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Chapter7: Yesterday's News of Normal Man by Gale Myers
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Normal Man Takes a Break
#7
OK, I’m just punching keys. I have been procrastinating too long trying to assemble a coherent form to this journal. I just spent several looong minutes rereading my last entry to try to catch up on how much I have diligently recorded. You may have noticed that I re-sent it was well. I changed the title and who knows what else, so I figure an overlap is better than a gap.
I’m back in Bangkok. It is Sunday, the 22nd of January. Is there such a thing as good natured ennui? I mean, the dictionary paints a pretty negative connotation of the word. I maintain that lack of ambition is not necessarily a negative state if accompanied by a sufficient appreciation of the present. After all, when have we lived in any other time but the moment? We may be thinking of the past or the future but we are living, inexorably I may add, in the present. So one whose awareness is of the moment, is most in touch with reality. Damn this Singha beer! I thought that after the rigors of rereading what I had already written, I deserved, nay, required a bit of refreshment to loosen up the creative muse I summon to make sense of the past and illuminate the future. All the laughter and Thai country music wafting from the outdoor corner restaurant 100’ from my guesthouse seemed just the creative lubricant required to spin yarns in Chaucerian abandonment. This is the very place where I went for a brief evening meal and beer on new years eve and wound up staggering very upright and not stumbling to bed at four and a half hours into the new year.
I strolled over and with utmost discipline ordered a pint of Singha to go, pointing over at my computer opened and waiting in the shade of the Home Stay Guest House. “You want glass?” the waitress asked. “No thank you.” I replied, “I have work to do.” Keeping that stream of logic in mind, I proceed to plow through the daunting adventures of….. Normal Man Conquers the North.
(An aside here to reassure my family that I really am exaggerating the quantity, and dependency of Normal Man’s consumption of beverage and to point out to my friends that such coherent stream of thought could never be achieved under such shurdlu shurdlu sequandocious empharianisms.)
OK, back to the stream of thou….wait….I’m thirsty.
1/23/12 Sunday
Well that didn’t work out too well. I met the American teacher from Iowa who is teaching at a university in Seoul, South Korea, and with whom I shared profound insights on New Years until he wandered off with one of the more comely revelers and I wondered if I could make it up the tile steps to my room before dawn. This afternoon we caught up on our travels, he had been down the south west peninsula and I had been in Chang Mai. This (Saturday evening) he took off for a steak dinner across the street and I finished off the third book of the Game of Thrones series, Storm Swords. I’m already well into the 4th one completed, Feast for Crows. I’m going to hate to finish them but I can’t slow down. Excellent fantasy series by George R.R. Martin. (later note, there is one more)
OK, for narration continuity, it is January 18, 2012. (I am referring back to my hand written journal now). I’m at the train station at 1:30 in the afternoon. The train leaves at 2:30 in the afternoon and arrives at 0510 the following morning. It turns out to be air conditioned, with a 3’ wide seat bench seat facing another 3’ wide seat. It is one passenger per seat. When the evening comes after dinner service, an upper bunk is lowered and the lower seats are slapped together to form the lower bunk. I chose the upper bunk because I prefer the greater privacy and separation and, oddly enough, the ticket is about 100 baht cheaper. I had seat #9, upper bunk.
I sat across from a Chinese man with three children and a cute, motherly- hen young wife. I am only guessing that he was allowed 3 children instead of the mandatory one, because he lived outside the mainland. He worked for a foundation that helps people integrate into a modern culture financially and socially. I regret not knowing enough of a common language that we could have discussed this more thoroughly. That is a very vague goal, in my mind, and I have no idea what it would entail to implement a program with those objectives. What would he physically be doing on a work day? What would he be telling people they ought to do? He and his family were going up to Chang Mai for a convention for one week.
When I returned from Chang Mai I got seat #9, upper bunk again. Quite a coincidence in that my only choice was upper or lower bunk. Across from me sat another Chinese man with his wife and teen age son. I had brief thoughts of Ground Hog Day with Bill Murray.
This gentleman was from Shanghai. He was a customs inspector and very amiable, and once again our conversation was limited to English which he spoke fairly well in a limited sense.
My initial reaction was slight irritation that I had to share this space with someone when there were other empty seats around. It’s a reflex action with me to guard my privacy. Once again I initiated a smile and a greeting because it lessens my sense of guilt if the rest of the trip is passed in silence, or as in this case, we were able to talk for awhile and I learned a few things about his life, and he, mine.
However, on the ride up to Chang Mai, everyone was settled down, the fellow across from me was reading, I settled sideways in my seat and folded my legs beneath me in a comfortable semi-lotus position, my back to the window and facing across the aisle looking out the other window as the landscape slid by. I kept my spine straight, didn’t chant, even silently like I used to repeat a mantra from my Transcendental Meditation days, but just quieted my thoughts and enjoyed the sensation of traveling to a new destination. Trains are great for that. The easy powerful hypnotic clatter along the tracks, gentle rocking. No worries mate. I enjoy the visuals especially. The moving point on the horizon around which the nearing landscape arcs as it sweeps by more and more quickly the closer it is to the train. Then the sudden stillness of the reflection on the window of the inside of the cabin. The whole cabin with myself staring through it is reflected silently, captured on a one dimensional plane. Then there is the living distance observed from my eye to the window plane. And finally the passing landscape beyond the window behind me reversely arcing its way within the scenario. I was unable to make out the reflected image in the window behind me which would have completed the five possible visual events occurring simultaneously.
I didn’t spend the whole two hours in the visual trance but I dabbled in and out of it for about that time. The rest of the time was more random thoughts of varied nature, mostly probably sex. I know the last few moments were an acute consciousness of the pain in my knees and gratitude that I didn’t have to stand up quickly. A little knee massage and I was ready for some more fantasy on my Kindle.
But there was also an exercise relating those visual perspectives to the subject of time, one of my favorite phenomena. (yes that should be plural?)
This particular session was related to an article I had just read in the Bangkok Post. It was written by Seth Borenstein of the Associated Press, Washington. It referred to a study appearing in an edition of the journal Nature. It was concerning a study conducted at Cornell University about invisibility. They made an entire event impossible to see. They invented a “time masker.” For an analogy they said to imagine a thief strolling into a museum and stealing a painting. The masker not only made the thief invisible, but his whole activity invisible. However, that’s a whole different scale because the actual experiment took place in one 40 trillionths of a second. But they did establish the event so now it’s a matter of extending the time event. (Monty I would like to hear from you about this) They were able to interrupt the flow of light for an instant.
Whereas science has previously created invisibility by moving light beams away in the traditional 3 dimensions, the Cornell team alters, not where the light flows, but how fast it moves, changing the dimension of time, not space. It’s like they erased a split second of history. Now, here the author makes a statement that I question. Was this a misrepresentation by the author, or misunderstanding of a concept within the experiment? Here’s what I am puzzled by: He says, “Their method splits light, speeding up one part of light and slowing down another. It creates a gap and that gap is where an event is masked.”
“You kind of create a hole in time where an event takes place,” said study co-author Alexander Gaeta, director of Cornell’s School of Applied and Engineering Physics.
(other co-author is Moti Friedman, based on a theoretical concept of Martin McCall, a professor of theoretical optics at Imperial College in London)
OK, my question is, How can you speed up light? I know it can be slowed once it leaves a vacuum but recent experiments have once again empirically demonstrated that light is the fastest phenomenon in the universe, so what are they going to use to speed it up? They can’t give it a boost, it would be like trying to slap a bullet to speed it up as it sails by. They can’t attach something to it and swing it in an arc like the poor last sucker in a line of skaters playing crack the whip. They can’t run it down a narrowing tube to increase the velocity by restricting the flow like a nozzle for liquid…..can they?
Now I could buy where they slow down light to two different speeds and insert an event in that gap. But I can’t envision speeding up light. That would seem to alter the whole nature of existence since light and time and mass are all interrelated.
Despite that threat to the foundations of my concept of cosmic reality, the trip went quite smoothly and we pulled into Chang Mai the next morning precisely within a couple of hours of the posted schedule. I hailed a tuk-tuk and he delivered me to a fine guest house called The Royal Guest House in the old town. I wound up staying there the whole ten days. It had a nice swimming pool, security room for valuables, good food, a very relaxing outdoor lobby with several fountains and koi ponds, and wi fi. It was so comfortable that some days I had to drag myself out of there to “see the sights.” Other days I didn’t bother. It ran about $12 a day. I remember one morning walking down the hall to the stairway and a young man greeted me with a smile, saying “Hello to me.” I just smiled and said “Good morning.”
Motorbikes only cost $4 a day, $3 if you reserved for a week. I rented one for a couple of days trying to find a guest house that we checked on before the Royal. It advertised a pool, and looked fairly good through the gate but they were full. They only charged about $6 a day but I couldn’t find the place again. Actually the Royal did have cheaper rooms too but they were on the 6th floor, with no hot water so I imagine that was probably the case with the other guest house. Change Mai got kind of cool some evenings and I actually wore a light jacket a couple of days.
I really enjoyed Chang Mai. It is an interesting town with lots of small alley ways with interesting looking small guest houses and shops and cafes and Wats threaded rather haphazardly throughout the neighborhoods. Mountains shouldered along the west of the city, the Ping River ran long the east, and the old town is surrounded by a perfectly square canal with crumbly old earthen bricks and ancient gates leading into the inner city. The canal was very handy to help me find my way around. Fortunately I found a much easier way to get around a few days into my stay.
I was having lunch one day at an outdoor patio of a restaurant across the road from the perimeter canal. While dawdling over a beer I caught the eye of a hostess who was standing near by. I smiled and she continued to look at me but her expression didn’t change a bit. Good heavens, an unsmiling Thai? She didn’t break eye contact, however, and came over to my table and we began talking in the international language of gestures, pidgin English and broken Thai. She did smile a couple of times and it completely changed her appearance from stoic observer to charming friend.
I asked if she could join me for dinner and she agreed. The difficulty and circuitry of our conversations, I won’t even try to replicate, so bear in mind that most of the information was not related in the direct fashion that I will convey in the retelling. It turned out that she had a 13 year old daughter. She had to pick her up from school and take her home, get her dinner, then she would pick me up at my guest house around 7:00 that evening. I had turned my motorbike in but she had here own which was the exact kind I had been renting. Now this was the way to get acquainted with a new town. I hopped on the back of the bike and she threaded her way through traffic as smooth as silk, ducked into back alley neighborhoods, turning myriads of corners and popping out in a totally different part of town knowing right where we were and where we were going. I just turned the itinerary over to her and picked up the tab for everything we did.
We had Essan, north country Thai food, her favorite. It was a nice, if basic restaurant, with a fair mixture of foreigners, along with a majority of Thai. It turned out that Tic didn’t drink but we hit a few clubs and listened to music and people watched. She drank orange juice or water. I had my usual Singha. I learned that she only worked the restaurant part time, and had worked most of her life as a masseuse. She invited me to meet her friends and co-workers the next day and to get massages. I thought about that for a nanosecond and agreed.
She picked me up the next day and we went to a large multi storied mall. The massage parlor was a combination beauty and massage parlor where you could get your hair done, nails, etc. like U.S. beauty parlors, plus there were massage chairs and mats where you could get face massages, foot massages, total back and spinal massages, or the whole works. She turned me over to one of her friends and she also got a treatment. I started with a foot massage, one hour, then a face massage, a half hour, then a full Thai massage with her getting a pretty extreme looking treatment next to me. Two and a half hours later I flowed out of there feeling like my bones had turned to rubber.
Then we went to a Buddhist Wat (temple). It was along side the Ping River. I went through the rituals with her, following her directions very closely and trying not to agonize over the grinding of my knees on the thin carpet which was one degree softer than tile flooring. We got a monk’s blessing, lit some incense and put money on some prayer sticks. Then we went out to a floating dock on the river, bought some pellets, like rabbit food, and some bread and fed about a bazillion pigeons fluttering and crapping all over the dock, and tossed bread and pellets into the river that was the color of heavily creamed coffee. Catfish the size of my leg, no exaggeration , would roll up out of the opaque river and gulp down chunks of bread. Their mouths were so huge, it was more appropriate to say they were opening their heads. Ugly suckers. And pigeons are my idea of feathered rats. I felt like we were enabling scavengers but they are all blessed children of the Earth, I guess. Still, I couldn’t help but wish I were feeding doves, and trout. Believe me though, I didn’t let a fraction of a glimpse of my animistic hierarchal prejudice show.
Over the next few days we went to several other Wats, the night market, Chang Mai University Campus (it’s huge!), a flower show, (I had to pass on paying for entry to that one. I thanked her for the great time and all the cool places she was showing me but I just couldn’t bring myself to pay a couple of hundred baht to form up in a large group (up to several hundred people) and follow a guide holding up a stick so we wouldn’t lose him and look at perfectly sculpted bushes and flower gardens in the hot sticky sun. The place was so perfectly groomed it looked like Disneyland without the rides. She actually smiled at my discomfort and seemed to understand my dilemma.
Afterwards, maybe it was the next day, we went to another Wat in the woods in the lower part of the mountains. It was a meditation center with a tall (the name escapes me at the moment….a cylindrical edifice [stuka?] whose unique purpose I should know but have forgotten. I’ll pop it in, in a future episode, right out of the blue.) We walked three times around it and then sat and meditated for about 45 minutes. Afterwards we walked beneath it through underground tunnels that had various forms of the Buddha back in 20’ chambers in dim light. The tunnels were lined with rock and quite dark in places. A meditation chant began while were there and it was hauntingly peaceful.
The next day we motored up to the top of the mountain to another Wat. This was the largest and most spectacular of the temples. We had to take a funicular to get to the actual grounds. They overlooked all of Chang Mai and had hundreds of Buddhas, bronze gongs, (that’s fun to say), Garudas, mythological beasts and demons, and incense permeating the atmosphere. It was a chilly, windy road up to there. Tic was more comfortable driving the city traffic than the steep twisty road. She drove slower up and down that road than she did in town, just the opposite from my inclinations.
That night she took me to one of the most bizarre eating places I’ve been. It was outdoors, under a huge tin roofed pavilion It was about the square footage of a football field. A little shorter and a little wider than an actual field. There were rows and rows of tables, most of them butted against one another but individual tables available mostly along the ends of the rows. Along two sides, running lengthwise the buffets were set out. Every food imaginable was hauled from the kitchens continually. I mean green vegetables, corn, potatoes, oriental squashes and potato-like starchy veggies, sea food, chicken, pork, beef, pastries, sticks, leaves, and anything else you can imagine stuffing into your mouth. But although most of it was prepared dishes of stews, rice, noodles fried and barbequed chicken, and almost every Thai and Chinese dish I’ve seen, there were also raw mountains of sea food such as clams, squid, octopus, fish, slabs of pork, beef, chicken, oh, and soups…if I haven’t mentioned it, it still was there. Now then, you paid 200 baht, which is about $6. They brought a kettle of flaming coals to the table and set it on a tripod. On the tray of coals they place a grooved dome about 10” diameter, that had a moat of water surrounding it. The coals soon heated up the dome, you put whatever you wanted from the diced raw meats and sea food available on the grill, and put the raw vegetables into the moat around it. Broccoli was there, onions, mushrooms, cabbage, you name it. The meat sizzled and drained the juices into the moat of greens, and mushrooms, and whatever you place in there, so you had a delicious soup going and picking out morsels of meat and sea food from the grill. Wow! Now, there is a caveat. If you load up your table but don’t eat almost all of it, you are charged for the wastage. Well, we both had eyes bigger than our stomachs, almost. We managed to put away almost every morsel we had loaded the table with, but it was a pretty wobbly trip home. I noticed that I hadn’t seen another tourist there. I was the only ferlang. (foreigner. That’s always worth some points in the travelers notebook)
The next day she took me to her daughter’s school to watch a dance they put on. It wasn’t the traditional Thai hand waving by any means. It could have been presented in a Midwest junior high school. Boys and girls doing choreographed dance routines, break dancing, and all the gyrations you see on TV which make me feel like an old codger and wonder at the difference between what was cool then, (I was cool, I swear) and what is cool now. Or whatever the phrase for cool is now.
Now, I don’t know if you’ve noticed but I haven’t mentioned the massages I got from Tic. She took me to another place where she had worked and was now on call, like the first place I mentioned. It was good too. When we were at the Mall, we found a scale and weighed ourselves. She is about 5’2” or maybe 5’4”, I can’t really tell, she weighed 104 lbs. I have lost 10 lbs. by the way. I weigh 190 lbs., and my belt buckle is starting to point to the horizon instead of my feet. She is 50 years old, very solid but not muscular or defined. I mention this just to illustrate how ill prepared I was for the experience.
When she offered to give me a massage, she mentioned the places and friends she had introduced to me. Then she said…..”Massage, I number one.” She wasn’t bragging, just stating a fact. Of all the places she had shown me and the couple that I experienced, and of her friends and bosses, she was number one massage.
Now Thai massage can be, should be, rigorous. They use leverage utilizing your own limbs and joints, and their own, combined to attack the stiff muscles, the strained tendons and ligaments that hinder the free motion of our bodies. Hidden ailments that cause pain and restriction of movement in parts of our bodies far from the source of the problem.
I swear, and I am making this up, she must have spent her early working years shaping wrought iron gates, and window protectors with her bare hands. She probably augmented her income punching thimbles our of plate metal with her thumbs.
I sat on the mat and she looked at my feet and said, “Oh gewut” (good) She pointed at the veins that stand out fairly prominently on my instep. Oh that’s good I thought. Then she ran her thumb down the inner calf side of my ankle. “Yikes” I cried manfully.
“What?” she said somewhat surprised. “See?” I looked. The veins on my instep were standing out like blue worms, “Gewut” she said.
So then I lay on my stomach and she began massaging my feet. Oh man. It felt so good, I could feel electric impulses flowing up through my whole system. In my torso sections were relaxing that I thought already were relaxed. She took her time, just quietly working away, must have been a half hour at least just on my feet, then calves, back of the thighs.
“Oh, not gewut” she said. She had me roll over bend my leg out at right angles to my body, grabbed my ankles as she sat up against my feet, then pulled my ankles as she planted both her feet in the back of my thighs. She worked her feet, grinding my biceps femoris, adductor magnus, and gracilis (I have an anatomy chart with me as you can tell, anyway, the back of my legs below my butt) as she pulled my feet and ankles into her.
“ow,ow,ow,ow,ow,ow,ow,ow,ow,ow,Uncle!” I cried aplombly.
She looked at me with furrowed brow and said something that I looked up later in my Thai-English dictionary. It has Thai words spelled phonetically so you can look up Thai words pretty efficiently and get the English translation. It’s not perfect but it is really handy. Her comment translated literally as “kitten who abides in the bush”. I don’t know. Must be an idiomatic expression. These Orientals. So poetic and enigmatic.
“What’s the matter? You have pain here right?” She pointed right at my lower back, I think it’s the sciatica, right along the vertical ligaments at the hinge of my back and hip. I had never mentioned this to her but in the mornings I had been having to walk kind of bent over like and old man until I put in a hundred yards or so and then it would loosen up enough that I could usually go the rest of the day without any more problem. But next morning I would have to go through it all over again.
“Well, yes I said but I thought you could just rub it until it relaxed, you know, like the Swedes do.” I won’t even try to translate the look I got.
“You have pain, maybe two day. Then you be OK.” And she continued. I toughed it out. She worked both my legs like that, and I’ve got to admit, it wasn’t enjoyable. When she got to my back though, and my arms and hands, and then my face and eyes and ears, it was excellent.
When I was a kid we had a neighbor who kept chickens. Every so often he would slaughter several of them and cook them up. He would grab them by the neck between his thumb and forefinger, and casually pinch it, breaking their necks. He would then drop it for the next one. All us kids would chase the flopping chicken around the yard until we caught it then dropped it into a bucket of boiling water to make the feather plucking easier.
Tic was kneading my back with her incredible grip. She got to my neck and said “Uh oh, not gewut.” (whimper). But I guess it was nothing serious because there was no more treatment like the rack. The next morning, I swear I stood straight up, feeling a little pain but nothing like before. The next day was even easier, and by the third day I was fine.
What am I doing in Bangkok? The joy of travel is a two edged sword. The question was jokingly asked but being on the road has its dark side even in the lighter moments. Well, I can’t speak for everyone because such generalities have built in inaccuracies, otherwise there wouldn’t be a need to generalize. Speaking for myself then, there is something compulsive about moving on that entails leaving things I don’t really want to leave, and carrying things, traits, with me that I would probably be more comfortable leaving behind. It’s not “for fun.” It is interesting, but not always, truth be told. I have to maintain an overview to lessen the trials of the mundane, and appreciate, even enhance the experience of the unique.
I am trying to catch up this journal to the moment, which is 11:00 pm January 29, 2012. I have been in Bangkok a couple of weeks now. I am changing my travel pattern. I rented a place in one of my favorite sections of the city. In my next letter I will give the details of my transition. When I first came to Bangkok in 1986, I attended the Asian Gemological Institute and wound up spending a year in Thailand. I stayed most of that time right here in Pitak Court. It’s good to have my own place. I can store all that crap I thought was so necessary to bring with me but has really done nothing more than get underfoot and develop massive trapezius from lugging it around and lifting it onto various storage racks. I have a swimming pool and exercise room at my disposal, air conditioning, a fridge, my own toilet and hot water shower, trees around the pool, squirrels, birds, and a fascinating neighborhood right out my front door. It’s about 2 hours to the beach, and, with the new transportation system it’s just pennies and minutes to anywhere in Bangkok. All for $150 a month. Once I catch up on the deposit I had to make, I will be able to travel with ease of mind because I can keep this place and afford to rent guest houses. I want to see the north east, section of Thailand, around Udon Thani soon. My favorite Thai music is from there. I already have 4 albums from the region. More later.
8>}
Normal Man Takes a Break
#7
OK, I’m just punching keys. I have been procrastinating too long trying to assemble a coherent form to this journal. I just spent several looong minutes rereading my last entry to try to catch up on how much I have diligently recorded. You may have noticed that I re-sent it was well. I changed the title and who knows what else, so I figure an overlap is better than a gap.
I’m back in Bangkok. It is Sunday, the 22nd of January. Is there such a thing as good natured ennui? I mean, the dictionary paints a pretty negative connotation of the word. I maintain that lack of ambition is not necessarily a negative state if accompanied by a sufficient appreciation of the present. After all, when have we lived in any other time but the moment? We may be thinking of the past or the future but we are living, inexorably I may add, in the present. So one whose awareness is of the moment, is most in touch with reality. Damn this Singha beer! I thought that after the rigors of rereading what I had already written, I deserved, nay, required a bit of refreshment to loosen up the creative muse I summon to make sense of the past and illuminate the future. All the laughter and Thai country music wafting from the outdoor corner restaurant 100’ from my guesthouse seemed just the creative lubricant required to spin yarns in Chaucerian abandonment. This is the very place where I went for a brief evening meal and beer on new years eve and wound up staggering very upright and not stumbling to bed at four and a half hours into the new year.
I strolled over and with utmost discipline ordered a pint of Singha to go, pointing over at my computer opened and waiting in the shade of the Home Stay Guest House. “You want glass?” the waitress asked. “No thank you.” I replied, “I have work to do.” Keeping that stream of logic in mind, I proceed to plow through the daunting adventures of….. Normal Man Conquers the North.
(An aside here to reassure my family that I really am exaggerating the quantity, and dependency of Normal Man’s consumption of beverage and to point out to my friends that such coherent stream of thought could never be achieved under such shurdlu shurdlu sequandocious empharianisms.)
OK, back to the stream of thou….wait….I’m thirsty.
1/23/12 Sunday
Well that didn’t work out too well. I met the American teacher from Iowa who is teaching at a university in Seoul, South Korea, and with whom I shared profound insights on New Years until he wandered off with one of the more comely revelers and I wondered if I could make it up the tile steps to my room before dawn. This afternoon we caught up on our travels, he had been down the south west peninsula and I had been in Chang Mai. This (Saturday evening) he took off for a steak dinner across the street and I finished off the third book of the Game of Thrones series, Storm Swords. I’m already well into the 4th one completed, Feast for Crows. I’m going to hate to finish them but I can’t slow down. Excellent fantasy series by George R.R. Martin. (later note, there is one more)
OK, for narration continuity, it is January 18, 2012. (I am referring back to my hand written journal now). I’m at the train station at 1:30 in the afternoon. The train leaves at 2:30 in the afternoon and arrives at 0510 the following morning. It turns out to be air conditioned, with a 3’ wide seat bench seat facing another 3’ wide seat. It is one passenger per seat. When the evening comes after dinner service, an upper bunk is lowered and the lower seats are slapped together to form the lower bunk. I chose the upper bunk because I prefer the greater privacy and separation and, oddly enough, the ticket is about 100 baht cheaper. I had seat #9, upper bunk.
I sat across from a Chinese man with three children and a cute, motherly- hen young wife. I am only guessing that he was allowed 3 children instead of the mandatory one, because he lived outside the mainland. He worked for a foundation that helps people integrate into a modern culture financially and socially. I regret not knowing enough of a common language that we could have discussed this more thoroughly. That is a very vague goal, in my mind, and I have no idea what it would entail to implement a program with those objectives. What would he physically be doing on a work day? What would he be telling people they ought to do? He and his family were going up to Chang Mai for a convention for one week.
When I returned from Chang Mai I got seat #9, upper bunk again. Quite a coincidence in that my only choice was upper or lower bunk. Across from me sat another Chinese man with his wife and teen age son. I had brief thoughts of Ground Hog Day with Bill Murray.
This gentleman was from Shanghai. He was a customs inspector and very amiable, and once again our conversation was limited to English which he spoke fairly well in a limited sense.
My initial reaction was slight irritation that I had to share this space with someone when there were other empty seats around. It’s a reflex action with me to guard my privacy. Once again I initiated a smile and a greeting because it lessens my sense of guilt if the rest of the trip is passed in silence, or as in this case, we were able to talk for awhile and I learned a few things about his life, and he, mine.
However, on the ride up to Chang Mai, everyone was settled down, the fellow across from me was reading, I settled sideways in my seat and folded my legs beneath me in a comfortable semi-lotus position, my back to the window and facing across the aisle looking out the other window as the landscape slid by. I kept my spine straight, didn’t chant, even silently like I used to repeat a mantra from my Transcendental Meditation days, but just quieted my thoughts and enjoyed the sensation of traveling to a new destination. Trains are great for that. The easy powerful hypnotic clatter along the tracks, gentle rocking. No worries mate. I enjoy the visuals especially. The moving point on the horizon around which the nearing landscape arcs as it sweeps by more and more quickly the closer it is to the train. Then the sudden stillness of the reflection on the window of the inside of the cabin. The whole cabin with myself staring through it is reflected silently, captured on a one dimensional plane. Then there is the living distance observed from my eye to the window plane. And finally the passing landscape beyond the window behind me reversely arcing its way within the scenario. I was unable to make out the reflected image in the window behind me which would have completed the five possible visual events occurring simultaneously.
I didn’t spend the whole two hours in the visual trance but I dabbled in and out of it for about that time. The rest of the time was more random thoughts of varied nature, mostly probably sex. I know the last few moments were an acute consciousness of the pain in my knees and gratitude that I didn’t have to stand up quickly. A little knee massage and I was ready for some more fantasy on my Kindle.
But there was also an exercise relating those visual perspectives to the subject of time, one of my favorite phenomena. (yes that should be plural?)
This particular session was related to an article I had just read in the Bangkok Post. It was written by Seth Borenstein of the Associated Press, Washington. It referred to a study appearing in an edition of the journal Nature. It was concerning a study conducted at Cornell University about invisibility. They made an entire event impossible to see. They invented a “time masker.” For an analogy they said to imagine a thief strolling into a museum and stealing a painting. The masker not only made the thief invisible, but his whole activity invisible. However, that’s a whole different scale because the actual experiment took place in one 40 trillionths of a second. But they did establish the event so now it’s a matter of extending the time event. (Monty I would like to hear from you about this) They were able to interrupt the flow of light for an instant.
Whereas science has previously created invisibility by moving light beams away in the traditional 3 dimensions, the Cornell team alters, not where the light flows, but how fast it moves, changing the dimension of time, not space. It’s like they erased a split second of history. Now, here the author makes a statement that I question. Was this a misrepresentation by the author, or misunderstanding of a concept within the experiment? Here’s what I am puzzled by: He says, “Their method splits light, speeding up one part of light and slowing down another. It creates a gap and that gap is where an event is masked.”
“You kind of create a hole in time where an event takes place,” said study co-author Alexander Gaeta, director of Cornell’s School of Applied and Engineering Physics.
(other co-author is Moti Friedman, based on a theoretical concept of Martin McCall, a professor of theoretical optics at Imperial College in London)
OK, my question is, How can you speed up light? I know it can be slowed once it leaves a vacuum but recent experiments have once again empirically demonstrated that light is the fastest phenomenon in the universe, so what are they going to use to speed it up? They can’t give it a boost, it would be like trying to slap a bullet to speed it up as it sails by. They can’t attach something to it and swing it in an arc like the poor last sucker in a line of skaters playing crack the whip. They can’t run it down a narrowing tube to increase the velocity by restricting the flow like a nozzle for liquid…..can they?
Now I could buy where they slow down light to two different speeds and insert an event in that gap. But I can’t envision speeding up light. That would seem to alter the whole nature of existence since light and time and mass are all interrelated.
Despite that threat to the foundations of my concept of cosmic reality, the trip went quite smoothly and we pulled into Chang Mai the next morning precisely within a couple of hours of the posted schedule. I hailed a tuk-tuk and he delivered me to a fine guest house called The Royal Guest House in the old town. I wound up staying there the whole ten days. It had a nice swimming pool, security room for valuables, good food, a very relaxing outdoor lobby with several fountains and koi ponds, and wi fi. It was so comfortable that some days I had to drag myself out of there to “see the sights.” Other days I didn’t bother. It ran about $12 a day. I remember one morning walking down the hall to the stairway and a young man greeted me with a smile, saying “Hello to me.” I just smiled and said “Good morning.”
Motorbikes only cost $4 a day, $3 if you reserved for a week. I rented one for a couple of days trying to find a guest house that we checked on before the Royal. It advertised a pool, and looked fairly good through the gate but they were full. They only charged about $6 a day but I couldn’t find the place again. Actually the Royal did have cheaper rooms too but they were on the 6th floor, with no hot water so I imagine that was probably the case with the other guest house. Change Mai got kind of cool some evenings and I actually wore a light jacket a couple of days.
I really enjoyed Chang Mai. It is an interesting town with lots of small alley ways with interesting looking small guest houses and shops and cafes and Wats threaded rather haphazardly throughout the neighborhoods. Mountains shouldered along the west of the city, the Ping River ran long the east, and the old town is surrounded by a perfectly square canal with crumbly old earthen bricks and ancient gates leading into the inner city. The canal was very handy to help me find my way around. Fortunately I found a much easier way to get around a few days into my stay.
I was having lunch one day at an outdoor patio of a restaurant across the road from the perimeter canal. While dawdling over a beer I caught the eye of a hostess who was standing near by. I smiled and she continued to look at me but her expression didn’t change a bit. Good heavens, an unsmiling Thai? She didn’t break eye contact, however, and came over to my table and we began talking in the international language of gestures, pidgin English and broken Thai. She did smile a couple of times and it completely changed her appearance from stoic observer to charming friend.
I asked if she could join me for dinner and she agreed. The difficulty and circuitry of our conversations, I won’t even try to replicate, so bear in mind that most of the information was not related in the direct fashion that I will convey in the retelling. It turned out that she had a 13 year old daughter. She had to pick her up from school and take her home, get her dinner, then she would pick me up at my guest house around 7:00 that evening. I had turned my motorbike in but she had here own which was the exact kind I had been renting. Now this was the way to get acquainted with a new town. I hopped on the back of the bike and she threaded her way through traffic as smooth as silk, ducked into back alley neighborhoods, turning myriads of corners and popping out in a totally different part of town knowing right where we were and where we were going. I just turned the itinerary over to her and picked up the tab for everything we did.
We had Essan, north country Thai food, her favorite. It was a nice, if basic restaurant, with a fair mixture of foreigners, along with a majority of Thai. It turned out that Tic didn’t drink but we hit a few clubs and listened to music and people watched. She drank orange juice or water. I had my usual Singha. I learned that she only worked the restaurant part time, and had worked most of her life as a masseuse. She invited me to meet her friends and co-workers the next day and to get massages. I thought about that for a nanosecond and agreed.
She picked me up the next day and we went to a large multi storied mall. The massage parlor was a combination beauty and massage parlor where you could get your hair done, nails, etc. like U.S. beauty parlors, plus there were massage chairs and mats where you could get face massages, foot massages, total back and spinal massages, or the whole works. She turned me over to one of her friends and she also got a treatment. I started with a foot massage, one hour, then a face massage, a half hour, then a full Thai massage with her getting a pretty extreme looking treatment next to me. Two and a half hours later I flowed out of there feeling like my bones had turned to rubber.
Then we went to a Buddhist Wat (temple). It was along side the Ping River. I went through the rituals with her, following her directions very closely and trying not to agonize over the grinding of my knees on the thin carpet which was one degree softer than tile flooring. We got a monk’s blessing, lit some incense and put money on some prayer sticks. Then we went out to a floating dock on the river, bought some pellets, like rabbit food, and some bread and fed about a bazillion pigeons fluttering and crapping all over the dock, and tossed bread and pellets into the river that was the color of heavily creamed coffee. Catfish the size of my leg, no exaggeration , would roll up out of the opaque river and gulp down chunks of bread. Their mouths were so huge, it was more appropriate to say they were opening their heads. Ugly suckers. And pigeons are my idea of feathered rats. I felt like we were enabling scavengers but they are all blessed children of the Earth, I guess. Still, I couldn’t help but wish I were feeding doves, and trout. Believe me though, I didn’t let a fraction of a glimpse of my animistic hierarchal prejudice show.
Over the next few days we went to several other Wats, the night market, Chang Mai University Campus (it’s huge!), a flower show, (I had to pass on paying for entry to that one. I thanked her for the great time and all the cool places she was showing me but I just couldn’t bring myself to pay a couple of hundred baht to form up in a large group (up to several hundred people) and follow a guide holding up a stick so we wouldn’t lose him and look at perfectly sculpted bushes and flower gardens in the hot sticky sun. The place was so perfectly groomed it looked like Disneyland without the rides. She actually smiled at my discomfort and seemed to understand my dilemma.
Afterwards, maybe it was the next day, we went to another Wat in the woods in the lower part of the mountains. It was a meditation center with a tall (the name escapes me at the moment….a cylindrical edifice [stuka?] whose unique purpose I should know but have forgotten. I’ll pop it in, in a future episode, right out of the blue.) We walked three times around it and then sat and meditated for about 45 minutes. Afterwards we walked beneath it through underground tunnels that had various forms of the Buddha back in 20’ chambers in dim light. The tunnels were lined with rock and quite dark in places. A meditation chant began while were there and it was hauntingly peaceful.
The next day we motored up to the top of the mountain to another Wat. This was the largest and most spectacular of the temples. We had to take a funicular to get to the actual grounds. They overlooked all of Chang Mai and had hundreds of Buddhas, bronze gongs, (that’s fun to say), Garudas, mythological beasts and demons, and incense permeating the atmosphere. It was a chilly, windy road up to there. Tic was more comfortable driving the city traffic than the steep twisty road. She drove slower up and down that road than she did in town, just the opposite from my inclinations.
That night she took me to one of the most bizarre eating places I’ve been. It was outdoors, under a huge tin roofed pavilion It was about the square footage of a football field. A little shorter and a little wider than an actual field. There were rows and rows of tables, most of them butted against one another but individual tables available mostly along the ends of the rows. Along two sides, running lengthwise the buffets were set out. Every food imaginable was hauled from the kitchens continually. I mean green vegetables, corn, potatoes, oriental squashes and potato-like starchy veggies, sea food, chicken, pork, beef, pastries, sticks, leaves, and anything else you can imagine stuffing into your mouth. But although most of it was prepared dishes of stews, rice, noodles fried and barbequed chicken, and almost every Thai and Chinese dish I’ve seen, there were also raw mountains of sea food such as clams, squid, octopus, fish, slabs of pork, beef, chicken, oh, and soups…if I haven’t mentioned it, it still was there. Now then, you paid 200 baht, which is about $6. They brought a kettle of flaming coals to the table and set it on a tripod. On the tray of coals they place a grooved dome about 10” diameter, that had a moat of water surrounding it. The coals soon heated up the dome, you put whatever you wanted from the diced raw meats and sea food available on the grill, and put the raw vegetables into the moat around it. Broccoli was there, onions, mushrooms, cabbage, you name it. The meat sizzled and drained the juices into the moat of greens, and mushrooms, and whatever you place in there, so you had a delicious soup going and picking out morsels of meat and sea food from the grill. Wow! Now, there is a caveat. If you load up your table but don’t eat almost all of it, you are charged for the wastage. Well, we both had eyes bigger than our stomachs, almost. We managed to put away almost every morsel we had loaded the table with, but it was a pretty wobbly trip home. I noticed that I hadn’t seen another tourist there. I was the only ferlang. (foreigner. That’s always worth some points in the travelers notebook)
The next day she took me to her daughter’s school to watch a dance they put on. It wasn’t the traditional Thai hand waving by any means. It could have been presented in a Midwest junior high school. Boys and girls doing choreographed dance routines, break dancing, and all the gyrations you see on TV which make me feel like an old codger and wonder at the difference between what was cool then, (I was cool, I swear) and what is cool now. Or whatever the phrase for cool is now.
Now, I don’t know if you’ve noticed but I haven’t mentioned the massages I got from Tic. She took me to another place where she had worked and was now on call, like the first place I mentioned. It was good too. When we were at the Mall, we found a scale and weighed ourselves. She is about 5’2” or maybe 5’4”, I can’t really tell, she weighed 104 lbs. I have lost 10 lbs. by the way. I weigh 190 lbs., and my belt buckle is starting to point to the horizon instead of my feet. She is 50 years old, very solid but not muscular or defined. I mention this just to illustrate how ill prepared I was for the experience.
When she offered to give me a massage, she mentioned the places and friends she had introduced to me. Then she said…..”Massage, I number one.” She wasn’t bragging, just stating a fact. Of all the places she had shown me and the couple that I experienced, and of her friends and bosses, she was number one massage.
Now Thai massage can be, should be, rigorous. They use leverage utilizing your own limbs and joints, and their own, combined to attack the stiff muscles, the strained tendons and ligaments that hinder the free motion of our bodies. Hidden ailments that cause pain and restriction of movement in parts of our bodies far from the source of the problem.
I swear, and I am making this up, she must have spent her early working years shaping wrought iron gates, and window protectors with her bare hands. She probably augmented her income punching thimbles our of plate metal with her thumbs.
I sat on the mat and she looked at my feet and said, “Oh gewut” (good) She pointed at the veins that stand out fairly prominently on my instep. Oh that’s good I thought. Then she ran her thumb down the inner calf side of my ankle. “Yikes” I cried manfully.
“What?” she said somewhat surprised. “See?” I looked. The veins on my instep were standing out like blue worms, “Gewut” she said.
So then I lay on my stomach and she began massaging my feet. Oh man. It felt so good, I could feel electric impulses flowing up through my whole system. In my torso sections were relaxing that I thought already were relaxed. She took her time, just quietly working away, must have been a half hour at least just on my feet, then calves, back of the thighs.
“Oh, not gewut” she said. She had me roll over bend my leg out at right angles to my body, grabbed my ankles as she sat up against my feet, then pulled my ankles as she planted both her feet in the back of my thighs. She worked her feet, grinding my biceps femoris, adductor magnus, and gracilis (I have an anatomy chart with me as you can tell, anyway, the back of my legs below my butt) as she pulled my feet and ankles into her.
“ow,ow,ow,ow,ow,ow,ow,ow,ow,ow,Uncle!” I cried aplombly.
She looked at me with furrowed brow and said something that I looked up later in my Thai-English dictionary. It has Thai words spelled phonetically so you can look up Thai words pretty efficiently and get the English translation. It’s not perfect but it is really handy. Her comment translated literally as “kitten who abides in the bush”. I don’t know. Must be an idiomatic expression. These Orientals. So poetic and enigmatic.
“What’s the matter? You have pain here right?” She pointed right at my lower back, I think it’s the sciatica, right along the vertical ligaments at the hinge of my back and hip. I had never mentioned this to her but in the mornings I had been having to walk kind of bent over like and old man until I put in a hundred yards or so and then it would loosen up enough that I could usually go the rest of the day without any more problem. But next morning I would have to go through it all over again.
“Well, yes I said but I thought you could just rub it until it relaxed, you know, like the Swedes do.” I won’t even try to translate the look I got.
“You have pain, maybe two day. Then you be OK.” And she continued. I toughed it out. She worked both my legs like that, and I’ve got to admit, it wasn’t enjoyable. When she got to my back though, and my arms and hands, and then my face and eyes and ears, it was excellent.
When I was a kid we had a neighbor who kept chickens. Every so often he would slaughter several of them and cook them up. He would grab them by the neck between his thumb and forefinger, and casually pinch it, breaking their necks. He would then drop it for the next one. All us kids would chase the flopping chicken around the yard until we caught it then dropped it into a bucket of boiling water to make the feather plucking easier.
Tic was kneading my back with her incredible grip. She got to my neck and said “Uh oh, not gewut.” (whimper). But I guess it was nothing serious because there was no more treatment like the rack. The next morning, I swear I stood straight up, feeling a little pain but nothing like before. The next day was even easier, and by the third day I was fine.
What am I doing in Bangkok? The joy of travel is a two edged sword. The question was jokingly asked but being on the road has its dark side even in the lighter moments. Well, I can’t speak for everyone because such generalities have built in inaccuracies, otherwise there wouldn’t be a need to generalize. Speaking for myself then, there is something compulsive about moving on that entails leaving things I don’t really want to leave, and carrying things, traits, with me that I would probably be more comfortable leaving behind. It’s not “for fun.” It is interesting, but not always, truth be told. I have to maintain an overview to lessen the trials of the mundane, and appreciate, even enhance the experience of the unique.
I am trying to catch up this journal to the moment, which is 11:00 pm January 29, 2012. I have been in Bangkok a couple of weeks now. I am changing my travel pattern. I rented a place in one of my favorite sections of the city. In my next letter I will give the details of my transition. When I first came to Bangkok in 1986, I attended the Asian Gemological Institute and wound up spending a year in Thailand. I stayed most of that time right here in Pitak Court. It’s good to have my own place. I can store all that crap I thought was so necessary to bring with me but has really done nothing more than get underfoot and develop massive trapezius from lugging it around and lifting it onto various storage racks. I have a swimming pool and exercise room at my disposal, air conditioning, a fridge, my own toilet and hot water shower, trees around the pool, squirrels, birds, and a fascinating neighborhood right out my front door. It’s about 2 hours to the beach, and, with the new transportation system it’s just pennies and minutes to anywhere in Bangkok. All for $150 a month. Once I catch up on the deposit I had to make, I will be able to travel with ease of mind because I can keep this place and afford to rent guest houses. I want to see the north east, section of Thailand, around Udon Thani soon. My favorite Thai music is from there. I already have 4 albums from the region. More later.
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