I know of no such things

4.15.13

The Thais in rooms one through six slept with the lights on the entire night.  Is there a genuine forest fear of tigers and mongoose who know how to pick locks? Come on ladies, red spiders don't bite Thai people unless of course you're covered in a green coconut curry. Breakfast finished, 22 visitors are content, the mountains a no-show at half past five, a fading outline is all they got and it is not yet hot. 

Four years ago today Keith and I went to the view top for sunrise, a wall of haze and nothing more except for the loud Chinese amateur photographers.  As the rest goes the earthy atheists followed us back to the Hill Top Café and Sumjana and satan’s spirits swirled like the amateurs they were, and then they left.

Today the Chinese ambassador to Nepal is going to make a stop at the top, in say 30 minutes.  I’ll be honest, thinking of immolation while making up the beds brought me to tears.  He’ll be attending the ceremony to introduce a digital trunking system that will improve police communications.  Yes, I saw the four huge solar panels, solar panels used to listen in on your conservations over dal bhat, comrade?

Surely loud and obnoxious Chinese four years ago have nothing to do with a Chinese ambassador today, no, except they were Chinese, and the odds of that happening are what, 200 to 1?  There is one date left on my ‘it’s time to forget the past nothing will happen’ checklist.  4.23.09. The day the spirit crashed my party.  A week from tomorrow, great.  Are we reminiscing too much?  

4.16.13

Fares for flights to the states in two weeks and at the end of May aren’t too different, about a hundred bucks, a hundred bucks. No summer work found, I am not happy being dependent and I'm not happy about not being happy about being dependent. Isn't this what they've been saying since I arrived eight months ago?  We are family and it's perfectly natural to be dependent on each other.  Ok.

Another slow orange red sunrise, so quiet and majestic, it’s the least I can say for my thoughts.  The inevitable will happen, Jack, unless you’re surprised, unless someone saves your scrawny neck at the last moment, unless you do something about such precarious loafing. 

For the first time this year the rooms are vacant.  It was an amazing stretch of business, how do you survive the summer months when nary a soul climbs to the top, when fog and rain disillusion, when  there’s too much water.  Hunker down and budget each meal.  Life is not easy and don’t you dare make it more difficult for anyone.

2:08pm—I’m told a dozen ladies and a few men jockeyed for water after midnight this morning.  Now Laxman is waiting for power to hook up and begin piping water into the tank.  Power went off at six this   morning and hasn’t returned.  While everyone generally accepts power cuts and water shortages as par for the course, it still sucks.

I did my bit of cleaning before the afternoon sun and strong winds prevailed; garden cleaning, step sweeping, showcase arranging and rearranging, and empty beer bottle relocation.  The children are happily about, Maya moves from chore to chore, Didi is off today and tomorrow, the dining room is quiet and an English family of four checked into room five after lunch.  Water rationing is still in effect.

I will say this now I am guilty of associating any events that will occur a week from today as coincidence.  Maya’s birthday is a coincidence though there is no relation at all.  How lame am I?

Here’s a plan that just came to me.  I need a summer job so, go to Thailand.  If you like the job and the money is enough, what's to keep you from leaving?  well…as for the driver’s license and police clearance, I can do the latter later and the former, well…I’ve managed without it for four years though Salalah could have been exceptionally better if I had one.

7:23pm—The children are away for the evening and it’s so quiet you can hear crickets.  The five to eight millimeters of rain predicted hasn’t fallen though it is still overcast and strangely calm as well, thunder grumbles in the southern horizon, and throughout the village candles illumine the darkness. 

Dinner is finished, a fine pumpkin soup/curry with rice, Maya is at the tap, and Lalena and Maria pay their bill and return to the Lake View.  Lalena is/was a most attractive woman living and working in Bali with short rastafari hair who’s got four inches on me and when we stepped outside to share a cigarette I laughed when I saw her broad shoulders and imagined she was a hot Bay City Roller.  Do you have Roller Derby in Moscow?  I know of no such things.