Sandy Does Southeast Asia

So I’m feeling pretty pleased with myself, don’t you know. Been staying at home all day, writing, reading, and keeping myself amused. Not drinking, not being silly, not crying. Done with the romantic drama and set squarely in my life. Not sad at all; very focused and disciplined.

And with the furious construction of the street outside my front window finished, I finally have peace and quiet during the day so I can work. I have a project I’m excited to start and two solid months of writing time ahead of me. Life is good.

Today I came home from a walk to find a motorcycle in my yard. And workmen in my yard. Lots of workmen in the yard. Digging up the yard. Look at the workmen digging up the yard! Water pipes – that’s what they’re digging up. Oh no. Water off in the house. Water pipes exposed, truckload of cement bags, a yard full of yelling workmen…

Julian! Help!!

Julian came over to see what was going on. The good news is the water pipes would be replaced in half an hour and the water turned back on. That was the work of the landlord, who owns my house. The bad news is that the land owner, who owns the land itself, has commissioned a wall to be built around the perimeter of the tiny plot on which the house sits, and hence the bags of cement.

There are already walls around the property so it strikes me as an unnecessary and ridiculous project to build a second, interior wall unless she knows about some secret Hun invasion from the next soi over planned for early spring ‘07. Then again, I also cannot for the life of me see what use the brand new 100-yard two-lane superhighway in front of my house serves other than a warm place for the soi dogs to sleep during the day. I’m obviously not on the same page with Thai logic in these matters.

With a sinking heart, I asked Julian to find out how long the construction would take. What I wanted to ask was exactly how long there would be clanging, banging bedlam directly outside my windows all day, every day? For how long would I be living smack in the middle of a construction site? Not sure why I even bothered because I knew the answer even as he was asking the question. It could only be…

Two months.

I did the only sensible thing – thanked Julian, went into the house, locked the door, lay down on the bed and sobbed out all my frustration. Silently, of course, so the greater Nong Khai workforce gathered in my yard wouldn’t hear.

Then I got up and swept. I started to work out a plan. I mean, maybe it won’t be so bad. Maybe I can learn to write at night. Do I want this or not? And if I do, how much do I want it? Because if I want something enough I’ll do whatever it takes to get it and nothing will stop me – not dust, noise, workmen, or odd working hours. Nothing.

I decided to give it a week or two. I will give it the old college try and if I find by the end of two weeks that I absolutely can’t remain sane and productive, I’ll figure something else out. I must remember that I am here to write. As much as I like my house, if I can’t work here, I’ll have to either find another house or leave Nong Khai. In the meantime, I will try my best, throw silent temper tantrums when necessary, and continue to trust that everything will turn out fine.

One last fun item from today: My Chinese friend Alannis, who I haven’t seen for a few weeks, visited the garden this evening to say hi. She took one look at me and asked sweetly, “Have you put on weight?” If that’s what passes for polite opening conversation in China, I am scratching that country off my itinerary. For serious. And on a related note, I’m about five pounds and one major construction project away from starting smoking again.

If you enjoy being ill, may I suggest a career working with children. I woke up this morning with my second flu-like fever in three months. That’s unheard of for me and the only logical explanation is that for the first time in my adult life, I’m being constantly exposed to the germ harboring creatures more commonly known as ‘children.’

It’s those damn Wright boys. They’re the ones I tutor during the week. I don’t worry so much about catching anything from Benny as I do his younger brother Johnny. This may be irrational but I think it has something to do with temperament. Benny and I get along quite well but we’re different sorts of people. He’s charismatic, outgoing and imaginative. He likes to paint and design things. I don’t worry about catching anything from him because I figure he is different from me on a very basic, even cellular, level.

On the other hand, every time Johnny sneezes in my presence, it’s a one-way ticket to Virusville. I’m not a firm believer in this sort of thing but I have to point out first off that he and I share both a Western astrological sign and a Chinese astrological sign. We are both Taurus Tigers. More pragmatically, he prefers math and spelling just as I did as a child. I have always preferred subjects with clear rules and right answers. And he shies away from anything that is ambiguous or that requires imagination, which I find very sensible of him since figuring stuff out and making stuff up is so tiresome, really.

What Johnny and I have most strongly in common is a disinterest in social expectations. When you speak to him, he is just as likely to ignore you as to respond. He doesn’t ignore you to make a point. It’s more like you have simply failed to engage him in any significant way and so you do not exist. This has been deemed “weird” behavior on his part by other people.

That makes me laugh because it is when Johnny is at his absolute weirdest that I see our similarities most clearly. Sometimes it is almost like I am seeing myself in him, and when this happens, I suddenly understand what it may have been like to have my own child. That’s worth a few extra fevers this year, don’t you think?

Maybe it’s the wind, I don’t know. Maybe it’s the wind blowing night and day, and living in a wooden house and drinking absurd amounts of coffee and this pleasure at being alone with my over-caffeinated thoughts. Whatever it is, it’s been making me think a lot about San Francisco recently.

I’m not missing my life in San Francisco but the city itself. In other words, this homesick feeling that has been rising in me is not for anything that belongs to a time, only to a place. I may have had some very dark days in the eight years I lived there but at the base of it all, I trusted San Francisco. I still trust that city like one might trust family. It protected and comforted me, and never once betrayed me, turned its back on me, or shut me out like Los Angeles did.

Thinking about how San Francisco offers unconditional love to the weird, the lost and the generally maladjusted has made me think – for obvious reasons – about Nong Khai. This town has some strong similarities to San Francisco – they are both pretty, small cities on the edge of the country, and they are both the last stop for people who haven’t quite managed to follow through with the life they were expected to lead. Both cities are outposts for outcasts.

John – the grad student who’s studying the retirement community in this area – said that one of the most pointed comments he’s heard about Udon Thani and by extension Nong Khai was on an Internet message board. It was a piece of advice that went something like: go spend a few years in Pattaya or Phuket and have fun, then come to Udon to die.

It makes me wonder what it is about the spirit of a place that draws people there to die, either literally or metaphorically (as in: dying into the next phase of one’s life). I also wonder if this is why I’ve had a freaked out paranoid panic a few times here – admittedly while drunk and under extreme emotional duress – that everyone in this town is already dead and that it is not a town but Purgatory.

Flashbacks aside, there’s definitely a feeling here that is sometimes horrible and sometimes fascinating, that everyone in this place is trying desperately to figure out or find something very important so they can move on to the next level, mostly without consciously knowing that’s what they’re doing. Interestingly, I felt the same thing many times in San Francisco but never in Los Angeles. People in Los Angeles did seem to be searching on an unconscious/soul level but in a useless, frustrated way that did not allow for growth; it felt like millions of people simultaneously looking for the right thing in the wrong place.

I think I am growing to trust Nong Khai. Not only have there been more frequent stretches of feeling content to just be, like how I felt when I lived in San Francisco, but also I’ve found myself relying more on the place itself than the people in it. Most telling, I do not feel lonely or shut out when I am alone. I feel like I am happy to keep company with the city itself, much like how I felt in San Francisco, that it is a dear friend. So yeah, it could just be the wind making me feel this way, but somehow I doubt it.

ps: ok, ok – an email from Mr J Ringhoff of California, USA reminded me of the real reason I miss San Francisco…”i have eaten nothing in the past 24 hours but burritos. beautiful northern california taqueria style burritos with lettuce, steamed tortillas and all the deliciousness imaginable. the last one i ate was in SF on valencia and i believe 18th st. sooooo good. and all the places i’ve got them have had the best tortilla chips on the side and that kick ass green sauce of magic.” Sigh. Green sauce of magic.

After enduring one last unexpected goodbye to Mr. Man (which made three heartbreaking farewell hugs in as many days), I did what any self-respecting, red-blooded American female would do – I went shopping.

It started with a practical matter. I need an electric kettle if I’m going to shut myself up in my house and write for the next two months. I cannot write without coffee. I can barely write my own name without coffee let alone the brilliance I fully expect to produce in the coming months. Leave booze to other scribes, I personally believe the answer lies at the bottom of a coffee mug.

There are kettles at the main covered market in town but I had an accompanying list of things to get that defied my time or patience with Tassadej market stalls: mugs, plates, Western-style broom, dust pan, underwear, and socks. It could have taken years to find all these things at the market.

So I caught a tuk-tuk out to Tesco-Lotus. It’s basically like Wal-Mart and every time I go there I get a sharp slap upside the head that I actually live in Asia. It happens when I am doing something much like today – pushing my cart slowly up and down the aisles humming along to Christmas carols and spacing out on brightly colored packaging in a totally familiar consumerist environment – and then suddenly I look around and notice that everyone is Asian…and there is a strange language being spoken…and all the writing is in an unfamiliar script. I have lost the plot for a brief moment before it all comes rushing back and shocks me. This rather upsetting disconnect happens every single time I go to Tesco. I usually recover with a chili cheese dog from Dairy Queen (so. not. joking.). Thank god for multi-national fast-food corporations.

So anyway, there I am strolling slowly along the aisles, pondering the absurdity of the Christmas show I saw on the way in – with the cast grooving around on an outside stage in the blazing afternoon sun, wearing Joseph and Mary costumes and foot-long smiles, while singing traditional carols in Thai accompanied by electric guitar to a suspiciously enthusiastic audience. I have no idea what was going on but it was weird.

I’m thinking about this while looking at underwear. I already know, before I even enter the ladies department, that this part of the shopping expedition is going to be a problem. I blindly grab at a packet of extra-large panties, throw them in the cart, and try to pretend that didn’t just happen. Moving right along…

The clever bit of cross-cultural understanding I came to today is that dressing rooms are universally appalling. What sort of sadistic asshole invented those lights, anyway? I am going to spare you the details and leave it at this: not even the dazzling engineering feats of Thai bras can compensate for seeing oneself naked under dressing room lights when one has recently quit smoking and gained a teensy bit of weight and, due to certain ethnic variations in body type, has extra-fucking-large underwear beating like a tell-tale heart just outside the door in their shopping cart. Ah-hem.

As I busily – and a bit desperately – distracted myself with brooms, dust pans, and coffee mugs, I kept noticing a tall, foxy hipster Thai boy. Then I noticed his foxy hipster Thai girlfriend. We kept running into each other. He kept overtly checking me out. He smiled at me. I smiled back. I wondered if maybe…could this…ooh…could this work both ways?

I may have extra-large Thai underwear lurking in my (oh what’s the English word?) dresser but my relatively exotic cultural status and my fair skin must have some cache, right? If it works for my male compatriots, maybe it can work for me.

But I let the opportunity pass. I don’t mean to be a complete jerk here but what the hell would I do with a Thai boyfriend? Am I the sort of person who could be happy sharing my bed, let alone my life, with someone who doesn’t know who Steve Martin is? Simply put: No.

It’s important to accept these things about oneself. I will wear ‘extra-large’ underwear, I will drink instant coffee, I will eat chili cheese dogs with white processed cheese and watery chili, but I will not date someone who just looks at me blankly when I come out of the blue with one of my frequent non-sequiturs like, “Oh man, Toonces, the cat who could drive a car – how funny was that?”

Drawing this line in the sand may result in spending the rest of my life alone, wandering the aisles of international Wal-Marts and snickering at my own cultural in-jokes. But honestly, as long as it doesn’t involve dressing rooms, I’m fine with that.

The cold season has arrived in Nong Khai. A wind began to blow late last night carrying a chill I had not felt before. It was the sort of wind that brings change. Yesterday afternoon, an American friend who’s lived here a couple of years pulled his jacket around him and said, “Seriously, come on, you don’t feel cold?” I told him to stop being such a baby. But by this morning I too was shivering.

“It’s cold!” I announced at Mut Mee. Since Simeon was the only person within earshot, I pointed my voice at him. “I’m freezing,” I added for emphasis. I was about to announce my imminent wooly mammoth style demise when Simeon cut me off to say it wasn’t actually freezing. I argued until he finally got up and checked the temperature at the reception desk. “75 degrees,” he announced. “That is a bunch of bullshit!” I cried, pointing at the halogen lightbulbs. “Look at those heat lamps it’s sitting under!” To prove his point, he brought the thermometer out to the arctic garden where the reading actually rose a degree. What a show off that guy is.

As the weather turns cold, my life is turning inward. I had to say goodbye today to Mr. Man. I haven’t mentioned him in this blog yet but he is my best friend here in Nong Khai. He is the person I turn to even when my problem is him. I told him that while he’s gone, I am going on a two-month writing binge. And I meant it. The more I work, the sooner I will forget that he is gone, and the better off I will be. It’s no good being heartbroken all over again. All I want for now is to be alone and work.

That didn’t stop me from indulging in one last emotionally tormented but basically pointless monologue of the sort that Mr. Man has grown resigned to, I’m sure. His saint-like patience is a match for my Woody Allen-like neuroses. Unlike most people who find it necessary to, oh I don’t know, point out how totally ridiculous I’m being or offer advice or their point of view, he just listens quietly but carefully, nodding at the right places and saying that he understands. Eventually, given a non-judgmental listening ear, I run myself to the end of whatever half-baked impulse started me off in the first place. Then I apologize, feeling stupid. He says it is fine and not to worry about it. And I, for the kabillionth time, wonder where he’s been this whole time and how, given that he had recently married when we did finally find each other, there can be any argument for justice in life.

A while later he gave me a hug goodbye and I left for work. In my head, I always imagine that things end with some grand display, some marker, something. After all these years, I am still shocked that all that happens in real life is you say goodbye and you walk away. That’s it. That’s all there is. Incredible.

When I moved into my house, Lee off-handedly asked me to care for the dwarf roses he’d just planted by the stairs. I began to worry about them recently when a bud disappeared completely. Then last week I was horrified to notice that they had been eaten. About 80% of the leaf area was decimated and the plant’s days were obviously numbered. Not that Lee will notice or care if he did, but I had really looked forward to seeing them flower. Now a plague of locusts or whatever the hell happened would prevent me from even finding out what color the flowers would have been. It struck me as a potential metaphor for my life but I immediately put it out of my mind and went about my business, determined never to think of that particular failure again.

This evening, when my weekend employers dropped me off at home, I walked toward the house with a heavy heart. With the distraction of work over, all I could think was, “He is gone. It is winter. Now is the next part of my life.” Just then, something bright at the foot of the stairs caught my eye. It was a flower – a brilliant, full-blown salmon red flower growing out of the beleaguered rose bush. I stopped and looked at it, surprised but suddenly very pleased. “Thank you,” I said to no one in particular, for reminding me that this is just life and life means change. Even if we can’t make sense of it, it is more than enough to remember that there are unexpected miracles like love and beauty happening everywhere, all the time.

Dear Santa,

What a bullshit year I’ve had. Let’s see, there was the major illness, the messy breakup, the death in the family, the losing my job, the falling in love with a married man. I mean, what the shit? I’m sure you would agree that I deserve some presents after all that nonsense. Here is my wish list…

* Spiral notebook (180 pages, college ruled – yes, I would spend the 99 cents to buy this for myself but after seriously looking everywhere, I’ve concluded they don’t exist in Thailand)

* Polyphonic Spree “Together We’re Heavy” (burned CD is fine since I’ll only have it for the next four months or so – oh yeah and I can play CDs now because I have a borrowed laptop!)

* Built to Spill “Keep It Like A Secret”

* Anything by Smog (how I miss my pretend boyfriend…sigh)

* Paperback copy of “A Moveable Feast” by Hemingway

* Any new & noteworthy books or CDs you think I may have missed in the past few months

* Magazines (preferably really cool ones I’ll want to look at a lot)

Do you even come to Thailand? Heathens don’t get presents, right? In case you have to ship stuff, you better get moving because it’s gonna take goddamn forever to get here from the North Pole! OK bye.

Love,
Sandy

On hearing that the visitor was in Nong Khai doing research for a Master’s thesis in city planning, about the regional impact of retired Western residents, Caroline waved her hand in my direction and said dismissively, “Huh. Well anyway, that sounds like something right up her alley.”

It is, in fact, right up my alley and I had been closely questioning the visitor – whose name is John – for the past day and a half. John lives in Udon Thani (the nearest city), where he has been working on the question for eight months with the help of his Thai girlfriend. We’d quickly ascertained we had a similar interest and started swapping anecdotes, insights and tidbits of information from interviews and other sources.

The fact that I’m becoming a passionate amateur sociologist in this off-beat topic is hardly surprising but it is curious. Why these guys specifically? Why do I find them so endlessly fascinating?

As individuals and as a culture, we have a huge blind spot about romantic relationships. We tell ourselves all manner of reassuring stories about love but when it comes right down to it, we behave as though there is only a very narrow segment of the population who are eligible for it, and even then only in approved ways. Our hypocritical lack of self-awareness on this issue is startling at times.

A friend of mine emailed in response to my “Fair trade, Thai style” blog to inform me quite eloquently that I would be better off not thinking about relationships as being based on an exchange model. Interestingly, this is the same person who informed me this summer that although he liked me as a person, I was simply too old to be a serious relationship prospect.

The sad truth is that he was right, on both counts. It is not healthy to view romance as a relationship of exchange, and yet as an aging never-married American, because this is exactly how we all do view relationships (whether we admit it or not), it feels like there is no longer a place for me as a woman in my culture. I am not a lover, I am not a wife, I am not a mother…and I no longer possess the feminine currency – youth, beauty – required to move into any of these roles.

No, I am not just interested in the men of Nong Khai as an intellectual hobby. It goes far beyond that. I know them because I see myself in them. And I am deeply envious that they have found a way out of the same bind that I am finding inescapable.

Sometimes – not all the time, you understand, just sometimes – I am struck by the fact that my life is perfect. I mean, really perfect. It is just exactly the life I asked for. From the hazy five and a half year nightmare that was my life in Los Angeles, I can pull up a vision of myself sitting on the couch in that duplex on Scott Avenue, wishing and hoping and maybe even praying for a very different sort of life.

If there are times when I distinctly feel that my life is perfect, now is one of those times. I am sitting at Mut Mee. It is 7:32pm. I am just starting to cool off from the intense heat of the day, wearing a tee-shirt and enjoying the ceiling fan. The night is very dark and I am looking at long, bright streaks of light on the Mekong, reflected from the Lao side of the river. White fairy lights twinkle in the trees of the garden. I am listening to The Stooges while trying to think of a title for my latest short story.

“Now last year I was 21…and now I’m gonna be 22; I say ‘oh my and boo hoo’”
‘1969’ The Stooges.

When I was 21, my best friend was a boy named Matt. We used to sing Stooges songs as we walked up and down the streets of the Mission in San Francisco like we owned the goddamn place. Not just the neighborhood but this whole dirty beautiful world was ours by virtue of youth and courage.

Anyway, as perfect as my life feels, if I for reals 100% had my way, my best friend Matt with whom I listened to The Stooges and went crazy and fell in love with life…

Well, he wouldn’t be dead.

This is the sort of desolation that I cannot escape, no matter where I go in the world. That I am here and he is not.

Luckily, I do not travel to escape. I travel because, although I am not as young or as courageous by half, I am still in love with life; I lust for experiences the way other people lust for money or sex. I travel because I want my world to be an enormous, thrilling, confusing, overwhelmingly chaotic and heartbreakingly beautiful place. I travel because at some point I discovered that the easiest way to create change on the inside is to create change on the outside.

I am only telling you all of this because you may also have a suspicion that your life could be much better than it is. And you may even have a crazy idea that what might make it better is if you did something drastic like leave behind everything that you know and love and depend upon, and hit the road. And I am saying this because maybe – just maybe – you are actually teetering on the edge of Do I Stay Or Do I Go?

I honestly do not believe that if you take this chance, you will ever look back and regret your own courage. That is simply not the sort of thing one regrets. One regrets sitting on their couch wishing and hoping, but not doing. One regrets not being able to say goodbye one last time. One regrets staying too long. One regrets opportunities missed. But you will never regret acting decisively on your own behalf. Be afraid if you are afraid, and go anyway. Just go.

I hate it when people ask about my writing. On crankier days, I even resent it because it seems to me there should be a general understanding that people who write do so because they feel at least some discomfort with verbal communication. If they don’t lack the skill altogether, they at the very least approach it as one might a second language – possible but not preferable. And when I say ‘they,’ I of course mean me. I mean that I can never speak intelligently about my own writing.

Yesterday a woman friend dropped the Most Dreaded Question: what are you writing about? If I had any sense at all, I would formulate a stock response to use in this situation but in any case I haven’t and so I had to fall back on my stellar extemporaneous speaking skills. “Oh, just about stuff,” I said.

“I see,” she said. “What sort of stuff?”

“About Nong Khai, I guess. You know, living in Nong Khai. Trying to get a sense of the place and life here. Oh, you know. Yeah,” I ended eloquently.

She looked at me as though she had suspected it before but now was sure I had something to hide.

“Don’t worry,” I said. “I’m not really writing about the Mut Mee community.”

“Well, that’s good,” she replied pointedly. “But I still have no idea what you’re writing about.”

I told her that my last two essays were about monks and about cross-cultural relationships. Unfortunately, I couldn’t stop there. I started babbling nonsensically about how fascinated I am by the seemingly large population of older men in Nong Khai who are here doing nothing I can see other than marrying Thai women and drinking themselves to death. She raised her eyebrows and said that she doesn’t get out enough to know who these people are. Then I really knew I should stop. This is not a subject Mut Mee people abide well and I know this.

“Oh I’m sure you have,” I continued. “Like the men who have breakfast at the German bakery.”

In a noncommittal tone, she said that yes, she had been there. It was clear that I was wandering off somewhere in a land far beyond simply misjudging my audience but I continued to ramble on about how I really want to write about them but can’t find an in.

“You could just talk to them, I suppose,” she said, in the same way one might suggest conducting interviews in a leper colony.

“Yes of course but that’s not what I mean. I’m talking about a creative in.”

Just then Caroline grabbed her for afternoon meditation. I was left sitting there feeling annoyed with myself. I should know better than to push unpopular topics. And how did I get suckered into that conversation in the first place, when I am well aware that talking about one’s writing – especially half-formulated concepts – is like talking about one’s dreams or sex life. You inevitably come across as either an idiot or a bore, or both. There was also something that left me uneasy about discussing my interest in this particular subject matter.

On my morning bicycle ride today, it struck me that what bothered me was how defensive I have become about my interests and even, by extension, about who I am. I suddenly felt how isolating it is to only have one friend here who generally shares my way of looking at the world and understands the things I say, and how anxious I am that he’s about to leave for a couple of months.

What I should have said, if I absolutely felt I had to defend myself, is that while it is easy to write beautiful words about beautiful things, it is about as interesting as shooting fish in a barrel. That isn’t even art, to me. True artistry is the ability to take a subject that most people would find sad or ugly and help them to see it as something beautiful. Terrible perhaps, but beautiful nonetheless. Otherwise what am I doing but reinforcing the simplistic way most of us are taught to view the world?

Really though, I don’t want to defend myself or – more to the point – to feel like I have to defend myself, because the truth is that I don’t have to. And I don’t have to because no one is actually expecting me to. I’m just suffering from Small Community Syndrome, the symptoms of which include defensiveness, social paranoia, and an excessive desire to gossip. That’s what I decided. But just to be on the safe side, I’m going to finally put together those few easy-to-remember sentences to parrot back to anyone who asks me what I’m writing.

I stomped my feet as a small child might and repeated, “Stop, stop, stop!” over and over. “Arghhhh!,” I cried finally, hanging my head in defeat, sweat pouring from my face. “For chrissake, please just leave me alone!”

It was 5:30pm and swelteringly hot, with mosquitoes swarming up from the ground cover of the garden and sticking to my sweaty skin. As I had been for the past twenty minutes or so, I was unsuccessfully trying to attach the metal fastener required to hold the bare end of a garden hose onto the spigot. This process involves simultaneously squeezing two sides of a stiff metal band together, holding a tiny plate in place just so, threading a miniscule screw into that plate, and then screwing it all together without shifting any of the pieces or changing the pressure.

In my case, it also involved doing this in ninety-degree heat with about ninety-percent humidity while I had ninety mosquitoes brazenly attacking me.

Since my hands were occupied with the very special garden hose challenge, I was reduced to yelling at the insects dining on my arms and hands. I was alternately yelling at them to get away from me and yelling at them about why the hell can’t I just get a regular screw-in hose in this godforsaken country instead of this impossible fastener with all these little bits that keep falling out into the mosquito swamp?

And then I started stomping my feet.

In my own defense, there were special circumstances. The night before, a few mosquitoes somehow got into the net over my bed and attempted to murder me. By the time the sun rose, I was exhausted and my back and arms were covered in blood-speckled welts. The tone was set for what turned out to be a long, hot day of being harassed by whizzing, whining swarms of flying demons.

All was not well in paradise. These moments sometimes appear out of nowhere in tropical countries. When you feel that the natural world has too much power accompanied by a consciousness intent on using that power for the ends of destruction and oppression. The air is too heavy, the vegetation too lush, the insects too insistent. Beetles drop in waves onto the table where you’re trying to eat. Geckos scuttle by while you’re showering. A frog screams from the bushes, unable to escape the clutches of a snake. You have a sudden awareness that everything is growing too quickly.

Julian recently said that why there seem to be fewer diseases at home than here is for the obvious reason that there are fewer, and that’s due to the same reason that food doesn’t go off in the refrigerator. “The cooling effect lowers the metabolism of the whole life cycle,” he pointed out.

I thought about this in the evening after I’d finally thrown the hose to the ground and stomped out of my garden to take refuge at Mut Mee. As I lay in a hammock overlooking the riverbank, a cool breeze coming off the water scattered the dreaded mosquitoes, and I felt that I could breathe for the first time that day.

Despite my temper tantrum, I decided I really do like the idea of living in a place where the entire ecosystem has a higher metabolism. Where life is reproducing more quickly and generally idling at a much higher rate than the one my body is set to expect. The truth is: even though this aspect of the tropics can make me feel overwhelmed, it also gives a solid object to which I can attribute the terrible certainty I sometimes feel, no matter where I am, that there is something sinister and doomed happening just beyond the edges of my understanding.