First meal from a Muslim woman oh my don’t look them directly in the eye!!!!

(This post was composed over a few nights just outside of Krabi town, Krabi province, in Krabi, Thailand. I drank beer and listened to music. I didn’t get to include some of the things that happened coz I work two jobs and also try to send other stuff out and am coming up with new ideas. Plus/minus. Like, for instance. I didn’t get to include the interaction I had with a girl whom had asked me about the pool in which I was swimming … that your pool? … no … I’m jealous … yeah … how’d you get in … there’s a sign … so you didn’t pay anything … no … CANNON BALL. And other stuff. Writing this from Chiang Mai. Composed in Krabi. Long day. Vlog #1 at the end. The beer is almost finished, too. You know what that means… It’s one am here. Signing off!)

Sitting up in bed on a Sunday night. Listening to Neutral Milk Hotel. Would you believe that somebody else made my fucking bed? Oh kay. Don’t get any smart ideas. Save the jokes for after Christmas.

Day 1

I came in like a lurid snake. I sat in an airplane seat for 10 hours straight. Only had two small Snickers bars. And a few sips of water. I sat next to two Swedish women. They didn’t speak English. At least I pretended that they didn’t speak English. It seemed easier to surmise that that was the truth.

(I probably shouldn’t be writing right now.)

Uhh. So I sat there. And watched four movies in a row. Plus a few episodes of It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia. The girls beside me were drinking wine in the dark and looking at 3-D pictures of the plane cruising over Eastern Europe, Russia, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Pakistan, Afghanistan, India, the Bay of Bengal, etc. It was a wild ride. I hardly moved except to stretch my legs.

I watched a movie with Ryan Gosling in it. And I watched The Hangover III. Some other movie where Will Ferrell and Kevin Hart were terrible. And some other fucking movie. I can’t remember. It’s not important.

We landed and I expected it to be hot. We were standing in line at the customs area … we waited and waited. There were people who held up the line because they were white and expected to just be allowed into a country for whatever reason. They were unprepared. I was holding a blue folder with my itinerary: both Airbnbs where I’d be staying and my flight to Chiang Mai, Thailand and a flight out of the country to Hanoi, Vietnam. (I am, I was, I still am -- my father’s son. I even had handwritten my itinerary in a purple notebook which I kept in an Iron Man bag which I kept in another bag strapped across my shoulders. And I had a longsleeve shirt tied around my waist. Setting fashion trends. Ladies with noserings looked at me while standing in line. I saw their mauve or whatever the hell color it was, their passports, and I realized that I was the only American in the place.)

I couldn’t wait to get away from them. All of them.

I got to the customs guy who was resisting. He was resisting morons from entering, entitled, into Krabi, Thailand.

Handing him my ticket, my little piece of paper where I’d written with a borrowed pen from the Swedish girls (who by the way were lovely after they got off the plane, I should’ve asked them where they were staying but I didn’t because, really, I didn’t care) I had written that I was an English teacher. An address. An American passport. And I was golden. No problem.

The guy stamped my passport. Ha. All the shit I’d read on travel blogs about needing proof of where I’d be staying and a flight for when I’d be leaving the country. Well, that was all bullshit.

I crossed into Krabi realizing that having an American passport was one of the most important things I had on my person.

Then I couldn’t find my luggage.

SON OF A BITCH. MOTHER FUCKER. FUCKING AIRLINE. FUCK. THIS PLACE. FUCK. SOME MORON DROPPED IT. SOME IDIOT MISPLACED IT.

I found a suitcase that looked like mine (the one I’d borrowed from my father). It even had the same bandanna tied around it at the same place. I followed it around the place where the baggage kept circling around and I got pissed when hordes of people blocked the view of the opposite spinning platform where baggage went around in circles.

FUCKING PEOPLE. BLOCKING THE VIEW. GET OUTTA THE FUCKING WAY.

I grabbed the suitcase that looked like mine, finally. Then I took it, pissing vinegar, up to some person who looked semi-important. They didn’t understand me. They got on a radio. A woman came up. She had on a purple vest and a scarf tied neatly around her neck.

“Look, I can’t find my suitcase. But this one looks like mine.”

I showed her the suitcase.

“I have the same bandanna tied at the same spot. And my suitcase looks like this one.”

“Uh huh,” she said. “I see.”

Then I saw it across the tile where the sunlight warmed the people and the light got into my eyes and I rubbed them.

“Wait,” I said.

“Huh?”

“That’s it. Maybe.”

I walked over. And sure as shit. There it was.

A few people had just dropped it, looking for their suitcase. I rolled it on over.

“This looks like mine.”

“HAHAHA OH YES IT DOES.”

“OH MY.” The woman in the scarf concurred.

I got the fuck outta there. Bought a SIM card (after being denied for not having cash, going to the ATM, being asked if I were standing in line or not, buying the SIM card, seeing another blonde haired girl with a nose ring, and walking outside into the heat, deciding that I’d risk it … I’d wait until I got to the hotel to buy some water).

“TAXI?”

“Yes.”

“Taxi.”

“Okay.”

I rolled my suitcase over to a fine gentleman.

“Where you from?”

I had forgotten.

“Italy. Well, that’s where I just came from. Actually, I flew in from Sweden.”

He said some gibberish into a handheld radio. The sun and the palms waved. No, that’s shitty writing. They wavered in the distance. Uh huh. Yeah. That’s better.

(I’m kinda drunk.)

“I’m actually from America.”

“Okay, okay. Taxi be here. Two minutes.”

The taxi got annoyed with me when I tried to tell him where we were supposed to be going. He knew. Lay back. Relax. Chill out.

I got there and checked in. It was an arduous process that isn’t worth mentioning.

After a short nap, I went out and got some beer. Fuck. I think my double-click laptop spellcheck is broken. I'll write more later…

###

I dunno how much writing I got in me tonight. I’ve been drinking beer for the last few hours. And I’d spent most of the day exploring and walking around Krabi, spiking my hemoglobin. I had some good moments…

Well, the first day when I arrived I was jetlagged. So I decided that the best thing to do was to grab some beer. I bought three at the nearest store. But I went out the back way of the hotel. (That’s where the cabbie had dropped me off. Actually, he’d missed the street. But nevertheless.) And the woman who rang me up for the beers had the most beautiful eyes I’d ever seen -- they were like pearls, blue, translucent purple, ivory, I’m stuck. They shone. I bought the beers.

“Where you from?”

“America.”

“Ahhh.”

“Well, I like beer. I’m sure you’ll be seeing me again.”

She laughed. Her eyes were fucking purple!

I went into my room up on the third floor. I slept for an hour or so after drinking a big bottle of beer. Then I woke up and opened one of the green cans. I turned on the TV and listened to the language I couldn’t understand.

“Heh, heh, heh,” I said to the walls.

Then after a bit, I fell back asleep for something like four hours. I woke up and finished the can of beer. Then I went out for some food. I had my first meal in Thailand. Pad Thai. Chicken. From a Muslim woman. There were Muslim women everywhere. (Just thought I heard a knock on the door. Some dude walking through the hallway at 11:17 pm on a Monday.)

Back to the music. Fall Out Boy!

Drinking this last and final beer. After eating three different ice cream bars from 7-11.

Uhhh. Where was I?

Peanuts.

I dunno man. I went back to my room probably. With some more beer.

DAY 2

HOLY SHIT.

I drank coffee in the morning. Then I ate some food.

It went on like this for the next few days. Also, I worked in the morning and taught classes online at night. I’d go outside, then. Finding some food. Fruit in the morning. Chicken at night.

DAY 3

SEE ABOVE.

DAY 4

I felt stupid with working so much. I think this is the day where the woman who ran (runs) the hotel wondered when I was going to leave. I also think this was the morning where I got outta bed worrying that the maids would be cleaning the room soon and I wasn’t ready … I’d slept in again … by accident … the air-conditioning was owning me. Good.

WELL YOU SEE I WORK TWO JOBS.

I never told anybody I was a writer. What the fuck was the point of that?

People kept telling me to have a travel blog or to keep a diary.

THEY’D NEVER READ ANY OF MY FUCKIN WRITING. OTHERWISE, THEY WOULDA NEVER BROUGHT IT UP.

Okay, getting dramatic. The beer and the sun...

DAY 5

(Counting on my fingers.)

Day five is today. So I’ll stop here. It’s 11:23 and I have half a Chang to drink.

###

Tonight is something like day 7. I’d paid for one night of my hotel when I wasn’t even there. Then six nights awaited my bum bum. Earlier, the power went out for a few hours during a rainstorm. Tits and tats fell from the sky. I lay in bed, dreaming. It was comfortable, my legs were tired from climbing a bunch of steps. The lights were out. Nap time…

When I awoke, the power was out. It confused me. I thought, maybe I’ll sleep for another 10,000 lifetimes. But there was a beer next to the bed so I kept drinking it.

Um. The fifth day. I reckon, I finally got a taxi into town. Krabi town.

It was beautiful. I wandered. Wondering. At one point I exclaimed to my lonesome: this is the most amazing place I’ve ever been!

The last two days in Krabi I spent exploring. It’s nearly past midnight and I have a flight to Chiang Mai, Thailand at 9:40 in the morning tomorrow. I’m close to being all packed up except for the clothes that I had a lady at the hotel wash (at her insistence) and when I went down to get them (after the power came back on) she was snoozing on the couch and another woman told me … after realizing that my clothes were still sitting in the washer … they’d be ready in the morning.

I wanted to write about all of this shit, the last two days. But I was busy. And tonight I’m tired. I’ll just add in some pictures.

But while climbing those 1,260 steps into the air -- at 93, 104 degrees -- all I kept thinking was: it’s hot, you’ll never make it, fuck these steps, what?, really?, they go straight up like that?, fuck this, I’m tired, what’s the point?, oh, shit, I’ll never make it, this is dumb, I’ll just turn around, I’ll stop here, look at those clouds, wow, the sky, it’s hot, I’m tired, I’ll never make it, this is impossible, oh my god, I can hear my heart in my ear drums, this is impossible, dumb, stupid, I’ll never make it, I’ll stop here, monkeys, waterfalls, monks living in the woods, how’d they get those electrical lines into the caves?, and the water too, oh shit, this is hard, up, up, up, wow, okay, I guess this is when I die, no more life, impossible, I’m not gonna make it, wow that girl has huge knockers, I’ll bet she’s Italian, yep, Italian, I hear another girl singing, how the hell is she singing when I’m dying?, is she asking me if I’m Italian, Americano, I’m gasping, holding onto the railing, curing my fear of heights … and sure as shit, she was right … I made it to the top.

And everything, I mean everything.

Was beautiful.

Absolutely.

The sun burned my feet.

I’d made it to the top.