The all-quiet zone

The Golda rules.  I don’t wanna leave a dirty home.  I’ll be back in 48 days.  Once through customs thank God it’s a no-Ramadhan zone.  It is very quiet here for the middle of the day.  I suppose expats got out a few weeks earlier.  And everyone else is doing nothing.  Good, stay home and relax.  Tea? Ah you got an hour to wait, mate.

Two great flicks on the flight: Gravity and Her. A street vendor's pad Thai is the most obvious reason I am sick.  Not sleeping on the six hour flight to BKK may also be contributing. 

Finally in the drink, the silky galangal waters of the Gulf of Thailand intoxicatingly welcomes, embraces and submerges, and the resort I’ve come to four times with rates tripled since I was here two years ago is so green and lush I blow my budget on the second day of holiday.  Sigh. What to do, it's therapy.

And who is behind rising rates and audacious commerce on Chaweng beach?  Who else but the Chinese.  There was a time you could pick a Chinese out of a line-up.  Chinese fashion didn't change for more than fifty years and today, they're all wearing new clothes and it’s not working simply because everyone wears the same khakis and polo shirts.  Surely no one wants to see Mao blue-coal grey suits and dresses anymore but what the Chinese are getting dressed up as isn’t them and I am embarrassed they don’t see how much they stick out.  

In a seafood restaurant I watch a well dressed Chinese man carefully eat a lobster with fork and knife.  Twenty years ago he would have attacked that crustacean with a cleaver covered in butter and oil.  I feel bad for him.  Twenty years ago foreigners in China were unmercifully stared at.  A passenger sitting next to me on a public bus would have stared at me unblinking for thirty minutes.  Today I stare back and he knows it’s his turn to perform.

I miss the restaurants where patrons toss chicken bones on the floor.  That’s the China I love and abhor!  

7.21.2014

I stay in room five because room six has a sofa from the tv room in it in addition to the rest of the furniture it looks full.  The sofa is not where it usually is because there were three children sleeping on the floor. 

Weather beats this place up.  It’s the usual monsoon mold.  After six days of being whiplashed from a Koh Samui sun my shoulders and arms and upper chest continue to shed much to the groan of one family member.  A serene sunrise today and my busted up camera won’t do it justice so it’s you and me maam.  It’s nice to be back and for how long you ask, well this here is this 15kg growth hanging here making me make one apparel purchase mistake after another and I’d like to say goodbye to it right here so will that three weeks or six, we will see soon enough.

The new help refuses to listen to my request and not wipe down the floor where I sit and goes ahead. ‘ramro garney’ he says and I know business has been slow since the rains increased.  There is also a driver who parks the car in the new garage right below the rooms where once Didi planted a variety of vegetables.  People of means the village has become since I came here five months ago.   Four houses are being built alone along the steps to the view top.  A fella who used to live in the tiny house next up the mountain is in Bahrain.  Poor Kushi. Remittances fuel gremlin Monab’s new home thanks to an Abu Dhabi bound father.  I got a decent job, relatively speaking yet becoming a longer term kind of citizen is a big I don’t know and another let’s not go there kind of thing right now.  And that has to be ok, right, of not living in the Himalayas upon retirement which I told Laxman is coming I reckon in another decade and a few what the hell kind of years left before I'm done, unable to work, or unwilling, unwilling is actually better because that means you hope you're in a position where making that call can work.  How can I be comfortably unwilling to work when I'm 69 years old?   

Finding new sources of water, property lines, long standing land rights play their complicated game among the rooted families; right below the dining room garden men continue cleaving into the earth to prepare way for a three story guesthouse which will cut off a significant view of Phew Tal.  That’s not cool.  And admiring Dhauguleri there is now the newest communications tower to share the view.  Change is good even if it ruins the view?  Money is being spent because the value of the land is worth giving up for a life that’s staying put. 

Clouds finally douse a ferocious sun, it is tea time and how splendid the winds are in the late of day.  The off season also provides a lake side community with fewer tourists and fewer late night parties and thus again, a quiet where you’re checking your ears to make sure you haven’t lost it somewhere.  Transcendent peace. 

At dusk gray clouds lower, fog and a steady jungle rain paralyzes.  Ten months in the desert, a minute please while I drink a cup of lush.

There is equality and there is inequality and it looks like from here inequalities are the penultimate inevitability and the east manages the inevitable with a more gracefully fatal presumption in the circle of life.

Every day raining girl, the thunder rumbles and the rain falls harder, stops, a cool wind blows, this is an all quiet zone.  

7.22.2014

Heavy fog at 5.30, a dozen moth on the windows. Inside.