This is me, holding my tongue

You know, it really shouldn’t be illegal to shoot a certain number of in-laws in one’s lifetime, say three or so. At the very least, dueling (between in-laws) should be brought back on a trial basis.
That is all.
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||
On second thought, it sucks to end on such a hopeful note, so here’s a photo of a plate of delicious bugs that a gardener gathered from our backyard forest and asked if I wanted to share for lunch:

Don’t mistake the ant eggs for grains of rice. Homeboy must have dug up an ant colony, among other things – Nam poked around it with a twig and a small dead frog emerged.

Front and center is a queen, I believe. To the left, a soldier tugs on a dead beetle thing. That’s as much as I’ll attempt with identification…. Mm-mmm!

These red ants grow to about half an inch long and when they bite, you can FEEL the pincers sinking in… When they crawl up your pant leg, it’s frantic monkey dance time.
Oh, as an afterthought I might as well admit that this fine meal was just…. too goddamn disgusting to try, even for me.

On the Road 2007 (Part 2)

On a typical road trip, the driver is the big man who calls the shots and ultimately determines whether one arrives safely or stuck in a ditch. The navigator’s main responsibilities include reading maps, changing music, spotting promising meal venues/interesting sights, and taking photos from shotgun position. All of the photos below were taken at high speed (both car and shutter) and the variation in sky color can be attributed to three factors:

  1. Ever-changing weather conditions the week of our trip
  2. Whether the shot was taken through an open or closed side window, or our polarized windshield (BTW, having a tinted windshield is totally awesome because until now I’ve only owned cars in places where it’s both illegal and enforced)
  3. My unwillingness to match them in Photoshop (read: laziness)

|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||

The only Ford tractor we saw in a 1,000km stretch of farmland. It’s sitting next to a patch of newly-planted papaya trees.

This is the kind of truck that I wish could tell its life story..

This is one of the largest stores selling cast concrete lawn animals/spirit houses/earthenware planters I have ever seen (there are countless stores like this on the roadside).

Taken unaimed out the window @ 160kph.

The only petrol station selling “high octane” gas in three counties. We stopped at a whole bunch of others before we found it, so I stretched my legs and took some photos.

The first “goat crossing” sign I’d ever seen.
_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/
All links for the On the Road 2007 series:
On the Road 2007 (Part 1)
On the Road 2007 (Part 2)
On the Road 2007 (Part 3) – Koh Chang
On the Road 2007 (Part 4) – Overloaded
On the Road 2007 (Part 5) – Tamnanpar
On the Road 2007 (Part 6) – The Animatronic Chicken Roasters of Rayong, Thailand

On the Road 2007 (Part 1)

Ten days ago, we set off on a road trip.

The rainy season had not yet really started, but it was giving us a nice preview. Wherever we went, the fields were green.

The basic idea of any successful road trip is that you just go where the road takes you. On the first day, it led us to the muddy back roads of a garish temple erected by one of the largest Buddhist sects in Thailand. The temple interested me much less than the hidden pond guarded by water buffalo and spirit houses just off the temple grounds.

Although the main sanctuary was in good condition, the surrounding buildings left much to be desired – such as walls.

The crematorium was in rough shape, too.

Finding a lost shoe always sets my mind to thinking about its story. I’m pretty sure this baby flip flop was abandoned by its parents at the temple because they couldn’t afford to feed it.

This was just our first stop on a long journey.

_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/
All links for the On the Road 2007 series:
On the Road 2007 (Part 1)
On the Road 2007 (Part 2)
On the Road 2007 (Part 3) – Koh Chang
On the Road 2007 (Part 4) – Overloaded
On the Road 2007 (Part 5) – Tamnanpar
On the Road 2007 (Part 6) – The Animatronic Chicken Roasters of Rayong, Thailand

Beautiful

1. The sunset we saw a few days ago standing on our balcony at our house out in the sticks

2. The hot pizza (double pepperoni / tom yum) that I ordered online and was delivered in the pouring rain to our house out in the sticks. That’s the definition of a killer online app! I would have given the guy a bigger tip if he’d delivered it on a water buffalo, though.
/////////////
I have some updates about the little girl, but I don’t feel like writing about it just yet. Her parents sure are creeps, though.

Putting the F in WTF

So here I am almost at the half year mark after starting over in this new place. It’s been grand, it’s been challenging, and sometimes the newness of it all is staggering. That newness, combined with my habit of running full speed into all kinds of cultural barriers and boundaries, sometimes creates situations which I am hard pressed to think about, much less relate to my readers about…
Forward, then.
///////////////
It started out oddly, yet innocently enough. My father-in-law’s friend came over for a visit with his approximately six year old daughter in tow. A sweet girl she was, bold enough to ask for what she wanted, yet polite enough to ask first. She took an instant liking to Nam (most children take instantly to either Nam or myself, but rarely to both of us, which makes it a kind of contest) and decided to eat lunch with her. Nam talked to the girl’s dad a bit and was told a few things:

  • The girl’s real mom had left when she was small, but the father had a dream where he was told to keep the girl, so he did
  • The father had since remarried to a woman who has children of her own
  • The girl is very easy to take care of and isn’t a “difficult” child at all

So this is where things start to get odd for me in American/Japanese mode: The man asks his daughter if she’s ready to go home, and she says she wants to stay, so he just leaves. Just leaves! As he (the little girl’s father) is walking out the door, Nam’s father says, “if we don’t take her back tonight, it’s because she’s staying over, ok?” (Nam told me about this later, I didn’t hear it myself or I would have… Well, I actually have no idea what I would have done.) So we spent the day with this little girl, who is actually one of the nicest little girls I have ever met, and she turns out to be like, a total prodigy or something. I show her how to play this traditional Thai xylophone-thingy (can’t be fucked to look it up just now), and pretty soon she’s like making actual music. Then I let her feed my improbably colored fish and showed her how to use my Nikon – and she proceeds to take like 500 photos all around the house. Here, you be the judge:






She took a shot through the screen door for this awesome effect – something that would never have even occurred to me to try
I mean, holy crap. And those photos are like totally unedited, just resized. I don’t know what to say, looking back on it, we just had a really fun day together. There were some strange things that stick out in my mind, like when the little girl couldn’t remember my name and just started calling us mom and dad, and when her parents didn’t even call to check up or anything – she was with us for about 6 hours straight until it got dark. We took her home, and guess what? Nobody was home… So we drove back to our house and she stayed the night in our room, on the floor.
Her parents (father and stepmom) showed up the next day and we made small talk about how much fun we had together and then the bomb was dropped when THEY OFFERED TO GIVE HER TO US. (When something this strange happens to me, my mind always reverts back to this early NWA sample that exclaims, “motherfucker, say what?”) Yeah. So we were pretty sure that was a joke, but kind of in shock because we had a sinking feeling it wasn’t. Somehow, her parents slipped away again while we were still in that what-the-fuck-just-happened state of mind.
So I need to explain something here: There are two factors at play here which make this a fucked up, yet totally understandable situation within the bounds of Thai society. First of all, there is the factor that Nam was aware of and related to me before this even came up: Thais believe that for a couple to spend time with somebody else’s child will bless them with their own child. So this is why even though things were kind of weird from the day before, we just assumed that this was what everybody had in mind regarding this situation. The second factor has to do with a time-honored tradition that has lasted until the current day: Poor parents sometimes give their children away to people who they think can take care of them better. Of course, I was flabbergasted when I heard this. I mean, I guess you could kind of view it as adoption without an adoption agency, but then you have to remember that adoption agencies exist for a reason. We could be axe murderers for all her parents know! I mean, they really have no fucking idea who we are, and they are offering up their daughter? Yes, I can honestly say this is one cultural wall I have run smack into, and will have a hard time recovering from. This wall kicked my ass.
/////////////////
So to finish the story: We dropped the little girl off at home later that evening. Sure, she lives in a poor part of town in an old house that her stepmom has converted into a beauty salon, but she ain’t gonna die of starvation or the plague, if you know what I mean. We greeted her parents, said out goodbyes to the girl, and basically sprinted back to our car. In parting, the father shouted something in thai that I couldn’t understand. I asked Nam what he had said when we were back in the car, and her face was still in shock. “Papers,” she said. “He said he would sign her over to us officially.”
Jesus fucking christ, yo.
The thing is, the girl seems really into it. The last scene I described was yesterday. Today her parents brought her around to our house again because her father (supposedly?) had to meet Nam’s father for something. Nam and I were both at work at the time. The little girl called Nam from our house and asked, “Why didn’t you pick me up today, mom?” Um…
So now we have a very weird situation that needs straightening out. In fact, the little girl called Nam again to ask if Nam would take her to work with her tomorrow. (Heh. Remember how I told you that children usually bond to either Nam or myself immediately, but almost never to both of us? Heh… Marital disclaimer: This is by no means really funny, just kind of amusing if you think about it in an abstract sort of way, obliquely, without any pertinence to the current situation in any way, or to reality at all if you really think about it.)
We have talked about this at length – I mean, how do we tell the parents we don’t want the little girl without somehow making the little girl feel badly? Although I’d love to smack the shit out of the parents for offering her up and putting us in this situation, would it even make me feel better? Even a little? No, I don’t think so. I feel bad for even fantasizing about it – you can’t smack the ignorance out of people. And I do believe this is ignorance – I mean, for fuck’s sake, if you’re going to offer up your daughter, your own flesh and blood, at the very least please do some due diligence. Fuck, this makes me so angry.
//////////////////
We will work this out, somehow.

odo trick – I [heart] OCD

One of my “borderline” traits is my fascination with numbers, especially numerical readouts (this also partially explains my fascination with pachinko and the like). Some numbers and patterns just mean a lot to me, although my commemoration of odometer milestones I know is at least shared by some of my friends. Some people just don’t get it though – I remember when I stopped my S-13 Silvia on a busy highway median to photograph reaching the 111,111 kilometer mark (sub trip odometer 1,111), the person I was with totally DID NOT understand why I thought it was so special, so I told him to get the fuck out of my car and he immediately got hit by a big truck and died. OK, maybe that last part was just wishful thinking, but what a fucking killjoy, you know?
So with that in mind, I present to you the first big milestone for my new (used) car:

Odometer otakus should note that I have synchronized the sub-trip recorder to within 0.3 meters of the main readout.
This is going to be something special.
/////////////////////////////////
I finally got around to taking a pic of my new audio setup, but I didn’t take it during the right time of day, unfortunately:

I was so happy with the work my guy did, I let him put a sticker on the box – it’s in Comic Sans!
The sub box is located in front of the amp, a simple vented design for a 12″ driver I bought cheaply in Japan and have used for over 5 years now. I can’t recommend the polymer/silicon/carbon substrate construction for speaker cones enough, and it’s a damn shame the only factory making them burned down last year. The speaker points forward, as I tried pointing both forward and back, but due to the dampened trunk lid, excess reverb prevented a rear-pointing layout. Speaking of dampening, the entire rear third of the car has been soundproofed with bitumen sheets. The rest will be done when I have the time.
All I have to say is, I’m lucky to be in Thailand because I could never afford to have all this stuff done in the states or Japan. I just happened to find, through a long string of coincidences, a local workshop whose owner speaks English really well and is more into car audio than I am, which is pretty rare. What’s even more rare is that his shop is A) fast B) cheap and C) extremely competent – it’s like being on a different plane of reality, where shit that isn’t supposed to exist does. I plan to take full advantage of this most advantageous situation.