Thailand - The Weekend Market.

4 hours at the outdoor market with Sandy and Cindi. At points I would Pray for Death, Sho Kosugi style. Shopping as an endurance sport is really not my raison de etre. I can hang for an hour or two, but after that I start hating with death-eyes the random people who bump into me.

"Beware of Pick Pocketing" signs were everywhere.


The Snider girls in their native environment.



Sandy partakes of the stall food stuffs.

Coconut water, direct from the manufacturer.


Sandy's haul. So happy.

Thailand - First Friday night.

What do you do your first Friday night in Bangkok? Go see The Dark Knight, of course.

Obvious, in hindsight.

And you buy the popcorn/coke memorabilia pack too.

[Hey, I wasn't the only one who wanted to go.]

Quick review - really good flick. Ledger's Joker performance is as jaw droppingly good as everybody is making out. Just brutally good. Bale's Bruce Wayne is spot on. And his Batman is good, too. But that voice he uses works only about half the time. It's too over the top the other half of the time. Aaron Eckhart's Harvey Dent is nuanced and really well done. When he snaps, cracks and explodes, it's really strong acting, and a powerful moment. Oldman's Gordon is also excellent in a deservedly more fleshed out role, not having very much to do in the first film. Freeman and Caine turn in their usual extremely solid, capable and worthwhile performances, with the gravitas unique to their respective careers. On the neg, some of the dialogue and exposition struck me as clunky. There were a couple plot holes too. [The most obvious, why not simply blame the Joker for Dent's actions? Instead of the way they went with it?] The fight scenes, while better than Batman Begins, still struck me as "off" though I couldn't say exactly why. And the Rachel Dawes character remains, for me, as useless and unnecessary in this flick as the first. The shoehorned-in cliched love interest, with not much to do, and without an actress, in either film, who made me care about the character.

Still, probably the best Batman film to date.

Thailand - Religion and Superstition.

Apparently, during this building's construction they were having all sorts of difficulty, and were told it was because construction began on a religiously inauspicious day. So this temple was built on the corner to appease god/nature/reality/the forces of whatever. Looks cool though.

Thailand - Satiating those Western dietary cravings.

Second restaurant meal in Thailand? Pizza Hut.

Hey, when a woman wants cheese sticks, she wants cheese sticks.

Thailand - Sandy made me take this pic.

"For Cindi."

Hey, I just do what I'm told. [Well, sometimes, anyways.]

Thailand - the Jim Thompson House.

Day 2 [1 and a half? Anyways, Friday afternoon.]

The Jim Thompson House.

The house was pretty cool, design wise, but the backstory is the hook. Former OSS officer who up and disappears after making a fortune in the Thai silk trade. That's a good story right there.

Jim Thompson (designer) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia:

"James Harrison Wilson 'Jim' Thompson was an American businessman who helped revitalize Thailand's silk and textile industry in the 1950s and 1960s. A former U.S. military intelligence officer who once worked for the Office of Strategic Services, Thompson mysteriously disappeared while going for a walk on Easter Sunday, March 26, 1967 in the Cameron Highlands of Malaysia. Many hypotheses have been put forward to explain Jim's disappearance, and there were some reported sightings of him after his disappearance, but what happened to him still remains one of the greater unsolved mysteries of Southeast Asia."

Silk design block. Not sure exactly how this worked, but that's what they called it.

Sandy owns the room.



I'll give props to the garden though.

Thailand - Hotel + Free Breakfast Joy.

The Furama Xclusive hotel. Our place to crash for 4 days, Cindi's home for a bit longer. [Muchas Gracias.]

View from the room.

Sandy's favorite part, free western style hotel breakfast.


Mmmmm...

Classy.

Sandy ruminating and posing pensively.

Night time view from on high.

Thailand - The $9 pint of ice cream.

And you know what? Totally worth it. Japan has 31 Flavors/Baskin Robbins, but they haven't cracked the Ben and Jerry's code yet. To their detriment.

Thailand - And we're off!

Day 1/Evening 1.

My view for much of the trip.



Off to "Cabbages and Condoms" for dinner. Not exactly sure of the Japan connection, though the first Google hit goes to this Japanese website, and the menu cover, obviously, namechecks Japan.

"Our food guaranteed not to cause pregnancy."


Cabbages & Condoms Restaurant:

"As one of the most unique restaurants in Metropolitan Bangkok, the Cabbages and Condoms (C&C) Restaurant has attracted international attention... C&C is very popular among local and foreign clients.

Our restaurant was conceptualized in part to promote better understanding and acceptance of family planning and to generate income to support various development activities of the Population and Community Development Association (PDA)"

Crab Meat Red Curry w/Betel Leaves is awesome. First Thai curry, and it was delicious. Plus the beer at the end of the long travel day didn't hurt.



Sandy's happy "no more airplanes today" face.


Condom decor.





Democrat and Republican size were both the same, forestalling any political debate.

Thailand - Ingress.

All day on Cathay Pacific Air...


Nifty personal TVs, same crappy airline legroom...


Sandy begins the planning/itinerary/agendizing phase of the trip.


Sandy's vegetarian meals = getting served first after takeoff on every flight. A tip for those flying while hungry.


In country. PINK taxicabs. Much cooler, and slightly gayer, than traditional USA yellow. Not in Kansas anymore.

Stories...

A reminder, like everything else on this dumb blog, mostly for me. Welcome to my narcissistic memo pad.

Change Your Story, Change Your Life:

"...the only thing that keeps us from what we really want in life is the story we tell ourselves about why we can’t have it. Life will provide plenty of reasons to be fearful. What we need to do is learn how to play with fear. We can do this by taking a closer look at the stories we create in our minds.

Our stories become a filter for what we will experience. Regardless of what’s happening in our lives at the moment, we all weave narratives. We tell ourselves stories that explain where we’ve been and where we’re going; who we are and who we’re becoming.

It would be easy to presume that our life’s events dictate the stories that run our lives, but just like writers who make adjustments to their scripts, we can change our stories at any time, and we often do, for better or for worse. Sometimes these changes come from the external world—the stories that others tell about you that can either be true or false—or the stories that you selectively edit, tell others, and become a reflection of your identity in the world.

...We must remember that we have the power to make choices along the way. Regardless of the subject, the real question isn’t where the story is coming from, or whether or not it’s even true. The real question is: What do you want to become? What story do you want to create for the future? It’s a decision we’re always making moment to moment.

China, you're kinda sucking right now.

Daily Brickbats > Putting on Their Best Faces - Reason Magazine:

"A fight broke out when Beijing residents lined up for Olympics tickets, and foreign reporters on the scene did what reporters do, they tried to cover the melee. That prompted Chinese police to do what they do. They detained the reporters and demanded they delete any photos of the scuffle."

Joe Rogan plays with dolphins, gets high, speaks wise.

Which, if you read, is remarkably similar to what Grant Morrison was going on about in the previous post. That's called a synchronicity. Or maybe drugs gravitate you to a certain way of thinking. Though that's a stretch... given they both play around with lots of altered states modalities - yoga, drugs, isolation chambers, peak experience, meditation...

This may be some of the best advice I've read in a while -

"Wring the stress out of your body in the gym so your mind can be free of the leftover chimpanzee rage.

Clean your mind of the foolish thoughts of the misguided souls that have lived before you and followed a blind path into the impossible jungle of consciousness.

Just because a bunch of other people are moving in the same direction, it doesn’t mean that any of them have any idea where they’re going, and just because they’re following one person, it doesn’t make him or her the leader.

A lot of people are just plain fucking scared of the dark, and they’ll follow anyone that’s holding a flashlight."

Here's a fuller excerpt - The Joe Rogan Blog » Conduit to the Gaian Mind » Hello, stranger.:

"...When you come into this kind of contact with dolphins it really hits you how smart they are, especially when you’re high as FUCK. They’re way smarter than anything on this planet other than us, and possibly smarter than us, they just can’t alter their environment the way we can. They’ve been here a lot longer than us, too. They don’t know exactly how long, but it’s thought that it’s millions of years. I’ve watched a bunch of documentaries on them, and I have a deep appreciation for them, so this encounter was extra exciting for me.

I started thinking while I was being treated to this amazing moment how incredible it was, and this led me to start thinking what it could possibly be like to be a dolphin, and what dolphin consciousness was like. I started thinking whether or not it’s different than ours, and whether they were more or less aware, and then I started thinking about the possibility that our consciousness was the same, but that just our biology and environments were different.

Then it hit me – what if that’s the case with people?

What if “me” is the same for everyone, just the physical circumstances differ.

The thought that hit me was that we are all the exact same thing, we’re just experiencing this existence through an infinite number of different biological filters that we call human bodies.

What if “me” at it’s core is always the same, it’s just the physical body and all the aspects of each particular life that are different?

Of course we all have different personalities, but how much of that is biological?

Human beings vary so much biologically- how much do these factors contribute to what you think of as “you?”

How much of your “personality” is a combination of your own personal, unique biochemistry? How much of who “you” are and the way “you” react to things is based on the levels of hormones your body produces, and the quality of your synaptic responses? How much of “you” is the genetic code that you function under?
How much is your accumulated reactions to life experiences?

...What if the variations in humans can all be attributed to a combination of all of these variables, but what if the “me” at the very center of all of it is exactly the same for all of us?

If I lived your life, in your body, every second of every day of your life until the point where you’re at now, would I be you? What if we are all the exact same thing, but we’re just living out different lives? That’s the thought that hit me.

Right as I watched these dolphins leap out of the water to play with us, this epiphany burned itself into my consciousness and I haven’t thought about a single thing the same way since. One moment that changed my mind forever.

...So really, what am I trying to say? I mean, so far, this sounds like some typical stoned, hippy bullshit about universal consciousness, right?

I’m well aware that to discuss anything as sensitive as happiness or consciousness you immediately run the risk of sounding ridiculous, but I really think I might be on to something with this line of thinking.

Something is very wrong, and very unnatural about the way most people live and think about this life, and I think it’s a major factor in why so many people are unhappy.

The way the majority of people in this country are living their lives is a sign of a sickness. We’re a group of people playing follow the leader, but there’s no fucking leader. Most of us will live our lives connected to a system that makes you labor all day for very little joy, pretending that somehow there’s a better life waiting when you’ve done your work.

This life flies by at a blinding pace, and often despite your best intentions it can take a turn for the miserable and just stay there until you drop.

You can read all the right books, take all the right yoga classes, but you never get happy.

Why is that? Why do so many of us fall into this trap?

My thought, while I was out in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, high as giraffe pussy and trying to talk to dolphins – was that the way to really be happy is to view everyone you meet as you. Be as happy to meet them as you would be meeting another version of yourself living a completely different life.

Could this really work?

It’s certainly working for me, but is this an idea that a large number of people would accept? I honestly don’t know, but when I look at it objectively it doesn’t seem very likely to catch on in a grand scale anytime real soon, and that kinda sucks.

It just seems like there’s way too many broken people in this world. There are just so many people that have lived their entire life in a shitty direction, and have neither the will nor the inclination to change it now. There’s just so much momentum propelling so many people into a shitty direction that it would take an incredible amount of energy to turn it all around. A mass psychedelic movement where thinking was readdressed and the consciousness of the entire population were reprogrammed.

Realistically, even if we started teaching thinking like that in our schools tomorrow, it would probably take a long fucking time for it to be sorted out, if ever. I mean, in 1859 Darwin published “origin of the species,” and in 2008 a recent Gallop poll found that over 50% of Americans said they thought that evolution was fake, and that the earth is less than 10,000 years old.

There’s going to be a lot of people that aren’t going to come along on our little hippy love fest. There are also a lot of people that would probably try to take advantage of this new way of thinking. Crazy homeless people would especially become a real problem, “I’m you! Give me my money, bitch!”

Either way, I had this thought a few months ago, and I’ve been subscribing to that notion ever since. It gets a little slippery sometimes, but for the most part the idea has stuck, and in fact it seems to be strengthening and growing.

...We as a race are clearly in some sort of an adolescent stage of evolution, and it certainly doesn’t help that we’re only alive in this life for a shockingly brief amount of time during which long before we ever get our own shit together, and develop a healthy perception of reality, we’re already trapped in the capitalist work grind and raising an entirely new batch of kids on the same dopey bullshit of the past.

I’ve been crazy, and I’ve been sane. I’ve been angry, and I’ve been happy, and a lot of what seems to make the difference for me is how much effort I put into positive patterns of thought and the proper biological maintenance. Positive thoughts attract more positive thoughts, and the more I focus on it the deeper and smoother the groove becomes.

...Where am I going with all this? I’m not exactly sure, but I really think I’m on to something. I know it sounds crazy, but try it, even if you keep what you’re doing to yourself. Try thinking of and treating everyone you meet as if they’re you.

You might be surprised at the results."

And there's more at the link. You should check it out.