getting there: northern thailand

pai

up in to the mountain town of pai. an absolutely stunning landscape. bit of byron bay vibes in town — people who will very soon have comfortably upper middle class lives walking barefoot for a few weeks in pai so they can say they had their moment. that they experimented with alternative lifestyles. that this fact separates them from their coworkers, those bland schmucks who did not walk barefoot for a few weeks in pai.

how many yous

my liver must be changing colors. getting pink. more like a living, human organ and less like a darkened and abused piece of silly puddy. my intake is all curry and coffee and water this last week. in bed early. sedated. minneapolis bartender mike would be confused.

in zadie smith’s nw, (which i luckily found in a used bookstore) felix visits an ex with whom he had a much different life than the one he lives now. their time together was oriented around him being her dealer and them having the passionate, thrilling sex of drug addicts followed by the attendant lows and fighting. he visits to tell her it’s over for good. he has someone new now. he’s new now. he tells her to cut her shit. annie mocks his naïveté: “…not everyone wants this conventional little life you’re rowing your boat towards. I like my river of fire.”… “Or are you one of these optimistic souls who feel they become a new person every seven years, once the cells have regenerated — blank page, start again — never mind who you hurt, never mind what went on before.”

in jason isbell’s gravelweed he says
“i wish that i could be angry
punch a hole in the wall
drink a fifth of cheap whiskey
and call and call and call
but that ain’t me anymore, baby
never was, to tell the truth”

i came in contact with both of these bits on a three hour bus up the mountains to pai. much thankful my recent minor sickness was not one of the stomach, for these winding mountain roads would have spelt all sorts of trouble. our characters believe different things. annie that you do not change, jason that you do. can.

i put a fair amount of fan faith in isbell as both a thinker and as, of course, a foremost authority on all things isbell. but his lyrics here are confused. if he’s right that you can change that doesn’t mean it wasn’t you before. it means it isn’t you now.

we do not get to be only our triumphs. we are all of our parts. ugly ones too. shit episodes where we shoulda held the metaphorical door but were too caught up in our own shit. let it slam.

i think weekly about a cormac line, “You might think you could run away and change your name and I don’t know what all. Start over. And then one mornin’ you wake up and look at the ceilin’ and guess who’s layin’ there?”

my time here is aided by occasional listening to discussions on buddhism. joseph goldstein says “the inevitability of unwanted experiences” is a better translation of the pali word “duhkha” than the more common used translation of “suffering.” joseph goldstein is one of those people who believes you ought to work to accept that duhkha. i might add the inevitability of unwanted yous. i reckon as i approach 35 it might be time to start listening to some of that shit. swallow some big boy pills. anyways.

no mowgli

i’m not a jungle guy really. i’ve found. i mean i quite like them but they have a tendency to put me on edge in the way other forests or cliffs don’t. every hole in the ground is home to something that will either burrow into my skin or deposit venom into my veins that gives me 30 minutes to get to a hospital. i don’t know who’s making the noises and the jungle is incredibly loud. an almost techno buzz. (listen to this video!)

i read a book about the search for the source of the amazon and it gave me nightmares. dudes with spoiling flesh because they can never get dry. bugs working away under their skin they can see tunneling around. i didn’t google what kind of snakes were here. what good would it do me.

but hey, immersion therapy.

it’s 90% humidity and by an hour in i’m pouring and i’m still an hour from the waterfall. but the immersion has worked. at minute fifteen i was avoiding plants — what if it’s poison ivy on steroids — and concerning myself with bugs. all of that is lost quickly. i just tromp on.

shoot pool tell some jokes have some fun

the biggest sandwich i’ve ever had in my life for 120 baht and a few hours shooting pool with a german guy named alex who when we get to the israeli bar we begin to tell people is from denmark, for obvious reasons. few liters of chang to get the liver back in the game. don’t want him to get too lazy. and when i say israeli bar i do mean it. of the hundred or so people in there maybe five or ten were not israeli.

back to the pool table and the changs the next night. almost every bar here has a table. they’re all open to the street with welcome patios. easy to walk around and wander in here and there. look for the appropriate crowd. live music plays in many. i get pretty taken by a thai hippie in his 60’s playing some great blues tunes. cats and dogs roam the bars as little mascots. a real beefy bastard takes a nap under the bar in a blaring loud room.

—

a rainy afternoon in a coffeeshop. the breeze feels nice. windows and doors open to it. a cute young with umbrellas couple comes by the intersection and briefly chooses one direction only to quickly change their minds. i wonder who said what. who decided the change. who complied. the guy who’s been in the hostel room with me the last couple nights walks by with his friends. also young. very enthusiastic. the playlist here is welcome. the playlist at the hostel pool was insufferable. bad 80’s and 90’s pop. multiple repeats. here a number of songs i once really liked but forgot about. some that perhaps should qualify as guilty pleasures but i’m a bit past the pretension on a lot of that these days. a function of time, perhaps. one plays that rings a little too true. you only know these things when they happen, despite the advice given. yelled even, sometimes. such is life. you cannot hide from you.

“when the going gets weird the weird turn pro.”
— hunter s. thompson

one of the reason you throw yourself into these scenes is you meet more interesting people than you would at north loop social mixers. i am going to tell you a few bits of story that you will think i made up. i did not.

i met a guy. let’s call him dave. dave is in his early 40’s and has spent most of his adult life working with his hands. various kinds of construction. dave decided to get a sailing license. for a while he’s transporting boats as a job. dave takes a transport job and flies home coach.

“six months mater i’m living on a houseboat in amsterdam and i’m watching stranger things in my underwear and boom boom there’s a fuckin swat team at my door with guns drawn.”

a boat he transported ended up being used for a massive drug smuggling operation, and while the drugs weren’t on the boat when he had it, his name was all over the registry for transportation. he became a kind of local legend and showed me a broadcast from his home country where the hosts are irate the country allowed him to be extradited to spain. i’ve now learned that spanish prisons aren’t known for being technically as humane as the rest of the european union. dave was put in basically solitary confinement as a means of covid isolation. he had fuckin nothing to do. drew a sundial plate with a piece of chalk by estimating hour passages coming through the window. spent five months in a spanish jail before getting to go home, this all happening before an actual trial.

still has never been found guilty of any crime but he gets a call occasionally to be reminded he’s still in legal limbo. he is still allowed to travel, and so he can still drink changs and shoot pool in pai bars.

to his astounding credit, this ordeal has not made him bitter. he tells of it with a dry astonishment and humor about the absurdity of it all. about how he could get so caught in something.