entry nº 9 // 20161219

Thank you for letting me know that the Model 600-J printer will not be available until May 4, 1997.

–example sentence from the japanese dictionary app i use

welp, here we are, huh? why did you guys vote for donald trump?! i didn’t vote for him, and i don’t know anybody who did, so like how could he have gotten elected?! ugh just kidding okay it’s complicated i get it. it’s not even fun to joke about, is the thing. i daydream of building a little high-powered bug-sized speaker drone insect robot that, anytime d.t. appears in public, just zips around playing back his “grab her by the p*ssy” quote over and over at varying speeds, kind of glitched out, at very high volume (using the latest bose™ audio technology of course), william s. burroughs “electronic revolution” style, and nobody can concentrate because that thing is just whipping around to and fro, incessantly robo-parroting back the prez’s unseemly words, and those secret service agents are all in a fuss, tripping over each other w/ giant fly swatters trying to get the thing down out of the sky, d.t. himself red-faced + fuming, the steam coming out of his ears eeeeever so slightly visible, from the right angle…

anyway, though, um, i seem to be having a little trouble getting going on my thailand blog entries? nothing strange about that, really. it’s just hard to get textedit started up on my pc, here, takes forever for all the plugins to load, + then of course it never fails, there’s always at least one that doesn’t pass the bootscan for whatever reason, even though last time it’s not like it had any problem? so then next thing you know i’m deep in a pile of .plist files manually checking line by line, hmm, somehow something got overwritten in there, + at this point it’s like wouldn’t it be easier to just write this out by hand and make photocopies? but of course that’s not too feasible given the exorbitant price of photocopies here. oh well. 

acting on a hot tip from a thai friend of mine, we drove our rental car (nissan march, white), up north out of chiang mai in search of baan rabiang dao, some guesthouses located way up in the mountains somewhere. the single blog post we could find about the place didn’t mention any specific address, name, or location, but we managed to find something on google maps that looked promising. zigzagging up into the mountains, passing occasionally by water buffalo lumbering along the side of the road, we finally arrived in this tiny village that looked kind of like what my friend had told us about. 

in chiang mai we rented a scooter for the day and man, we were just zipping around like a couple of motherfuckers out there. want to rent a scooter in thailand? no problem. just head over to MISTER MECHANIC and they’ll get you all set up. it cost like, ten bucks for the day or something? i left my passport as a deposit because i forgot to bring extra baht for it, but thoughtfully they give you an a) leave yr passport, or b) leave a cash deposit option, and so i went with “a,” not wanting to lose out on precious scooter time by running back to the hotel first. (i guess you’re like “kevin, never leave your passport with anybody while traveling,” and like, i know okay? but i do have to say, there is a certain thrill to it…). last time i’d driven a two-wheeled vehicle w/ a motor in it was when i was about 17, taking the new hampshire motorcycle licensure class with my friend joe, so i was a little bit curious how the whole experience was going to play out? (“yeah…, just go for it!” said the girl who worked at the rental shop as i started to pull out into traffic on basically the busiest road in town). thailand traffic seems to be pretty much anything goes: scooters everywhere weaving in and out of traffic (guys w/ their entire families on scooters, little girl perched up behind the handlebars w/ no shoes on, mom on the back looking at her phone…), pickup trucks, tuk-tuks, bright red songthaews carting people around to wherever they’re going. people seem to just change lanes, or pop out from side streets, without really signaling or waiting, and everybody else just sort of moves out of the way to make it work. made me think of huge schools of fish zipping around at high speeds + changing directions on a dime. except thailand has the second highest traffic-related death rate in the world. oops!

anyway, it was super fun! we were just laughing our heads off out there, breeze through our helmets. got pulled over at a traffic stop where basically it seemed that anybody who looked like a tourist on a scooter was getting siphoned off the road by cops. “do you have an international driver’s license?” he asked me. thing is, I TOTALLY DO, but we forgot it at the hotel that day. so, 400-baht ticket (like 12 bucks). welp. as he was leading me over to the ticket-writing table, i passed by another middle-aged american woman on her own scooter who, with a grave look, hurriedly whispered to me “don’t give them more than 200 baht.” i managed to get the guy down to 300 baht, which i consider pretty good for an overgrown shy kid who’s not into confrontations. cop was super nice, either way, and the copy of our ticket he handed us makes as pretty nice souvenir, too. 

w/ that out of the way, we proceeded to skedaddle on out of town + up to the top of doi suthep, a mountain w/ this incredibly ornate temple on the top. thailand’s temple style seems to be “cover everything in gold” and man it’s intense. especially compared to japanese temple+shrine style, though i think one of the takeaways of the whole trip was that anything in thailand, compared to japan, seems super intense. we hung out up there for a while (after our first entrance attempt was thwarted due to shoko getting busted for having shorts on, and having to go back down to get a loaner sarong to wrap around her legs, which of course is absurd because i had on a tank top + short shorts and nobody called me out on it). people watched and wondered about tourists and camera phones and what the heck everybody is doing, in general. saw a really sweet old farmer-looking couple from china or central asia maybe? deeply wrinkled, sun-hardened skin, simple peasant-like clothing, looking absolutely singular amid the masses of other tourists swarming about. the both of them beaming as they looked around. the man approached me and asked me to take a photo of them, and of course i obliged and snapped a few shots with his phone. they thanked me, the three of us smiling, me feeling lucky to have been chosen, to have had that singular honor. only thing is, a couple minutes later i saw them having somebody else take the exact same photo of them, b/c presumably mine wasn’t quite as good as they were hoping it would be? ah well. 

anyway, here’s some things we did, or that happened, in thailand, expressed as a series of nouns or noun phrases: train, boat, motorbike taxi, sleeper˙car, 

thailand bathroom experience 

thailand food 

[20170901 update: and that’s where i left off writing this one back in, oh, december of last year? anyway, may as well let it stand. the last two lines were notes to myself about what else to write about. use your imagination.]