Wednesday, November 29, 2023
Re-Alive Again
The Cage Haiku Plus Two
World Wide Destruction
As the world skids out of control with the Endless War penetrating every corner of the globe, a Jewish friend texted that he expected an imminent nuclear exchange, because of The Gaza War.
I had been born with the Caul, the placenta, wrapped around my head. Celts believe it gives you the vision.
Despite the frenzied havoc in Palestine my inner sight doesn't see such maddog destruction. Genocide maybe, but a world-wide holocaust no, but back in the 1970s I had several vivid dreams about nuclear bombs. Once in the East Village sirens sounded and everyone scrambled to the Astor Place Subway. A frenzied terrified scrum. I looked up. Saw the missile. White flash. Vaporized.
Second dream Moscow. Red Square. Sirens. Everyone filing orderly into the Metro. I look up. A missile. White flash.
The last was in the Nebraskan flatland. I was fucking this blonde. A schitzah. Sirens. She leapt up and dressed in a SAC blue uniform. Wished me luck, as she got into a B52 bound for the USSR. Mushroom clouds marched in my direction. A missile. White light.
I realized I had woken before the nuclear blast killed me.
I still see the bombs dropped on Manhattan crossing the Esate River Bridges, however never on my freturn to Brooklyn.
Lucky and I feel lucky now. As would someone who has survived the worst. The best is yet to come
Tuesday, November 28, 2023
Loy Krathong
Back in 2007 November 8 was Loy Krathong.
Pattaya City police geared up for the annual water festival by conducting street sweeps of undesirables in order to clean up the coastal city's image for the traditional festival. Last year they banned fireworks and instituted shore patrols to prevent any krathongs or offerings from entering the sea. Water worship was relegated to the reservoir. I stayed in Jomtien and made love to my mistress.
We had a baby boy from that night's union.
Fenway Pechdee Smith.
Chok dee.
Monday, November 27, 2023
The Missing Of Loy Krathong
The most beautiful holidays in the world are the Hindu Diwali and Thailand's Loy Krathong.
These festivals of light celebrate the full moon night of the twelfth lunar month. I have celebrated Diwali in Lhasa Tibet with the Indian cooks of the Snow Dragon Hotel and Loy Krathong with my wives and children. Sadly this year I will once more miss joining them in offering a krathong or decorated flower basket to float down a river or out to sea.
"I float for you," my youngest son Fenway told me over the phone.
"I wish I was with you." Especially since I could stand with his mother and vow to be with her forever.
"You come soon, papa." Fenway is my superstar. Mam is my love.
My daughter Angie and her son Sunson clasp my heart.
I can't stop thinking about all of them; Noy, Frost, Fook, Angie, Sun Sun, Pen, Fenway, Nu and Mem.
This evening I will go down to the East River and throw flowers and coins under a full moon with Venus crowning the sky. I asked forgiveness of the goddess of water 'Phra Mae Kongka' for fouling her rivers and streams over the year. There were no 'khom loy' or floating lanterns in the night sky. Thailand is on the other side of the world. We share the same moon and I read the Loy Krathong's lyrics in the dark.
November full moon shines, Loi Krathong, Loi Krathong, and the water's high in the river and local klong, Loi Loi Krathong, Loi Loi Krathong, Loi Krathong is here and everybody's full of cheer, We're together at the klong, We're together at the klong, Each one with this krathong,] As we push away we pray, We can see a better day. A better day will come with the union of my family and me. Chok dii.
Kicking Off The New Year
After New Year's Day of 2008 my 'wife' packed the car with Angie, Champoo, and her fat sister for the return drive to Chai-nat. Her week stay for Xmas had been torture. My every word was ignored with visible disdain. She told my daughter that I was a worthless drunk. My young daughter and I celebrated her birthday together. Angie refused to choose sides and cried getting in the car.
I hugged my daughter and said, "I'll see you soon."
Chai-nat was a five-hour bus ride from Pattaya. My online site for selling fake F1 merchandise required daily attention, but I had come to Thailand to be with Angie and not flog second-grade copies to brainless racing fanatics in the Occident.
"You take care?" Angie's mom spoke little to no English. The former factory worker considered farangs 'so-kapok' and only one step above Arabs. Thais have a very high opinion of themselves and their country. Their chauvinism was not misplaced, for the Thailand was the France of the Far East.
"I'll be fine." I kissed my daughter good-bye. Her mother and I had not been intimate since before her birth. Our sole connection was our daughter and she had said on more than one occasion that Angie wasn't mine. Murder constantly paced the corridors of my mind and her slightest touch could lead to a stranglehold. Accordingly we maintained a defensive distance whenever we were close.
The Toyota backed out of the driveway. Angie waved from the backseat. She had my mother's smile, crooked teeth and all. I swallowed a lump and went inside my rented house to open a can of beer. It was twenty-three minutes short of noon.
I thought about calling Angie's mom to come back, but my words had lost their magic.
They had a full tank of gas and 2500 baht. More than enough to last two days, but if I've learned one thing in Thailand, "It's never enough."
The beer tasted of irony on an empty stomach. I was once more being deserted to my own devices in Pattaya. Nu's ex-boyfriend had disappeared from Pattaya weeks ago. Pi-et was no magician and the main prop for his vanishing act had been a bus north. Chai-nat lay in the same direction.
I turned the TV onto Fox News. Bill O'Reilly was praising GW Bush for saving America after 9/11. I finished the beer and threw the empty at the TV. The cheap aluminum didn't even scratch the screen.
As I got up for another beer, my mobile phone vibrated on the coffee table. The volume of the ringing was turned down to avoid unwanted phone calls during Nu's stay. My wife suspected the worst and a woman was never wrong about a man. I answered the phone
It was Mint. 22 years old, thin as a runway model, and convinced that I could never love her.
"Is she gone?"
"Back to Chai-nat."
"And her 'feend'."
The Thai word for lover sounded very much like friend.
"Yes."
"We have to talk," she said in English. She didn't watch farang movies, so that statement must be universal in every language. The topic had few options.
"About what?" Mint and I had been lovers for over a year, but we had never spent a night in bed together. We were pure afternoon or early evening.
"I tell you when I see you." She shared an apartment on Jomtien Beach with a gay friend. Glai was very jealous of our relationship. The hustler liked it better when I had been a customer. Mint felt the opposite.
"Can't you tell me now?"
I pondered the subject of our conversation.
If Mint wanted to leave me. No problem. She was young. I was ancient. Her old 'friends' called at all times of the day. She never picked up the phone, while we making love.
"No. Not now. I see you. I tell you."
If you can't say it over the phone, then it wasn't about money, although Mint wasn't greedy, despite having two kids. They cost money. I gave what I gave. It also was never enough. I could see #2 leading right to #1.
Mint probably had another boyfriend to bankroll her life. She was an ace at pretending desire. Her faithful clientele from her years on Soi 6 and the Mona Lisa Massage in Bangkok were legion. She juggled her time with us like a crap shooter hoping for the best roll, however she had been slinging snake-eyes for the past few months.
We were more than lovers.
I drove my scooter down the back roads to Jomtien. The vanishing wetlands behind Jomtien Beach put a good distance between my house and Mint's apartment, diminishing the possibility of my wife and Mint running into each other. I hated confrontations.
Pattaya was attracting thousands of long-timers. Coconut plantations were giving way to holiday villas.
By the time I reached Thraprassit Road, the sun had burnt through the morning haze. The cold front had sputniked down from Siberia. Thai beach-goers were reveling in the sea. Russians waddled out of 7/11 with ice creams. It was a too nice a day to hear goodbye twice.
I turned off the Beach Road and rolled up to her semi-abandoned apartment building hearing the start of the Doors' 'THE END' like this scene was the beginning of APOCALYPSE II. Mint sat on a stool. She was wearing a loose dress. A bottle of beer was on the table.
The two glasses had ice in them.
"You want drink?" She averted looking in my eyes.
"Yes." Beer protected me from everything.
She poured beer into the two glasses. Neither of us took a sip. Mint had her hands folded on her lap. I sat down and asked, "What is it?"
"I'm pregnant." She lifted do-it-yourself pregnancy test. Two red lines indicated mint was carrying another life. I had thought her recent extra weight coming from beer.
"Pregnant?" I was old enough to be Mint's father, who's actually two years younger than me.
"Yes. Two months. It is yours."
"Mine." Two months ago had been Loy Krathong. I distinctly recalled a long afternoon in bed. The math worked out to 1+1=3.
"I not go with other man."
"I know." I wasn't brought up to accuse a woman of entrapment. It wasn't like I was the pick of the crop. "A baby."
"Chai." Her morning sickness and expanding belly should have been signs of impending fatherhood. I was too absorbed in my problems to notice the obvious.
"A baby."
Walking was easy in Thailand. Marriages dissolved like sugar in the rain. Men were free to come and go as the wind. Women were glad to see them go too. Mint was well aware of her position. The father of her two children had left her penniless at 18. Her beauty had saved them from starvation. I lifted her head with two fingers. Tears dotted the corners. She had been here before, but not with me.
"Two months."
"Chai." She was expecting a repeat of bad luck. Men ran from a woman in her situation. Thai and farang. Pattaya was the Last Babylon. It was every man for himself.
"What you want to do?"
"I want have baby." Mint wanted to make me happier. She was too crazy to do that all the time, but she had heard the sadness in my voice, as I told her about Angie. Her mother had signed the name of the father to Pi-et. The Thai authorities would never reverse that signature.
Mint wanted to have the baby. She wanted it to be mine.
"She be cute."
"That's the truth." Looks were the least of our problems.
"How do you know it's a girl?" She certainly had not done an ultra-sound.
"Old lady see my neck and say if blood move up and down sure to be girl." Mint indicated a pulsing vein on her neck. "Old lady say maybe I have two."
"Twins?" 30 seconds was not enough time to digest the first news let alone the second.
"Not sure. What you want do?"
Abortion was out of the question. It was illegal in Thailand and while I accepted the freedom of choice for a woman, I was old-fashioned enough to regard every life as sacred.
"If it's a boy, can I chose the name?" I was a 55 year-old American living in Thailand. Going back to the States was not in the books.
"Yes. What about your wife?"
"We were never married." Her numerous betrayals had cancelled that wedding.
"I not want be mia noi." Her smile was half-hearted. The second wife or mia noi usually ends up standing in the rain outside the house of her child's father. Thai TV soaps loved that scene.
"You won't be a mia noi." I couldn't guarantee how her countrymen would view her, but Angie and her mother were living up-country. They weren't coming back. My cash flow was threatened by the global slow-down. The big house in Pattaya was an unnecessary expense. Two families were an obligation for a real man. Jomtien had the beach. Mint and I could live small.
"You and me will be one."
"I not want much." Not much sounded good today. Much would be spoken later, because kids cost money.
"Only me." I felt good saying it. Believing it was not as easy, but Mint held my hand and said, "Only you, me, and babies."
And I wouldn't have it any other way.
You never do when there's only one choice.
For better.
Never worst.
I wasn't going anywhere, if I could help it.
Seven months later we had a child.
My son Fenway.
He's no girl.
The Missing Of Loy Krathong
NEVER WANT TO GIVE YOU UP by Peter Nolan Smith
THE GODFATHER 3 was a horrible movie; Andy Garcia, Sofia Coppola, and Al Pacino's wretched line, "No sooner than I think I'm out, then they pulling me back in.
Unfortunately those words held personal resonance in early November of 2007 for like Michael Corleone's failure to leave the Mafia, I was unable to end my affair with Mint, a 22 year-old masseuse from Soi 6. Our affair lasted through several tempestuous seasons. We were as good for each other as we were bad.
Ours should have been a one-afternoon stand.
I had a 'wife' who didn't love me, but I couldn't leave Nu because of our daughter, Angie.
Mint had two children. She worked Soi 6 for them. The sex meant nothing, except with me, but I meant nothing, because she could only be my mia noi. We fought more than a married couple and she shouted that I was a fool to think my 'wife' was ever coming back from up-country.
"She have boyfriend. You give money. Why she need you?"
I hated hearing the truth and plotted a coup de grace to our ill-fated romance. She said that a rich Californian client was coming down from Bangkok for the Loy Krathong holiday. Her voice rang with conviction on the phone, as she said, "I have to take care of my babies. Not call me. I have new life. You have old life. I want nothing from you." She hung up the phone without hearing my saying, "Good luck."
Mint's future mattered to me and I put some money in her bank account. It was enough for a good time tonight.
That night I called my 'wife'. No one answered the phone. It came as no surprise. Bedtime came early in the rice villages north of Bangkok.
That night I drank with Fabo, the seismic oil explorer from Charleroi, at the Buffalo Bar. He downed Heinekens as fast as I drank vodka-tonics. The girls at the bar were eager to go upstairs for a short-time session.
Tomorrow was Loy Krathong, the annual festival venerating Siddhartha Guatama by floating a candle on a banana leaf raft to symbolically the sins of past 12 months. A more glamorous aspect of the Buddhist celebration required women and girls to attire themselves as an ancient king's favorite consort. These traditional outfits cost 1000s of baht to rent for the evening. Mint had a stunning outfit planned for the following evening. The rich American wanted only the best.
"Hey, Yankee Dog. You are a free man again. You can go with anyone." Fabo knew my taste ran to skinny and the young Belgian invited several young beauties to join us for drinks.
"Pick one. The bar fine is on me." Fabo earned big money on the ship. There were no bars on the high seas. He blew his wad in Pattaya.
"Thanks the offer." My inner eyes were blind to temptation. I called Mint every half-hour she had blocked my phone. I resigned my destiny to holding hands vodka more vodka-tonic. The bar girls hated my dedication to drink. Fabo and I bought their love with shots of tequila.
I woke the next morning to Fabo in bed with the lovely Gai. Both of them were more dead than alive. I wished I was more the former than the latter. I cooked the couple breakfast in bed. Gai was a good eater. Fabo wanted more beer. Within six days he would be off the frozen waters of Norway with a sullen crew of Poles.
"Yankee, we drink tonight."
"Yes, we drink tonight." My life was a tabla rasa or clean slate.
My 'wife' had deserted me six months ago. Our daughter was the one reason I left New York. Mint was at a high-class hotel with the LA millionaire. She was an expert at happierness. I was cursed to live a life alone and rode my motor scooter to the fishing village of Ban Samae San.
A hilltop temple dedicated to a mythical water goddess overlooked the unpopulated archipelago stretching south into the Gulf of Siam. I struck the bells outside the wat with a wooden mallet and beseeched Phra Mae Khongkha, the adopted Hindu water goddess, to forgive my mistreatment of her holy element. Part of he ritual requires striking the bells alongside the lofty wat. After the metallic peals cleared the air and I drove the motorcycle down to the Navy pier.
Several skin-divers were working on the quay's support pillars. They glanced at me without a second thought. They dealt with farangs from the US Navy during the yearly Cobra Gold war games. The sea was unsullied by tourism. Civilian use of the islands was banned by the military.
I hadn't been in the ocean since my motorcycle accident in September.
That night I had been coming home from Mint's place in Jomtien. We had fought over my 'wife'. Traffic over the hill was light, but my mind wasn't on the road and I didn't see the motorcyclist veer into my lane to avoid a pothole. He clipped my handle bar at full speed.
My front wobbled out of control and I was tossed from my bike lacking any grace.
I hit the asphalt hard, but got to my feet seemingly without any serious injury. Blood was flowing heavily down my arm. The deep wound zagging across my forearm looked like the aftermath of a shark attack. I could see bone. The emergency ward at Banglamung Hospital did a great job of stitching together the slab of flesh and muscles. Mint had disinfected the scar everyday. My 'wife' merely phoned to say that I should drive better. I could do nothing good in her eyes.
I had told my daughter that my people came from the sea. We were khon talay. The ocean made us strong. She loved the beach. Neither her mother nor Mint favored the sea, but I didn't have to worry about them. I was free and stripped down to my swimming shorts at the end of the pier. The tide was out and the surface was a good twelve-foot drop from where I stood. Colorful fish darted between the shell-encrusted support beams. I dove head first to prove my New Englander's love for the sea.
I re-surfaced with a renewed sense of exhilaration. The Navy skin-divers helped up the ladder. None of them had ever seen anyone dive from the pier. I explained in rudimentary Thai that my girlfriend had left me for a rich man and I wanted to wash my body clean of her.
"Mai dai," the CPO explained wisely, for he felt the only way to end it with your mia noi was to have her find you with another woman. "Lucky she not cut off penis."
"And feed to duck." Thai newspapers chronically reran gory tales of wives severing a philandering husband's penis. They gave it to ducks, because pigs wouldn't eat penis.
The Navy Seals invited me aboard their Zodiac and we rode at high speed over to the nearest island. The water was as clear as 150-proof vodka and the sand was as powdery as flour. The divers were happy to meet a faring who could speak Thai, if only badly and I ended the day with them with a promise to return the following weekend for an excursion to a more distant island.
The ride back to Pattaya almost felt entering a new city, until I stopped for gas. My mobile was ringing. It was Mint. I didn't have the strength to turn off the phone and answered it with exasperation, "Yeah, what?"
"I not go with farang from California."
"Why not?" I was ready for a song and dance.
"Buah." Like most bargirls she can't bear to spend more than 30 minutes with a boring westerner. "He not same you."
"How so?" I was all ears, since it was obvious that Mint had to have seen the rich guy in order to be bored by him.
"You same me. You crazy. You hurt same me. Rich man only same farang. Want sex."
"And so do I." Most men my age were addicted to Viagra to overcome penile dysfunction. Sexual arousal was another of our strong suit. "What about Loy Krathong?"
"I have beautiful dress. I look like goddess. You want come see me."
And like that Barry White started singing NEVER WANNA GIVE YOU UP in my ears.
20 minutes later I was in Mint's arms, telling her words of love in several languages and meaning most of them. She was a goddess for Loy Krathong and I worshipped more than her feet, but both of us knew that we were postponing the inevitable no matter what Barry White growled on that hit record, because something as good as Mint and I has to be bad in the end and I could deal with bad. Bad is always better than worst.
November 27, 1978 - East Village - Journal Entry
Two weeks ago Bill Yusk fronted me an ounce of hashish. I've yet to sell any of it. I can't even be a drug dealer adn wrose I've smoke a quarter ounce. Ann brought home Sherry. I have slowly acquire a taste for the British liquor, although sherry tastes too much like altar wine for me to like it. Too many memories.
As an altar boy the priests required our wearing cassocks and suplices, so we looked like devotees to Jesus headed for the black cloth. Latin was the language on the altar, until Vatican II changed the Mass' litanty to the worshippers' language. The magic of mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa lost its magic in English. I still remember 'forgivev me, forgi e me,reelly forgive me' as one of the Latin phrases I didn't have to mumble.
I stayed an altar boy into my teens, because my services were required at funerals during the week, whihc meant my brtoerh and I went to St. Elizabeth's at 8 instead of St. Mary of the Foothills. We could go through the motions. The mourners weepy before the close coffin. They were never open in the church.. That was only for the funeral homes. The priest rambled through the liturgy with a short testesmonial for the departed. Mostly old people. The exit procession is very solemn. Priest leading the way with us carrying urns of burning incense. Sometimes rich families had the parish organist play a dirge for their loved one. We stood aside for the casket and the priest sprinkled a blessing of holy water of the casket. We never saw anyone arise from the dead. THe dead stayed dead. Even as a proto-atheists I respected the solemnity of the service.
I was a virgin then.
Somehow I abandoned holiness for libertinism.
Maybe when I first touched Ann McCellan's tits. She was one of a set of identical triplets. Her sisters Beth and Cathy were also fondled freely in their basement. Having impure thoughts was an easy sin to confess, until the thoughts became deeds and lust a goal for the ages.
CBGBs Pinball 1978 VDO
Throughout the late 1970s I stood at the front of CBGBs for the Contortions, Damned, and the Voidoids. Afterwards I drank beer and play pinball at the back of the club. I was never friends with the big names. The bartenders were my friends, the doorman with the yellow construction helmet let me in for me, college co-eds thought I looked like David Johansson from the New York Dolls and by the time they discovered I was simply a poet, it was too late to try for someone else. I was lucky and CBGBs became my home away from home.
Sunday, November 26, 2023
Loy Krathong 2001
Loy Krathong 2001 I spent the festival of light with the worst girlfriend of Pattaya.
Three months earlier Mam and I met at a bar. I only had another week in Thailand. My next stop was Kathmandu.
In bed Maam said sadly, "Why you go mountains, when you can climb me?"
There were a thousands of reasons, but I answered, "I not go to Himalayas. I stay with you. It was a big mistake, but wew had a few good months.
For Loi Krathong she dressed in Thai finery.
Maam resembled a handmaiden to the goddess of water.
Even on a street where women serviced 'farangs' like me.
We drank at her go-go bar
Maam danced on the steel pole.
A Sạkh khiw bạs̄ or succubus on the prowl for sinners.
Mark knew her too.
I joked that she was danger.
It was more of a warning than a joke, but she was good to her kids and in the morning she was a goddess to a man with a hangover.
I should have know better, because we both had more than a little fiend in us than friend.
Memory 2018
November 26, 1978 East Village - Journal Entry
I'm completely broke once more after two week's without work. I suppose this depression about money will be my guiding light for the futre, but I can't worry about the trivialities about which I can't do anything. Somehow I have to find a job.
THE HUDSON DOCKS NOVEMBER 1978
November night>
Derelict docks stretch along the Hudson
Empty berths for miles
Once home to
Clipper ships, ferries, upriver ships
The Halve Moon
Robert Fulton's Clermont
The Cutty Stark
All
Gone into a forgotten history
No more ocean liners going to Europe.
Yet the Hudson flows back and forth
Twice a day
The piers home to rats, tramps and sex adventurers
I walk with Libby
A blonde model
All in black panther leather
Long legs, haughty hips, a breastless chest, an aquiline nose.
In the deep dark
She could be a he.
We enter a collapsing wharf.
Under the protection of darkness
Men huddle in silent orgies.
We deeper into the ruins
We stop in a room
Two shadows
A foot apart
Now.
My leather coat on the floor
Libby's clothes on a battered crate.
She
Near-naked
Except for expensive lingerie.
My Levis drop down my legs.
The November wind baffles through the open bays
On the Hudson
The thump of powerful engines
Something big on the river
Very big
An ocean liner
Its diesel engines
Powering the ship
On the tide
Sea bound
Into the Atlantic
Libby pulls me down
Between her thighs
Her legs hooked around my knees
Her
Naked
Yearning
A cool hand guiding me
A thrust
A gasp
Two animals humping
Men watch gather to watch.
A warning glance
Retreat into the shadows
I groan the potential of life
Into Libby
The ships long gone
The ocean liner too.
Into the night.
Now
Done
Libby back in black leather
A dim silouhette
We leave.
Behind
The men in the shadows
By the Hudson
In the November night
PAINTING BY REGINALD MARSH
Saturday, November 25, 2023
David Henderson's Vortex 2021
David Henderson's Vortex.
THe mixture of mathematics and magic welded together by a lost mind.
Friday, November 24, 2023
Dives of Pattaya - Entry Date - Aug 3, 2007
Aug 3, 2007
Wikpedia defines a 'dive' as a rundown drinking establishment offering the cheap drinks of a high alcohol content to a questionable clientele frequenting the bar for the sole purpose of drinking and not petty drinking either.
New York City had been loaded with such dubious haunts on the Bowery ot the Boulevard of Broken Dreams. 50 cents a beer and $1 a shot and no red-faced stockbrokers lusting after big-haired secretariesb on a Friday night. Only busted-down drunks with a couple of front teeth like Pattaya during low season.
Wendy Mitchell who wrote NYC's BEST DIVE BARS considered a good jukebox, a seat at the bar, an affable bartender, and not-too-bright lighting as essentials for accreditation as a dive. Gotham Books' staff prided itself on having drank in most of them. My favorite was the beach bar in the Rockaways. Drunken Indians and transients at a end of a subway line. Everyone knew this was nowhere.
Pattaya is reputed to have 1400 bars
No one can claim to have drank at all of them, although some Englishmen have sacrificed their livers in the attempt.
For Queen and Country.
None really qualify as a dive, but a few come close.
I've never seen a juke box in my 20 years in Thailand. Not a pin ball machine either, although many have condom dispensers in the bathroom. The music tends to be HOTEL CALIFORNIA or pop music for the girls. Lights too bright with bar stool stressed by overweight drinkers and bartenders with moods rivaling the Wicked Witch of the West. Drinks might be cheap but the measures are more a whisper for hard-drinkers.
There are few exceptions.
The Welkom Inn on Soi 3 with its dim lighting comes close. You can usually get a seat and the old ladies behind the bar are good-tempered despite having to listen to the drivel of drunken farangs day after day after day.
Soi 6 bars are sleazy and dark, however no one goes to a short-time bar to drink. 90 baht for a thimble of vodka and tonic. The Bus Stop isn't bad because the music is almost punk. Viking Bar is awful, but Mint used to work there. maybe she will again once her boyfriend's money runs out.
The only actual dive is Maggie May's on Soi Chaiyapoon.
It only features drinking.
No girls.
Stale peanuts.
Sports on the TV.
The dregs of society on the bar stools.
"Drinks for me and my drink," Mickey Rourke called out in the movie BAR FLY about the poet Charles Bukowski's drinking life. People are shouting out the same in Maggie May's. The music sometimes sucks, but the beer is cold and during happy hours as cheap as it gets in Pattaya.
The other day I saw Dave from the old Dang Bar. We had fought on Soi 6 last winter. He had called me a spineless cunt too many times. Something about not liking that I didn't drink in his bar. 50 year-old men fighting on Soi 6. My mother should be crying in heaven over that sad spectacle.
At least I won, Ma.
I hadn't seen Dave since the fight and said, "Hello."
The bald Aussie nodded and drank his beer.
Maggie May's.
You wear it well.
#1 Dive of Pattaya
Still open in 2023
Maggie Mays, 383, 21 Soi Chalermphrakiat 25, Pattaya City, Bang Lamung District, Chon Buri 20150, Thailand
Thursday, November 23, 2023
Black Friday Beer
Written 11/30/2013
On Black Friday millions of Americans hit the shopping malls to purchase marked-down electronics and toys. This frenzied spending spree kicks off the Christmas shopping season. This year's Black Friday was an all ugly affair and getting uglier by the year.
The term 'black Friday originated from Philadelphia retailers' description of the four-week holiday season as one that turned the red on their books into black.
The BBC estimated that nearly half America participated in the madness.
Yesterday I restrained from assaulting the XXXL Mall on Fulton Street and purchased two cans of beer from Ralph's Meats on Lafayette Street in Fort Greene. He wasn't opened, but Ralph had some beer for me. We are old school.
They went down so good that I'm thinking of drinking some more today.
Happy Boozy Saturday.
ps the bronze Ballantine beer cans are from Jasper Johns.
Black Friday Beer
Today on Black Friday millions of Americans hit the shopping malls to purchase marked-down electronics and toys. This frenzied spending spree kicked off the Christmas shopping season. This year's Black Friday was an all ugly affair and the event has getting uglier by the year.
The term 'black Friday originated from Philadelphia retailers' description of the four-week holiday season as one that turned the red on their books into black.
The BBC estimated that nearly half America participated in the madness.
Yesterday I restrained from assaulting the XXXL Mall on Fulton Street and purchased two cans of beer from Ralph's Meats on Lafayette Street in Fort Greene. He wasn't opened, but Ralph had some beer for me. We are old school.
They went down so good that I'm thinking of drinking some more today.
Happy Boozy Saturday.
ps the bronze Ballantine beer cans are from Jasper Johns.
No Black Friday For Ken
WRITTEN 11/27/20
Every Black Friday American consumerism outgrossed the previous year's gluttonous excesses, as shoppers descended on the XXXL malls to buy corporate crap at discounted prices. The hoi polloi in the millions fight over wide screen TVs, iPhones, and Barbie dolls. Having never participated in the capitalist frenzy, I left the Fort Greene Observatory on Friday and headed down to the nearest 99 Cent store on Myrtle Avenue only to discover that the management had opted out of the post-Thanksgiving Day tradition.
"Nothing is on sale." The clerk waved me away from the counter.
"Nothing?"
"Nothing."
I accepted my defeat and exited from the store with a 99 Cent roll of toilet paper.
No one on Myrtle carried a shopping bag, except for a frazzled mother. Her daughter had an iPhone. She was happy, but I had to ask myself, "Why doesn't anyone fight over Ken dolls?
The answer was that it's a Barbie World.
She rocks.
Naked or not.
Fugly Americans
Written 11/27/2020
When I was young, I shopped at different stores for different gifts.
The prices were good and the quality guaranteed the products might last six months or more.
Throughout the 21st Century Sam Walmart and his family has eliminated the corner stores, the main streets of America, and the curio stores by a scorched-earth cutthroat policy against middle-class businesses. Their success has been lauded by Democrats and the GOP free marketeers and this Black Friday Walmart proudly oredicted record sales for the day after Thanksgiving.
According to Al-Jazeera a spokesman for the chain predicted that in a span of four hours Thursday evening, Walmart stores across the nation processed 10 million register transactions. On Thanksgiving, Walmart.com received 400 million page views, and on Friday, by noon, customers had purchased 2.8 million towels, 2 million televisions and 1.4 million computer tablets.
"We had record-breaking Black Friday results in our stores."
Videos showed the hordes of shoppers hurtling through the doors to fight over TVs, laptops, tablets, dolls, and anything on sale.
"Buy, buy, buy."
Most of it in my mind was crap and all of it was produced outside of the USA.
Protests against Walmart's starvation wages were met by police.
Courts attempted to block demonstrators with injunctions.
Walmart pays $8/hour. That come to about $320/week before taxes. No one can live on that wage and an organizer told Al Jazeera, "We are not slaves. We are people just as well. At the end of the day, we want the things that the people who run Walmart have ... We shouldn't have to pick and choose what bills we are going to pay."
In her four months at Walmart, McKinley says, she has made little over $2,400.
Truthfully Americans should boycott Black Friday, Walmart, and shopping malls, however their minds have been warped by millions of TV ads and I have to say that revolution in America will not depend on those consumers thronging to Walmart.
Before they were the lumpen proletariat.
Now they are simply victims of the global free market.
They produce nothing, they buy crap, and they believe the lies on TV.
These victims of zombie economics number about 200 million Americans with another 100 million of their income-challenged countrymen yearning to join their ranks.
The filthy rich are only .0001% of the population.
They wouldn't be caught dead at Walmart or anywhere where their class wasn't dominant.
That leaves 30 million Americans possibly struggling for good or bad or the in-between.
People get ready.
Our time will come.
Death to Flat-Screen TVs.
Long live the GTO.
And Kim Novak.
Free the Turkey
Benjamin Franklin proposed the turkey for the national bird. The turkey of his era was nothing like the domesticated bird slaughtered for Thanksgiving. The wild turkey was a cunning wood creature living in large communes of fellow avians. Huge flocks of brightly plumed turkeys would cloud the skies. Benjamin Franklin was vehemently against the choice of the eagle as the national bird.
"I wish that the bald eagle had not been chosen as the representative of our country, he is a bird of bad moral character, he does not get his living honestly, you may have seen him perched on some dead tree, where, too lazy to fish for himself, he watches the labor of the fishing-hawk, and when that diligent bird has at length taken a fish, and is bearing it to its nest for the support of his mate and young ones, the bald eagle pursues him and takes it from him.... Besides he is a rank coward; the little kingbird, not bigger than a sparrow attacks him boldly and drives him out of the district. He is therefore by no means a proper emblem for the brave and honest. . . of America.. . . For a truth, the turkey is in comparison a much more respectable bird, and withal a true original native of America . . . a bird of courage, and would not hesitate to attack a grenadier of the British guards, who should presume to invade his farmyard with a red coat on."
Nice talk for the national bird.
Wonder what Eagle would taste like for Thanksgiving.
Vulture???
Wintah Maine 1959
Walking on a back road
From school
No sign of the sun
Leaden clouds overhead
Fields frozen by deep snow.
A northerly wind from Montreal
A long slog home.
Grey slush underfoot
The wet seeping
Through boots
Cold wet feets.
Another mile to Grandmother’s house.
Where waits
A warm pot belly stove
Dreaming
Pull off boots
Peel off soxes
Stick frozen toes
Under the heat
Aaah
A cup of tea With milk and sugar
Aaah
No more the cold
Grandmother’s house
Maine winter
Only another half-mile
To go
Till
Grandmother’s house
Spring
Another four months away.
Till then
Counting the days.
To April
Flowers
And no snow.
Aaaah
I spent my early childhood in Maine, sledding the winters on Blackstrap Hill. There were really winters then, still are in Fort Kent. Painting by Winslow Homer A New EnglanderFrom school No sign of the sun Leaden clouds overhead Fields frozen by deep snow. A northerly wind from Montreal A long slog home.
Grey slush underfoot Cold wet seeping Through soles Another mile to Grandmother's house.
Where waits The warmth of a pot belly stove Pull off boots Peel off soxes Stick frozen toes Under the heat
Aaah
A cup of tea With milk and sugar
Aaah
No more the cold Grandmother's house Maine winter Only another half-mile To go Till Grandmother's house And Winter Another four months away Till Not winter. Till then Counting the days. To April Flowers And no snow.
I spent my early childhood in Maine, sledding the winters on Blackstrap Hill. There were really winters then, still are in Fort Kent.
Painting by Winslow Homer
A New Englander.
There are two season in Maine. The season of good sledding and the season of bad sledding. - Doctor Frank A Smith, who rode a sled on his visits around Gorham, Maine, when wintah was truly wintah.
Happy Thanks Wampanoags
My family’s ancestors crossed the Atlantic on the Mayflower. The Howland clan spent that first autumn in Plymouth. Their food supplies were dangerously low and only the intervention by the native tribes spared the settlers from starvation. Americans have celebrated the largess of the Indians with an annual feast of turkey and all the fixings.
Little if any mention is made of the Wampanoag Indians, who were nearly wiped out by the Puritans, then again extermination has no place at the holiday dinner table.
Prayers of thanks are saved for family friends and God.
Turkey is the main meal.
I’ve had the bird most every Thanksgiving in my life.
Mothers around the USA spent hours preparing the feast.
My family was no different from the rest of America. The early part of the day was filled by the chore of peeling apples, potatoes, turnips, carrots for our eight family members and another 5-10 guests. My older brother called it ‘KP Day’. My mother would cool the bird in the garage. Why was never explained to us. She would just take the big bird out of the oven and say, “Put it in the garage to cool.”
One Thanksgiving I obeyed her command. The garage door was open. The air was cold. I had spent the morning at the football game between my hometown and their arch-rivals. My next-door neighbor came over to the driveway with a football. We went into the backyard to emulate the day’s heroes. After bobbling a long pass Chuckie pointed to the front lawn.
"What's with DJ?"
DJ was a neighborhood dog. I was in love with his owner, Kyla. The German Shepard had his entire head was stuck in a turkey. I had not shut the door to the garage. I ran closer and then heard my mother scream.
“The turkey.”
I picked up a stick from the ground and charged to save our holiday meal. The big black dog fled from our yard with a slobbering snarl, leaving behind a mauled meal. My mother cried, “Where are we going to find a turkey now?”
My father looked at me. This was my fault. I didn’t even bother to explain my side of the story.
When you’re wrong as a child, proving you’re right is a waste of breath.
My older brother and younger siblings thanked me for ruining Thanksgiving, although it didn’t turn out so bad, since DJ’s owners paid for our meal at a nearby hotel. Kyla kissed me on the cheek. The food was good and my mother didn’t have to wash any dishes.
We didn’t have a home-cooked Thanksgiving meal for the next five years.
We still thanked family, friends, and God, but my older brother and I also thanked DJ. Even bad deeds can turn out good as long as no one brings up the extermination of the New England tribes on the Fourth Thursday of November.
169 Turkey
in 2019 I celebrated Thanksgiving at my home away from home.
Everything was delicious.
The 169 Bar.
Thanks to the gracious Charles Hanson and my many friends.
Peace and love and a big gin-tonic too.
No Thanks Day
Half my family arrived in the Americas on the Mayflower. The Hamlin clan owed its survival that first autumn to the Wamanpoags or People of the Dawn. The Saints and Strangers of the Old World showed their gratitude by forcing the disease-weakened natives from their ancestral home, much as the Moses' ancestors had evicted the Philistines from the Land of Milk and Honey. The Pilgrims thought that they owned the land, while the Indians believed the land belonged to the people born on it.
Native animism versus the Old Testament.
The Bible offered many lessons for those of the past and present and probably the future.
The Wampanoag Tribe luckily survived the mass extermination of the coastal Indians and every Thanksgiving gather on Nantucket to mourn the failed alliance between the Old and New Worlds.
No Thanksgiving.
At least the wild have come back to their native land.
Give the Wampanoag Tribe a few slot machines and who knows where they'll celebrate No Thanksgiving on the 400th anniversary of the Pilgrims' landing.
Me, I wish I was in Thailand eating crab curry with my children.
Mea Culpa Wampanoags.
Wednesday, November 22, 2023
COLD TURKEY john lennon
Today's Thanks
Today America commemorates Pilgrims’ gratitude to the local Indians lessons in food-gathering, especially those tribesmen of Squanto. who helped the religious refugees survive that first year in Plymouth. In response to this unexpected aid the settlers held a 3-day feast for their neighbors. The holiday was made official in 1789 by George Washington, although Squanto’s tribe had nearly vanished from Massachusetts and Indians don’t celebrate Thanksgiving.
Neither do I.
Even though I am a Mayflower descendant.
There was a Thanksgiving parade in New York this morning. I saw none of it. High school footballs between bitter rivals are played in the afternoon. I haven't seen the results between my high school and their North Shore rival. I've yet to leave my house, but I do have things to be thankful for this year.
I survived a liver transplant.
I am alive.
I make some money.
My children are healthy.
Mam loves me sometimes.
So does Aphinya.
Every 4th Thursday of November Americans travel by train, plane, and car to feast with friends and family on turkey and all the fixings. Once their bellies expand to a girth of near-explosion, the men watch a meaningless football game in a stupor mimicking a boa who has swallowed a goat, while women repair to the kitchen.
Being male I have no idea what they do other than clean dishes and pots. Younger children are happy to gorge themselves on pies, while their older siblings sullenly vow to not end up like their parents.
Like all holiday the situation is prime for a good argument.
Eight years ago my father cautioned my plump 20 year-old niece that she wouldn’t lose weight if she ate any more pie. Sensitive about her size she broke into tears. My older brother demanded an apology. My father adamantly said he was only telling the truth.
My brother ordered him to leave the house.
My father grabbed a turkey leg and exited from the house, plowing his car across the lawn rather than wait for anyone to move their vehicles out of the driveway.
I would have really like to have seen his tires plowing furrows in the grass, except I was in New York. No turkey that year either.
I celebrated the holiday alone.
Google Goggle Hey Goggle Hey to paraphrase the Ramones.
Max’s Kansas City had turkey dinner for the punk orphans during the late-70s.
Free too.
Beer half-price.
Today I'm dining with Professor Ollamn, the famed Marxist, and his son Raoul.
Praise be the Turkey.
And those sexy Pilgrims.
Bad Behavior Thanksgiving
After Bad Bob's description of the insane weekend with my former husband and in laws, I can only refer to the quote in your last email. It's something my mother would have loved, even though she always betrayed her own advice. She once said to me, after the first time she met the whole lot of them at Thanksgiving,
"How can people that poor be that fucked up?" She was shit faced at the time and certainly not a snob given her predilection for stable hands, plumbers and drug dealers but it was absolutely dead on accurate because that family, every last one of them, is completely whacked and not in a ha ha, amusing way.
We invite people like that to tea, but we don't marry them.
Lady Chetwode on her future son-in-law, John Betjeman.
Slough
Come friendly bombs and fall on Slough!
It isn't fit for humans now,
There isn't grass to graze a cow.
Swarm over, Death!
Come, bombs and blow to smithereens
Those air -conditioned, bright canteens,
Tinned fruit, tinned meat, tinned milk, tinned beans,
Tinned minds, tinned breath.
Mess up the mess they call a town-
A house for ninety-seven down
And once a week a half a crown
For twenty years.
And get that man with double chin
Who'll always cheat and always win,
Who washes his repulsive skin
In women's tears:
And smash his desk of polished oak
And smash his hands so used to stroke
And stop his boring dirty joke
And make him yell.
But spare the bald young clerks who add The profits of the stinking cad; It's not their fault that they are mad, They've tasted Hell.
It's not their fault they do not know
The birdsong from the radio,
It's not their fault they often go
To Maidenhead
And talk of sport and makes of cars
In various bogus-Tudor bars
And daren't look up and see the stars
But belch instead.
In labour-saving homes, with care
Their wives frizz out peroxide hair
And dry it in synthetic air
And paint their nails.
Come, friendly bombs and fall on Slough
To get it ready for the plough.
The cabbages are coming now;
The earth exhales.
Lady Penelope Chetwode, the poet's wife and grand Indian explorer of Himal Pradesh
New Haven Turkey Day
Seven years ago I traveled north to have turkey with my younger sister's in-laws.
They were good people.
Back in the 1940s New Haven was a prime destination for commuters. however in the 50s the Federal Courts had ordered the New Haven railroad to divest itself of the trolleys running from the various stations along the Connecticut shore and the rail line plummeted into insolvency, as the car replaced rail as the primary form of transportation in the suburbs.
While the city's population declined in those years, its inhabitants still number 130,000 making New Haven the Nutmeg State's second more populous urban area behind Hartford, although exiting from the train station I wasn't able to verify that 2012 census claim.
Once the other passengers were picked up by family, I noticed the projects across State Street were devoid of humanity. Even the minimart was closed for the holiday.
I called my sister. She was running thirty minutes late. I decided to take a walk. It was a sunny day and New Haven possessed some striking brutalist architecture.
Some trees showed the colors of autumn.
Some more than most.
Winter was far away from New England and I strolled down the deserted streets to the Knights of Columbus Tower.
The 23-storey modern style reinforced concrete building was designed by Kevin Roche John Dinkeloo and Associates and finished in 1969. According to Wikipedia 321 feet (98 meters) tall is the third-tallest building in the city's skyline. No one was there too.
Flowers adorned the sidewalks.
They didn't know it was almost winter.
Another low building exhibited all the signs of 1960s urban service.
It took me a little time to discover its function.
Knights of Columbus Museum.
The Catholic Church.
As an atheist both the tower and the museum threatened by godlessness and I hurried away toward the train station. It was almost time to meet my sister.
I walked past the New Haven Police Station.
It was having a quiet day.
So was I.
After all I was a Mayflower descendant and Thanksgiving was all about celebrating New England's conquest of the Indians.
We should have treated them better.
New Haven too.
There was no turkey in the air.
Only loneliness.
And it felt familiar.
But not for long, because I would be with family and friends.
And that was a good reason to come to New Haven.
Thank you Squantum.