A Walking Street Stir-fry: Age, Cancer, Israel, Human Populations, and Getting It On
By KorskiOne Friday night on Walking Street, two Australians were sitting on the outer edge of a bar getting thoroughly pissed. One of them was tall and heavy and had a full head of curly salt and pepper hair; and it was clear from looking at his red and round face and his gin nose that he’d been on the piss often through the years. It was also apparent on this particular night that if he had another drink or two he was going to need help getting back to his hotel room. A betting man would say that the last thing he’d be doing, before he woke to strong mid-day sunlight, would be getting a good shag.
What really grabbed my attention about this Aussie some eight or ten drinks to the wind was the way he was stopping farang who got within shouting distance of where he was sitting. And then as soon as they approached came forth with this line: Hey, mate, mind if I ask your age? He wasn’t stopping anyone with this question, just those he judged to be older than he was. He was fifty-nine. If asked why he was asking this question, his response was, I have to know who’s the oldest c*nt coming down here to get a girl, because it's not me. What he wanted, pure and simple, was a number: fifty-five, sixty-two, sixty-nine, seventy-one...
This question about age is, of course, asked thousands of times a day all over the whoring areas of Pattaya. It’s asked of hookers by farang, and it’s asked of farang by hookers. The motives for the questions vary. Is the hooker so young that she really doesn’t know how to perform worth a damn? Is she over thirty and thus, for no really good reason other than pure prejudice, not young enough to take as a bed partner for the night? Is he (a hooker question) young enough that if I play it right we might get something serious going, and then I can drain all his bank accounts?
We’re fascinated and seemingly preoccupied with this question of age in the West. We just have to know how old someone is chronologically. Because once we know a person’s age there is so much that we just know that we can infer about the person. Yeah, sure...
&
Breast Cancer. Consider this small set of facts (nothing invented). A woman goes to a doctor and gets a mammogram and when the doctor sees the x-rays he is disturbed. For on the woman’s left breast are some odd and disturbing squiggly lines, and experience shows that these invariably indicate that she’s got breast cancer. There are now various options other than doing nothing: radiation, chemotherapy, and the radical solution—remove the breast.
The doctor consults with the woman and presents her with the options. She responds, matter of factly, Just get rid of the breast and be done with it. The doctor tells her what this means. She repeats what she said, and within a couple of days the doctor has scheduled for the woman to enter the hospital and have the breast removed at one in the afternoon on the day she comes to the hospital. An emergency arises on the day of the operation, however, and the doctor cannot remove the woman’s breast until four in the afternoon.
The following morning, one of the woman’s sons calls his mother on her cell phone and says, Mom, how are you feeling?
She says, Right now I’m walking out of the hospital and your brother is going to pick me up at the curb. Call me later in the day, but not too late. I have a meeting to go to this evening.
Question: With just these facts, what would a person guess this woman’s age to be? Forty-nine? Fifty-nine? Sixty-nine? Seventy-nine? Eighty-nine?
My money says that fewer than five percent of a hundred people chosen at random would put this woman’s age at eighty-nine. Perhaps a similarly small percentage would put her age at seventy-nine.
The woman I described as having her breast removed was in fact eighty-nine. I know all this because she is my mother, and I was the one who made the call to her asking how she was doing.
&
Israel. Choose one hundred well-educated Americans at random and ask them this question: How many states are there in the U.S. Close to one-hundred percent of them will say that there are fifty states in the U.S. Perhaps one or two of this sample will slip up and forget that either Alaska or Hawaii is a state and come up with the number forty-nine.
When I bring up this question in my university classes, I make it clear to the students that the real—the effective—number of U.S. states in fifty-one. And the fifty-first state—and the most important state by far in the U. S.—is Israel. Israel in a major way drives U.S. foreign policy. Israel in a major way got the U. S. in the Iraqi War (it all goes back to the neocons and the early nineties). Israelis citizens receive on a per capita basis more money from the U.S. treasury than citizens of any state in the union—by far. No state or U.S. elected official, or someone running for President of the United Sates, can get elected if they are not strongly pro-Israel; or if he or she speaks out against Israel as a racist and apartheid state (which it clearly is); or if he or she says what I have written in the previous three sentences.
My point here, as with the story about my mother, is that we very often use numbers in ways that are—by criteria that are largely beyond debate—simply misleading if not downright erroneous in how we think about an issue.
Human Population Numbers. If you ask one hundred university students chosen at random to identify where one finds the major population problem in the world today—thinking in terms of countries—a good ninety-five percent of them, assuming they are together enough to have given a little thought to the question, will say China or India. They will say China because as a nation-state China has the world’s largest population at around 1.3 billion people. And they will say India because India has more than a billion people.
But, surely, speaking in the present, these answers are wrong. A thinking person will recognize that human population numbers are not merely a counting exercise (like counting the number of years a person has lived), but a number that makes a lot more sense if it is weighted by per capita resource consumption rates and per capital damage to the environment. Put this way, the effective—and this is the key word--population of the U.S. is something more than twenty times that of the population of China or India. This effectively means that the population of the U.S. is more than six billion people (20 X 300 million, roughly the current population of the U.S.), about the size of today’s world population.
My point here, as with the story about my mother, and what I have said about Israel, is that we often use numbers in ways that are—by criteria and context that are largely beyond debate—simply misleading if not downright erroneous.
&
So this brings us full circle, to Walking Street on a Friday night at around eleven p.m. and an Aussie who is eager to find the oldest c*nt he can who is going to go with a hooker for the night.
The question, of course, as he has put it, is meaningless. For on any given night on Walking Street there are all kinds of farang in their forties and fifties who aren’t going to be able to get their dicks up, or shag like they know what they’re doing if they can get it up, or who can do it more than once a night. Conversely, I have no doubt that there are plenty of men on Walking Street on a given night who are in their fifties and sixties who are going to not only pick up a girl for the night and give her a bloody good shag, but they might well give her another good rollicking go in the morning before she showers and collects her money and says, Will I see you again tonight?
So, then, as with my mother, and as with Israel, and as with human population numbers, when we are talking about age in the context of sexual performance, let’s get over the idea that a simple number is all that meaningful as a measure of what will go down. What that Aussie who was fascinated with finding the oldest c*nt around that night should have done and asked was something like this. He should have stopped all those men who he thought were above say forty and said: How many times have you shagged a hooker in the last week? Maybe this Aussie so preoccupied with not being the oldest c*nt on Walking Street with the aim of getting laid, would’ve gotten the prize for being the “oldest” farang out that night—or week? But then maybe it might’ve been one of his Aussie or Brit or American mates who had just turned thirty-five.
The author can be contacted at korski1@cox.net.
The author of this website, NOT this article, can be contacted at: stickmanbangkok@gmail.com.
