In Honor of Lassitude

Written 6/29/2013

Back in 2008 the BBC had broadcasted a story about a Bogota Museum honoring laziness with a week-long exhibition dedicated to a deeper understanding of lethargy. At last lassitude has achieved respect by intellectuals, who have too often downplayed its importance to human existence. 

Throughout the 80s and 90s my Sundays were devoted to ruminating before the TV in my East 10th Street apartment, taking long baths, avoiding conversations, and finally watching Star Trek, while having a plate of General Tsao's Chicken take-out from China Star on 1st Avenue.

My girlfriend, Ms. Carolina, called this day 'the incommunicado Shabbath'.

In fact the only person to whom I spoke was the six-fingered Chinese deliveryman.

"$4.75."

"Keep a dollar tip."

The door shut and I resumed doing nothing, while the rest of New York returned home tuckered out from a day at the museums, movies, or brunches.

As a child my father couldn't stand idle hands and scheduled a slurry of chores for the Lord's Day; mowing the lawn, sweeping out the garage, weeding the flower beds.

There was no TV, until you were finished, but he also said, "If you aren't going to do a job right, then there's no reason to do it."

I must have been ten, when I tested his saying.

One Sunday he entered the TV den to find me watching the movie SINBAD.

"Are your chores done?"

"I didn't think I could do a good job mowing the lawn, so I stopped."

What could I have been thinking?

My argument for laziness earned a month of no TV.

I didn't get a mention for thatact of juvenile rbellion at the Bogata museum and neither did the Thais, who are perennial Olympic contenders for the gold medal in lassitude in the eyes of farangs, who don't lift a finger in hard labor. Thai workers labor six days a week for less than $10 a day with lazy drunk wewsteerners compaining about their abilitiy to nothing when they weren't getting paid.

In the late 1990s I work at a metal shop.

Every week I carry tons of brass and steel.

I know tired same as the Thai workers.

All you want to do after a long day is drink a beer and lay down for the count.

Today in 2013 I am at rest.

It's a natural state in the universe and farangs can go fuck themselves onmine and Thais' off days.

Thanks for your support. In order to avoid ads, please donate to blogger.com.mangozeen through Venmo. Any amount will help us. I do have a large family. My Venmo account is @Peter.Smith.18

Much more to come.

I Love My Sleep

The end of Daylight Savings Time means I was happy to sleep another hour this morning. After waking before the dawn I pulled the covers over my head and arranged the pillows for renewed comfortability.

The next forty-five minutes belonged to a blissful slumber.

Sleep is the drug.

ZZZZZZZZZZZZ.

Paradise according to Ernest Hemingway, who said, "I love sleep. My life has the tendency to fall apart when I'm awake, you know?"

NAPS OF THAILAND by Peter Nolan Smith

When a Chinese general was asked about how the People's Army were defeated by the Vietnamese in 1979, he replied, "We get up at 5am and they get up at 4."

The draconian work ethic of NVA seemed to have been sapped by the torrid climes closer to the equator, because Thais and Laotians are epic sleepers with an uncanny ability to find comfort in conditions better suited to a CIA rendition camp.

Some farangs attributed this hyper-sleeping habit to oriental lassitude, however their Eurocentric observations are way off mark.

Most Thais wake before dawn to work in the rice fields until the heat hits treacherous body-sapping temperatures and then 'Khon tam khao' retreat from the sun for a good meal followed by a better nap or nge'ep before returning to the fields for the long afternoon.

This rice farming tradition has been transported to the cities where workers labor from dawn to dusk six days a week.

Having lived in the South of France, where siestas are a valued cultural treasure, I often defended the Thais and other Asians' sleeping habits.

"Naps are good for you," I once said at the Buffalo Bar.

"So explain to me why bar girls sleep twenty hours at a clip," an English bar-goers asked in Pattaya. Jim had been here for years. His vocabulary in Thai was limited to orders for more beer and sexual propositions.

"Only can be several reasons." I'd been in the Orient since 1990.

I didn't have all the answers.

Just some of the right ones.

"Like what?" Jim was eying his date. The plump bargirl seemed alert for the moment. The fifty year-old mustn't have paid her yet.

"First is that she's exhausted from having sex with you." Many farangs in Thailand exist on a diet of Viagra and alcohol.

"Could be." The bar-goer smiled with pride.

"Second, she could be on ja-bah and crashes after sex." His girl's fatness excluded her huffing meth. She was a healthy eater.

"No way. The cops piss-tested her at Marine Disco the other night. She came up clean."

"Well, that leaves only one other explanation and this comes from a very knowledgeable Mama-san of a go-go bar. She said the reason most of these girls sleep so much is that they're trying to escape the reality of having to have sex with a fat farang and would rather live inside a sleep world until they have enough money to rejoin other Thai people. Of course this couldn't pertain to you since you're such a sex hero."

Jim tipped the scales over 280 and his age was a 20th of Methuselah. No one had called him 'sexy' since he was in his teens and that person had probably been the parish priest. For an Englishman Jim had good smile considering he had half his front teeth.

"I'm not so sure about that." Even Jim recognized that he was no Apollo.

Me neither, but I like hearing girls tell me I'm the best I ever had.

It's a lie which improved with age and I sleep in peace content to accept a well-intentioned lie.

Sleeping well is a talent an old man admires with age.

Those damn Thais.

There is nothing like a good nap and as Carrie Snow once said, “No day is so bad it can't be fixed with a nap.”

Ching ching.

LOVELY SLEEP by Peter Nolan Smith

Published 2013

The Thai people pride themselves in the purity of their language. Few English words have infiltrated the common lexicon. Dtam-ruaat is the word for police. The diphonic annunciation can confuse most farangs. I thought for years that Dtam-ruaat meant 'make blood', however make blood is spelled Dtam-leuuat with a falling accent on the last syllable.

Thai culture remains strong, however beer is beer in Thai as is pizza pizza, so foreigners don't starve to death in the hinterlands. 1150 is telephone number for Pizza. Pay the gas and the motorcycle delivery boy will drive to the most distant reaches of ban-nok ie the sticks.

Other commonly shared words are whiskey, taxi, sex, and WC for 'water closet', which along with pizza cover most human needs.

Two years ago I returned to New York from Bangkok via Narita Airport.

Twenty-seven hours from Soi 12 in Jomtien to Fort Greene in Brooklyn.

Most people would have taken several days to recover from such a trip. I needed money and showed up at work 10 hours after passing through customs at JFK.

I was exhausted from the trip, yet couldn't sleep and tried to explain to my son's mother why I couldn't sleep. My Thai was rudimentary and Mam was getting increasingly frustrated by my ignorance of her native language.

"You stay here many years. Why you not speak Thai good?"

"Because I'm a farang."

"I know that." She sounded like she was saying 'farang kee-nok'. I know we aren't as good as them, because I have lived in France and the Thais are the French of the Orient.

Their chauvinistic love for their country's traditions, food, and culture border on fanaticism and after residing in Thailand I have to admit that they aren't half-wrong. The only problem was that I had to move back to America.

New York to be exact.

It was where my job was.

The other side of the world and this week my body clock was off by twelve hours.

Day is night and night is day.

"I can't sleep," I explained to Mam over Skype.

"Go sleep."

"Khan Lak Ter. Last night I had a dream about staying in a house with no walls. It was in the middle of a rice paddy. Very beautiful. Made out of wood. You slept in bed and I held Fenway."

Fenway was our son. He was two years old. Every night his body spun on the bed like a clock. I slept like a stone with him.

"Good dream?" Mam was a firm believer in beauty sleep, however children steal sleep from their parents like a CIA rendition torturer. The theft gave them control. Fenway was no different from the rest of the young in their preparation to usurp the strength of their mothers and fathers.

"Not a good dream. I see men in the dark. They attack us. I wake up screaming." I live alone in the top floor apartment of a Fort Greene brownstone. The walls were thick. No one heard my terror. "A nightmare."

"Fan raai." A nightmare was scary in every language.

"Yes."

"Are you thuuk-phee-am?" Mam was horrified at the possibility that I had been possessed by an evil spirit or 'phee'.

"Not at all." I never scoffed the Thai belief in ghosts. I had been to the house of a 'maih moht'. Magic existed in the heart and soul of her country, however my dream was the harvest of several sleepless nights. My next attempt to clarify the reason for my insomnia pierce the language barrier.

"You mean 'jet lag'?"

"Yes, jet lag." The word was the same for Mam as it was for me.

"Can not sleep?"

"No."

"I understand now." She had never traveled outside of Thailand, so the effects of jet lag were a mystery.

"I can't sleep. Four nights now." The CIA used sleep deprivation to persuade secret prisoners to tell the truth. I had slept maybe ten hours since Tuesday.

"'Oht nawn' not good for old man." Mam was twenty-six. I was more than twice her age. Youth had a mission to take over the world. No one lived forever or not sleep forever.

"I'll fall asleep soon." I couldn't say when, but Mam cared about my health.

"Nom dee." She wanted me to reach a hundred years old. Thais hated being alone.

And at the tender age of close to sixty, so do I.

We have a couple of words for loneliness in English.

"Never want to say good-bye." Barry White sang those words.

And I feel the same way too.

Like a man without a soul.

THE SLEEP OF THE DEAD by Peter Nolan Smith

Two weeks after my arrest by the Thai Cyper-Crime Unit in 2008 I was drinking at Donovan's Sports Bar on Pattya's Sai 3. Most of the clientele was watching a golf match, while I concentrated on drinking a vodka-tonic. Golf meant nothing to me.

After Tiger Woods birdied a hole, the TV went to commercial break. Conversations of a normal nature resumed between the drinkers.

An oil worker complained that his new girlfriend slept most of the day.

His friends said that their girlfriends suffered from a similar somnalepsy.

The oil worker hailed from Texas. He was overweight and bald.

"And when she wakes up, she eats like an escapee from a concentration camp, then watches Thai soap operas before dropping into a coma."

"Same with me." His two friends were also dumbfounded by the malaise.

"Sleeping 20 hours a day has to be a disease."

"I'm just glad that it wasn't infectious."

Donovan's owner had a 4-handicap. To the oil worker this skill was genius and he asked Steve, if he had any idea why their girlfriends slept like the dead.

"I don't have a girlfriend." Steve was the smartest man in the bar. His Thai waitresses understood more English than they let on and he changed the subject. "Think Tiger Woods will play the Hong Kong Open?"

The golfers bailed after another drink. Their tee-off at Khao Kheo Golf Course was scheduled for 9. I paid my bill. Steve forestalled my departure with an offer of another vodka-tonic. He knew my story. The police might not have thrown me in jail, but their geek shut down my website. I couldn't leave the country until my trial. My money was very tight.

I accepted his buy-back with gracious humility.

Steve and I discussed Eli Manning's Scramble in the Super Bowl, which gave the Giants the win.

"In the regular season he would have been whistled dead. Caught in the grass. Then again rules are made to be broken by the refs in the Superbowl. They had a lot riding on the game." Steve felt that the only people who can fix games were the officials.

"The secondary stopped playing defense to watch him get his." I believed that the NFL officials were also on the fix.

"Never stop playing until you hear the whistle."

We clinked glasses and I asked about his bachelor status.

"I don't have a girlfriend, because I hear too many stories from my customers about theirs."

"I won't ever tell you about winning the Worst Girlfriend of the Year in 2001."

Bee had left me for an Italian five times in two months. I wanted her to go. She just couldn't say good-bye. She was stuck in my life like gum in hair. She had to be cut out in the end.

"Thanks, my head filled with enough unhappy endings to write a soap opera, but I have a question. Why you think Thai girls sleep so much?"

His question echoed off an unspoken affair whose mysteries defied his rational mind. I speak Thai. I know bar girls on a platonic level. They tell stories about 'customers'. Some of them might be true.

"The most obvious answer is the one no one wants to believe."

"Which is?"

"You try spending a night with a drunken farang sucking down beers and tequila like the Taliban were at the city gates. I promise you that you would be a little slow to get out of bed."

"But that's not the real answer, is it?" Steve wasn't accepting the easy way out.

"No, their sleeping sickness is either pretend or a reaction to having to spend so much time with a farang. Faking sleep keeps a farang off them. Not many people have a fantasy about sex with a sleeping woman. The second option is that they are so freaked by being with a farang that they wrap sleep around them like a blanket. You have to think of it like astronaut in suspended animation for inter-planetary travel only Thai girls sleep after they've landed on Mars. They have no interest in the Martians."

"You mean us?"

"Did you ever see BOB CAROL TED AND ALICE. Ann Margret sleeps throughout her affair with Jack Nicholson. Why? Because she didn't want to be there. So what do you do when your girlfriend sleeps?"

"I certainly don't wake her." The peace during their slumber was priceless.

"Let sleeping dogs lie."

"As long you're in bed for when they wake up."

We clinked glasses again and another drink was pushing my budget, but I ordered it anyway.

Mam was already asleep. She was so cute under the sheets. She was safe and so was I. Tomorrow morning was another story.

Four Days Gone No Work

NO work.

Nothing to do.

What choice in the world is there for a working man?

Sleep at the 169.

NAPS OF THAILAND 2007

When a Chinese general was asked about the defeat of the People's Army by the Vietnamese in 1979, he replied, "We get up at 5am and they get up at 4."

The draconian work ethic of NVA seemed to have been sapped by the torrid climes closer to the equator, because Thais and Laotians are epic sleepers with an uncanny ability to find comfort in conditions better suited to a CIA rendition camp.

Some farangs attributed this hyper-sleeping habit to oriental lassitude, however their Eurocentric observations are way off mark.

Most Thais wake before dawn to work in the rice fields, until the heat hits treacherous body-sapping temperatures and then 'Khon tam khao' retreat from the sun for a good meal followed by a better nap or nge'ep before returning to the fields for the long afternoon.

This rice farming tradition has been transported to the cities where workers labor from dawn to dusk six days a week.

Having lived in the South of France, where siestas are a valued cultural treasure, I often defended the Thais and other Asians' sleeping habits.

"Naps are good for you," I once said at the Buffalo Bar.

"So explain to me why bar girls sleep twenty hours at a clip," an English bar-goers asked in Pattaya. Jim had been here for years. His vocabulary in Thai was limited to orders for more beer and sexual propositions.

"Only can be several reasons." I'd been in the Orient since 1990.

I didn't have all the answers.

Just some of the right ones.

"Like what?" Jim was eying his date. The plump bargirl seemed alert for the moment. The fifty year-old mustn't have paid her yet.

"First is that she's exhausted from having sex with you." Many farangs in Thailand exist on a diet of Viagra and alcohol.

"Could be." The bar-goer smiled with pride.

"Second, she could be on ja-bah and crashes after sex." His girl's fatness excluded her huffing meth. She was a healthy eater.

"No way. The cops piss-tested her at Marine Disco the other night. She came up clean."

"Well, that leaves only one other explanation and this comes from a very knowledgeable Mama-san of a go-go bar. She said the reason most of these girls sleep so much is that they're trying to escape the reality of having to have sex with a fat farang and would rather live inside a sleep world until they have enough money to rejoin other Thai people. Of course this couldn't pertain to you since you're such a sex hero."

Jim tipped the scales over 280 and his age was a 20th of Methuselah. No one had called him 'sexy' since he was in his teens and that person had probably been the parish priest. For an Englishman Jim had good smile considering he only possessed half his front teeth.

"I'm not so sure about that." Even Jim recognized that he was no Apollo.

Me neither, but I like hearing girls tell me I'm the best I ever had.

It's a lie which improved with age and I sleep in peace content to accept a well-intentioned lie.

Sleeping well is a talent an old man admires with age.

Those damn Thais.

There is nothing like a good nap and as Carrie Snow once said, “No day is so bad it can't be fixed with a nap.”

Ching ching.

THE SLEEP OF THE DEAD by Peter Nolan Smith

Two weeks after my arrest by the Thai Cyper-Crime Unit I was drinking at Donovan's Sports Bar on Pattya's Sai 3. Most of the clientele was watching a golf match. I concentrated on drinking a vodka-tonic. Golf means nothing to me.

Tiger Woods had birdie a hole. The TV went to commercial break. Conversations of a normal nature resumed between the drinkers.

An oil worker complained that his new girlfriend slept most of the day.

His friends said that their girlfriends suffered from a similar somnalepsy.

The oil worker hailed from Texas. He was overweight and bald.

"And when she wakes up, she eats like an escapee from a concentration camp then watches Thai soap operas before dropping into a coma."

"Same with me." His two friends were also dumbfounded by the malaise. "Sleeping 20 hours a day has to be a disease."

"I'm just glad that it wasn't infectious."

Donovan's owner had a 4-handicap. To the oil worker this skill was genius and he asked Steve, if he had any idea why their girlfriends slept like the dead.

"I don't have a girlfriend." Steve was the smartest man in the bar. His Thai waitresses understood more English than they let on and he changed the subject. "Think Tiger Woods will play the Hong Kong Open?"

The golfers bailed after another drink. Their tee-off at Khao Kheo Golf Course was scheduled for 9. I paid my bill. Steve forestalled my departure with an offer of another vodka-tonic. He knew my story. The police might not have thrown me in jail, but their geek shut down my website. I couldn't leave the country until my trial. My money was very tight.

I accepted his buy-back with gracious humility.

Steve and I discussed Eli Manning's Scramble in the Super Bowl, which gave the Giants the win.

"In the regular season he would have been whistled dead. Caught in the grass. Then again rules are made to be broken by the refs in the Superbowl. They had a lot riding on the game." Steve felt that the only people who can fix games were the officials. "The secondary stopped playing defense to watch him get his." I believed that the NFL officials were also on the fix.

"Never stop playing until you hear the whistle." We clinked glasses and I asked about his bachelor status.

"I don't have a girlfriend, because I hear too many stories from my customers about theirs."

"I won't ever tell you about winning the Worst Girlfriend of the Year in 2001."

Bee had left me for an Italian fiveive times in two months. I wanted her to go. She just couldn't say good-bye. She was stuck in my life like gum in hair. She had to be cut out in the end.

"Thanks, my head filled with enough unhappy endings to write a soap opera, but I have a question. Why you think Thai girls sleep so much?"

His question echoed off an unspoken affair whose mysteries defied his rational mind. I speak Thai. I know bar girls on a platonic level. They tell stories about 'customers'. Some of them might be true.

"The most obvious answer is the one no one wants to believe."

"Which is?"

"They're tired. You try spending a night with a drunken farang sucking down beers and tequila like the Taliban were at the city gates. I promise you that you would be a little slow to get out of bed."

"But that's not the real answer, is it?" Steve wasn't accepting the easy way out.

"No, their sleeping sickness is either pretend or a reaction to having to spend so much time with a farang. Faking sleep keeps a farang off them. Not many people have a fantasy about sex with a sleeping woman. The second option is that they are so freaked by being with a farang that they wrap sleep around them like a blanket. You have to think of it like astronaut in suspended animation for inter-planetary travel only Thai girls sleep after they've landed on Mars. They have no interest in the Martians."

"You mean us?"

"Did you ever see BOB CAROL TED AND ALICE. Ann Margret sleeps throughout her affair with Jack Nicholson. Why? Because she didn't want to be there."

"So what do you do when your girlfriend sleeps?'"

"I certainly don't wake her." The peace during their slumber was priceless.

"Let sleeping dogs lie."

"As long you're in bed for when they wake up."

We clinked glasses again and another drink was pushing my budget. What the heck. Mam was already asleep. She was so cute under the sheets. She was safe and so was I. Tomorrow morning was another story.

SLEEP ANYWHERE

The attribute I most admire in the Thais is their ability to sleep anywhere and I seem to have acquire this gift from my years of living in the Land of Smiles.

I thank Siam for this talent.

Everywhere and anytime.