Thai Thoughts And Anecdotes Part 398
“STRANGER IN PARADISE
In 1953 a play called Kismet featured a song called Stranger in
Paradise. Sample lyrics below:
Take my hand
I'm a stranger in paradise
All lost in a wonderland
A stranger in paradise
If I stand starry-eyed
That's a danger in paradise
For mortals who stand beside
An angel like you
The lyrics were by Robert Wright and George Forrest and the melody was based on music composed by Alexander Borodin. Everyone wanted to sing this song from the dramatic evocative styling of opera singer Robert Peters to Tony Bennet to Isaac Hayes. Sometimes this song comes to me as I am going down the hallway to Immigration in Bangkok. I am once again in Thailand and so so happy. A stranger in paradise. Sometimes this song comes to me as I am once again going into the Rainbow bar at the N.E.P. on Soi 4 in Bangkok. A stranger in paradise and so so happy. And often I think of this song on the boardwalk as an angel opens her arms and I stand starry-eyed next to her. I'm a stranger in paradise and I am so so happy.
I'M NOT NORMAL
Is it different when you get older? Yes, it is. I wouldn't have necessarily thought so but it is. This attraction to women thing. For most men, as the age increases and the testosterone decreases, they find women less addicting. Not me. I'm not normal. I find women more interesting now than when I was twenty years old. It's as if I am living my life backwards. No matter, I'll take it.
But age yields experience and familiarity leads either to contempt or additional interest. I find women endlessly interesting. My age has expanded and deepened my needs however. No longer is every thought or action directed towards copulation. Sometimes a smile, a laugh, another smile, or a soft spoken word is enough. Contact with a Martian. I'm satisfied. I couldn't have gotten the pleasure from anything else but a woman. I'm satisfied. You would never say:
"Now take me to a real Martian."
You know it was the genuine article and a genuine experience. Women. Outerspace creatures admitting of no substitution.
It's a hot night during the holiday season and I am ambling up Soi 8. I'm ambling because Soi 7 and Soi 8 do not really work for me. They do work for other men but not for me. But once or twice a year I go back. Anyway, I'm ambling: no agenda, no needs, no hurry. I've had sex in my life. I'm not twenty and keeping score. Whatever happens happens. And if nothing happens that is ok too. I'll just stagger home and go to bed. Tomorrow morning the parasails will still be in the thin blue morning sky, and there will still be wonderful women on the boardwalk. This night on Soi 8 however is different for some reason. Women are dancing in the street, and women are dancing in front of the bars, and beautiful young happy Thai women are dancing on the tops of the tables. I have never seen this before. I have just come over from Soi 7 and there was nothing like this going on. Soi 7 was dead. Soi 8 is cranking. Makes you almost want to look around to see where the movie cameras are. There is an unreal quality to it. Spontaneous happiness and fun wrapped in the costumery of youth and sex and hope and hormones. No matter, I'll take it.
I spot a guy who is selling women's lingerie. He's got some kind of little wagon festooned with hangers and a mirror. I've never seen this stuff being sold on the street at night and it looks great. Lots of colors. Great looking. I start looking. I spot a beautiful woman who also seems to be ambling without agenda on this hot Thai night and ask her to join me. She's about thirty years old and all grown up. We don't exchange names and she doesn't ask any questions. I had a man's body and a man's voice. She had a woman's body and soft brown eyes. The basics.
There, one step up from the curb on this happy Soi 8 night, she and I look at all of his bras and underpants and other fancy dressy lingerie for ladies. She starts out by stealing glances at me from under hooded eyes but soon relaxes and smiles and participates. She knows instinctively that I am not going to pressure her or disrespect her. I have a good heart. I'm just a man who wants contact with a woman. She probably has stretch marks and a child at home. I'm certainly not a perfect man. None of it matters. This whole man-woman thing is just beyond us. Why dissect a mystery that brings so much happiness? She gave to me and I took from her. I gave to her and she took from me. What's to understand? Just smile.
The lingerie items she likes go in a bag and I pay the vendor. As I give my mystery lady friend who has not said one word the bag she takes the edge of my hand and puts it in her mouth and gently bites down with her teeth. Martian contact. Beyond explanation and beyond improvement. I walk away. Time to go home. She doesn't follow me. She wasn't supposed to.
DANA NOTE:
"The methodical parallel in cosmology is the coincidence problem that came up after resolving the cosmic age problem with dark energy." —
Unzicker and Jones
Thank Christ, something else I will never hear from a bargirl's lips. Another reason to sink to my knees in gratitude and lower my brow to the sacred boardwalk of Pattaya.
Hey, and here is another:
"We review the theory of inflation with single and multiple fields paying particular attention to the dynamics of adiabatic and entropy / isocurvature perturbations." — Inflation Dynamics and Reheating
Sweet Jesus on a cracker, all hail Pattaya and the girls with the 50,000 watt smiles. Brainless amoebas of paradise plunging through us like humanoid neutrinos and leaving smiles in their wake. Randomly combining words could not produce a statement like the above with more improbability or incomprehensibility to a bargirl's brain. And who would suggest a change or an improvement? Paradise.
So anyway . . . no wait, just one more:
"It will be recalled that in strangeness-conserving strong interactions, all the production is of neutral K-meson, which has a definite strangeness, or its antiparticle, which has the opposite strangeness." — J. Bernstein
No mongers and lovers of mongers, I did not make that up. You need multiple college degrees of the PhD. kind and a seed stuck between your teeth to even think of such a thing. However, just as there is now assumed to be anti's to many things of a cosmological and sub-atomic nature (matter and antimatter, etc.), I can take some comfort in the fact that I have participated in the anti of this intellectualism. To wit: her name was Bong and every night before we would start adult activities she would have me kneel beside her naked self on the mattress and face the headboard and pray to Buddha. Two heads of two naked people at the A.A. Hotel in Pattaya bowing up and down. I do not know what her prayer to Buddha was but my prayer every night was:
"Viagra, don't fail me now."
At any rate, the experience was in all ways the anti to the above quote by J. Bernstein. In his twenty-nine word statement he uses the word strange (strangeness) three times. Apparently, in his world the word strange appears (occurs) every ten words. Well, I haven't knelt beside a beautiful naked Thai woman and prayed to a headboard Buddha every ten days but it still counts. Pattaya delivers the anti-strange experience that I need to stay sane. God bless Pattaya.
