Thai Thoughts And Anecdotes Part 69

A BUSINESS MAN'S SUIT

I'm on the plane to Chiang Mai. I'm going up for mixed reasons. I'm going up to meet my girlfriend and her parents and her siblings (boring). I've done this before. My comfort level with this kind of forced conviviality
isn't very high (I'm a no-bullshit American) but I've agreed to do it. I have spent so much time with Pea that it is getting harder and harder to say no. I have also managed to wangle a meeting with a business friend of a friend
in BKK. Well, actually Pea has. Pea and I are getting to the point in our relationship where we can both see the M word (marriage) starting to peek above the social horizon. She says she would love to go to America but she is lying. She doesn't
want to leave snakes and spiders and floods and suffocating heat and government graft and corruption and familial abuse and sibling hatreds. Ah, Thailand. Paradise. So lately she has gone into overdrive getting me interviews. If I get hired for
a ‘good' job in Thailand we can get married and stay in the land of double pricing and racism. Lucky me! I'm too old to resist so I have been going to these interviews. They are always horrific. But I keep going. It amuses me.
I like Pea. If I can manage to shmooze this Chiang Mai meeting successfully it might develop into a job interview. If I could procure employment in Thailand from a position of strength I would move here permanently. Pea knows this. I must have
told her. Mistake! The amusing part of this is that she can't tell the difference between one job and another job. All she hears is the word job (marriage). Climbing into the back of a truck to be taken out to a tapioca field and being the
managing director of the Oriental hotel are identical to her. Jobs. Marriage. But I am not moving here to have young men's adventures or to flip banana crepes on Khao San Road. Anyway, for a number of reasons I am engaged in serious adult
activity as I board the plane to Chiang Mai and I look like it. I am dressed in conservative business attire including a bankers style suit and tie and briefcase.

Shuffling slowly and interminably down the aisle of the plane I am behind two gays who look like they just graduated from Clown College for Queers. Social misanthropes of this egregious exaggeration you don't usually see in Boyztown
in Pattaya on a Friday or Saturday night. Freaks! They are rolling their eyes and lip smacking and throwing their little hips around and flipping their scarves as if there is a wind blowing in the plane. Making public spectacles of themselves
and sashaying down the aisle as if they are auditioning for a homo prison riot they are trying to validate their lifestyle choice by drawing people's attention to it and rubbing their faces in it. This doesn't seem like a winning influence
tactic to me but this negative aggressive behavior has recently found favor with gay strategic thinkers: "Let's see, people have a built in predisposition to not approve of us; so let's make them disapprove of us even more, then
we'll get respect." Genius. This is what mystifies me and disgusts me about these kinds of gays. What makes them think that the rest of us are interested in their private sex lives? How did this dumb idea get started? What butt fucking
homo philosopher chiseled this into a velvet covered rock? Most people I do not want to see naked and I have no interest in anyone's sex life except my own. I think these people are stupid. Not smart. And it's not working. Thailand is
full of heterosexual men and women and the third sex katoeys and men and women of homosexual inclinations but over-acting, eye rolling, lip smacking, limp wrist theatrical creatures like these are still a relative rarity. The middle class and
high class serious minded Thais on the plane aren't buying what they are selling. You can tell by the sidelong glances and body language and facial tics and lowered faces that these traditional value Thais don't find Mr. Ass Lube and
Mr. Squealer appealing.

So anyway, I am jammed up behind them as we go down the aisle and I am hoping (praying) that none of the Thais think that we are together. Sure enough, I have the aisle seat and they have the other two seats. Now, how did the Thai airline
personnel manage to seat all of the non-Thais together? Well, there we are. Me and two guys who are obviously playing butt darts and swapping spit in their hotel room. One is white and has an accent from some part of the Empire and the other is
a black of indeterminate origin. The plane to Chiang Mai is full of Thais of serious mien and ordinary aspect. Well dressed and well behaving. These two high heel shoppers stick out like a sore thumb. I mostly can't stand gays. Their aggressive
behavior and public posturing and needless defensiveness and constant challenging of universally accepted public mores is ultimately childish and boring. We are not equal. But I don't hold it against them. I have a social contract with the
world. If the world leaves me alone, I promise to leave it alone. I'm an open minded, extroverted, highly social guy so I start to chat up Mr. Empire on my right. Flying makes me nervous and it's an hour to Chiang Mai. He looks interesting
and educated. Maybe we'll have some fun. He isn't having it. I keep trying with bright little conversation starters. He plays along a little bit but it's not really a happening thing. If Pea was with me she would have sensed trouble
and reined me in but I'm all along and defenseless. I say something friendly to the black guy two seats over. That does it. Mr. Empire turns to me and starts to loudly lecture me in a parental way about how he doesn't appreciate the
farang sex tourist in Thailand. This goes on at some length. I nod and smile in a friendly way. I am dressed in a business man's suit and tie and a briefcase for Jesus Christ's sake! Sensing easy opportunity he bears down harder. Now
for all that he knows I could be going up to Chiang Mai to accept an award on behalf of the greater Thailand Cement Producers Association. Or going up to work on the Faculty of Medicine at Chiang Mai University. Or flying up to help my daughter
pack because she has been accepted to Chulahorn University. I could be one of the numerous computer government consultants here to help Thailand. Perhaps I am a representative from the United Nations Lychee Research project being administered
by the Australian government. How does Commander Ass Lube know that I am not a missionary flying up to assume northern Thailand church projects. Perhaps I am a representative of Childreach International flown in from New York to help Thailand
with foster child issues. Except for the color of my skin there is not one scintilla of evidence that I am less than a model citizen. And he has the same color skin. In the face of this nonsense and madness Mr. Interracial Buttfucker is judging
me! Honestly, sometimes the level of bullshit in this country gets so high you just want to scream. He would have been easy to bait but as I age the easy win has less appeal. Been there. Won that. So I just sit there in my bankers suit from the
States and let him beat on me. I'm small. I'm used to it. I get beat on as soon as I leave the house. I'm sitting there in conservative serious adult attire while a flamer lectures me loudly about proper social etiquette in Thailand.
I can't figure it out. The only reason I can think of for this behavior besides sheer mean-spirited stupidity is that he and his gal pal friend are not 100% comfortable with their chosen public alternative lifestyle on this plane full of
well dressed middle class and high class Thais so I am getting this public shitstorm to divert attention away from them. It is working. There is some social tension in the air. I can feel the little hairs on the back of my neck starting to wake
up. You can tell by the subtle polite movements that the surrounding Thais are listening to this. They had been sitting there politely reading complimentary issues of the Bangkok Post but now they have been dragged to a lynching. They are looking
and listening. Looking at me!

Priming the pump of hate is always popular and usually effective. It gets people elected and it often gets the girl and it gives communities cohesion. It also allows individuals to eliminate the tensions associated with fact filtering and
decision making. But it is wrong in higher developed species. We haven't spent millions of years battling our way up from the muck and the mire to behave like one celled organisms. These knuckleheads were using old methods and well worn tools
to deflect attention from themselves and to get the community to focus on me. It's a good plan. But it was only a one hour flight. There wasn't enough time. Thank God. Commander Ass Lube wouldn't have thought of this idea if Pea
had been there with me, but sitting next to me all alone he is suddenly brave. Just another reason why I find gays so repellent. I'll defend to my death their right to pursue their own brand of personal fulfillment and I will back up my opinions
and philosophies in the voting booth. But Jesus Christ if you are not comfortable with who you are don't crap all over me. Hey everybody. CHILL OUT.

Oh, by the way: I didn't get the job!

THE NEW BRAGGERS!

When they tell you that they speak Thai they love to use the word ‘fluent'! "Hey man, what be the difference man?" I mean if you can speak Thai aren't you automatically fluent? It's hard for me to imagine an
adult Thai bragging to me that he or she is fluent in their own language! They speak Thai. That's it. Well, of course! But the word ‘fluent' carries more weight, it has more panache. More sex appeal. Now we are into bragging territory,
a territory so populated by young men that it is impossible not to bump into them. It's like the tennis craze of the 70's. People always played better at the cocktail party than they did on the court. And the running craze of the 80's.
People always ran more miles in the telling than in the morning. So now we have the fluency braggers. They don't trot this nonsense out when surrounded by Thais. They know better. But if you are a farang and you don't keep moving it
is only a matter of time before one of these frauds gloms onto you and starts bragging.

Let me tell you something Mr. Fluent: Basic speaking and reading fluency in all languages is determined by two tests. Can you read the local mail (letters, utility bills, fliers, solicitations, advertisements, invoices, notices, political
ads, etc.) that you receive; and can you pick up the ringing phone and talk back to the local on the other end. Additionally, if you can't read bus and train and plane schedules, road signs, menus, jokes, newspapers, movie subtitles, comic
books, shopping catalogues, electronics manuals, toy assembly directions, packaging labels, magazine advertisements, TV and cable listings, contracts and other various forms of legalese like eviction notices and arrest warrants and marriage and
divorce documents, as well as all signs and revered monk bios in temples, etc; the kinds of text that are symbol and slang rich: then you are not fluent. Most of the big talking farangs with diplomas and certificates can't do these two things.
But I have to spend part of the rest of my life listening to them tell me that they can do something they can't. They think that they are telling me that they can do something that I can't. But what these fools are really telling me
is that they can do something that they can't. But there is more! When they lay this heavy trip on you about how they couldn't speak the language when they first came here, but now they are ‘fluent'; they watch your eyes.
The eyes are the mirror of the soul. The eyes can't fake it. The eyes are the great truth tellers. They watch your eyes to see if you believe them. If you don't roll your eyes with disgust, or go blind with opaque diplomacy, or launch
into the facial tics of the abused; then they trot out the really big lie. Not only can they speak Thai. THEY CAN READ THAI.. You can practically see the handprint from the palm of God on their shoulder. When I hear this my knees usually go weak
from incredulity. Even if it is true, this is the kind of information that isn't going to benefit you because no one is ever going to believe you. For instance: in my case, I am the greatest lover to have ever lived in the history of the
species; however, I have found it best to keep that to myself. The true delusional, however, knows no bounds. He wants the world to know that he can speak and read Thai (fluently). This is all part of the boring young males hard wired need to
establish dominance over as many other males as possible. I have never once had a farang in his 40's or 50's or 60's take time out of his busy day to tell me he can do something that I can't do; but you can't shut the
young guys up! They can't establish dominance over other males or gather females into their harems through acts of violence anymore; so now we have these conversational set pieces that are supposed to establish social hierarchy. They imagine
that they are setting themselves apart as more advanced but they are boring and predictable frauds.

So that's my rant on the farang Thai fluency braggers. Oh, and one more thing. Did I tell you I was fluent in Thai? Yeah, that's right. I CAN EVEN WRITE THAI. You know, fluently.

Sure I can. . . .

Stickman's thoughts:

That's Dana's 69…