True Hardcore

Not a lot going on lately. It's the rain season so I am sleeping more than usual -- this makes for good sleep but it also makes for entire days shot to hell by the steady pound of rain on my patio. I blew my last paycheck in something like 5 days so now is the waiting period in which I eat less, smoke cigarettes to the goddamn filter and slow my heartbeat. I wake up, check email and ESPN.com then I listen to 4 hours of podcasts of the Adam Carolla Show, have a couple cigarettes, play Spider Solitaire. After this I force myself to take a shower and shave, go outside and buy something to eat -- usually either pat krapow moo which is spicy pork and greens over rice or kao pat gai which is fried rice with chicken, egg and vegetables. I buy two cans of coke and some potato chips and some oreos and a pack of smokes. Then I go back to my room and eat while watching Jimmy Kimmel Live which this guy posts in 10 minute clips on youtube everyday. Then it's nap time.

A couple weeks ago I realized I haven't had this much freedom to do what I want with my time, or had my life set up in such a way where so little was expected of me, since I was 5 years old. I have this distinct memory of the week before I started kindergarten, my last day before school started. I'd watched my brother and sister get yelled at to turn off Gilligan's Island and go catch the goddamn bus enough times to know what was in store for me. I was 5 and I would wake up every morning while it was still dark out, like 6AM and go across the street from my house and catch frogs in this tiny pond all day. This is all I did. This one day, the one I remember, was the last day before school started and I was walking through the wet grass to the frog pond with nothing to do for anybody else all day, just gonna go catch frogs for as long as I wanted. I was passing this huge oak tree and I had the thought: my life will never be this good again.

This is kinda funny: I was coming back from the market last week and there was this huge elephant tromping down the sidewalk with a guy riding it. As me and a small group of dental assistants (they were all wearing the pink dress uniforms, every one of them) were passing the elephant, it decided it wanted some water from a fountain that bordered the sidewalk. The rider made a move as if to steer the elephant away from the fountain but immediately saw it was no use and just shrugged his shoulders and stared ahead as the big guy sucked a bunch of water into his trunk and started slapping the trunk on his side and spraying the water. The women all screamed and we tried to avoid the spray but we all got wet. Hot, elephant-snot Bangkok water. I thought my skin was gonna come off.

Elephants are everywhere here and it's scary sometimes because you know they can do whatever they want and the only reason they aren't stomping the life out of everybody and tossing people around is that they just haven't thought of it yet.