper than they expected, as I do now. But that’s life outside of college maybe.”

I’ve acted like a recluse for the past couple weeks, carrying out my tasks and eating many of my meals by myself — just since the end of the semester felt nearer. No, I have not sworn myself to hermitdom, nor would it be a path I could follow for very long: I’m too often comforted by voices that aren’t my own. With October off, I am going north by myself for most of the month. I’ll bounce around the province until I’ve run out of money or interest, then I’ll traipse a ragged beat back to Bangkok where my body may crumple once again thankfully into my covers, and I’ll sleep until November heralds the beginning of the second semester. Is taking my meals by myself practice for my month in solitary? Not quite. When you spend a great deal of time with a small group of people, sometimes your own company becomes easiest. There comes a point when all conversations converge into same one you’ve had already for the past six months: “my kids are crazy, I’m doing this and this on my October break, so and so has the Bangkok belly, I can’t stand rice anymore, I look tan, but that’s actually just pollution, this happened my sophomore year in college and now I’m never allowed in FAO Shwartz again.” We need new stories. October may be the solution.

My train leaves tomorrow evening at 6 pm. Oh ho, here we go.

PS. Photos updated. Check out the slide show. Click here

Most of the western news coverage I’ve read on the political problems here are garbage, but this is a breath of fresh air. If you’re curious check it out: http://iht.com/articles/2008/09/12/asia/12thai.php?page=1