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Zenwind
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Zorro (1957)
Firefly (2002)
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Well written OP/article.
Smoking THC weed is definitely Medicinal – especially when micro-dosing.
I’m an old guy, and smoking marijuana flower buds here in Thailand within the last year has significantly improved my health and well-being.
My testimony is here (posted in this forum’s Health section earlier this year):
https://aseannow.com/topic/1289233-health-benefits-of-high-thc-cannabis/
-Zenwind.
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It’s great to read the experiences of fellow old-folks about your walking routines. Keep it up, and keep inspiring the rest of us. I am 73 and have been benefiting immensely from my own walking program.
I walk a bit every day, but my current program is to take longer marches of 6 to 7 kilometers at least twice a week. On these marches, I do stair-climbing by climbing the pedestrian “flyover” bridges that cross my street. On my regular walking path, there are 5 older flyover bridges, plus 4 more on the two newer MRT elevated rail stations (one on the north and the south platforms of each station). That’s 35 steps up each of the old ones and 50 steps up the MRT stairways. On a round-trip walk, I zig-zag down the street and back up, crossing at every flyover, with a possible total of 14 stair-climbs in my 90-minute march. (Important: hydrate constantly!)
I hope to start incorporating hand-weights into my walking routines – which can be an amazing intensification of a workout. Decades ago, when living in America, I had a complete set of Heavy Hands™, a set of light hand-weights that can be adjusted from one pound in each hand up to much heavier combinations by one-pound increments. In those days, I would hike with these weights through forests and backroads, up hill and down, and the added aerobic and body-wide muscle-building effects were incredible, building strength right down to your toes. To keep the aerobic exercise going on the downhills and on the flats, I would pump my arms and swing them with vigor. At present, I have a pair each of one-kilo and two-kilo dumbbells, and I plan to initially start using them while climbing the stairways in my home, a total of 30 steps – up and down, up and down, etc.
I have suffered for decades from fibromyalgia, which involves chronic pain and debilitating fatigue, making it an extreme effort to get up and move. My upper back has been vulnerable to injury so I must use lighter weights. In the last few years, I have also seriously injured my lumber spine, causing intense sciatica pain – causing me to limp only short distances with a cane over a year ago – so I have to carefully limber up and stretch before exercising.
I have had a remarkable breakthrough in the last year – and my remedy may be controversial to some. Now that it is legal, before my longer marches I Micro-Dose a mere two tokes of Cannabis sativa, then I limber up with ultra-inspired Tai Chi, do some mindfully thorough range-of-motion calisthenics, then stretch my leg muscles very carefully. Then I do my long flyover climbing trek down and back up the street. My overall health has improved extraordinarily. (It’s not for everyone, but if anyone is further interested in this experience of mine, check out some of my posts on my Profile here, e.g., Health Benefits of High-THC Cannabis, and other posts.)
Keep walking everyone! It is not only healthy, it’s great fun.
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Here is a link to my original 15 March post here on Asean Now (in the subforum “Health and Medicine”). It is called “Health Benefits of high-THC Cannabis” and it documents my recent positive experiences with Micro-Dosing:
https://aseannow.com/topic/1289233-health-benefits-of-high-thc-cannabis/
I am 73 years old, and, quite simply, marijuana’s very significant health benefits to me are to get me to Exercise. Please read that original post to get the full story.
Here, I want to add some info to that OP. I only smoke cannabis two or three times a week, usually when I realize that I must break out of my old-guy laziness, get up and move more. I have refined my Micro-Dose intake to only two “tokes”, and they are quite modest inhalations – all I need.
My walking distances have increased (from 100 meters with a cane a year ago), and twice a week I usually do a seven-kilometer loop in around 90 minutes, with shorter walks on days in between. If I feel especially spunky, I will climb the 35-step pedestrian flyovers crossing the avenue and any even higher stairs to elevated train stations, up to 12 of these stairways in my seven K marching route. Nice workout.
The past month has seen 100-degree F heat on my midday marches, so I recommend diligent hydration. I always have a water bottle in hand and wear a quality mask because of the dirty air.
You may be skeptical of my experience, but my original post (linked above) is worth examination.
-Zenwind.
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I’ve lived in Thailand for 17 years at the same address (in Bangkruai, Nonthaburi), and postal service here has always been sketchy. But it is much worse since the Covid pandemic. I rarely get any mail at all. Christmas cards from family in the USA no longer arrive. Monthly bank statements from the USA will only arrive maybe one out of ten. Important bank packages have been returned to the US as “undeliverable”.
Over the years, I found that sending mail to the USA is impossible through the Thai Post – it never arrives. I use DHL to get it there.
The US Postal Service is famously bad, but these clowns in my Thai province make the USPS look competent.
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Intelligent Micro-Dosing is the Key / To the health benefits of THC.
Smoking Cannabis flower buds with high THC – which is much misunderstood, much maligned, and dismissed as a merely “recreational” herb – actually has incredibly profound therapeutic health benefits when used in judicious Moderation.
I am an old guy in my 70s, with numerous debilitating health problems, and Thailand’s recent complete decriminalization of marijuana, specifically including high-THC weed, has helped restore my health and enriched my life immensely, mainly through pushing me to Exercise.
What the THC high does is to motivate me, propel me and incite me to Move. To get me up and to Exercise, even though my pain, stiffness, fatigue, and inertia resist. (My Thai doctors emphatically tell me to “move more,” to exercise.) In my long lifetime of experience, there is nothing remotely like a micro-dose of weed to radically incite healthful movement and activity.
I have suffered from Fibromyalgia Syndrome (FMS) for over half my life with debilitating acute pain and chronic fatigue. Add to that a lower back injury within the last few years, with a compressed lumbar spine, leaving me with crippling sciatica pain. I had been reduced to a limit of limping barely 100 yards, leaning heavily on a cane. My life has been a screaming saga of pain and immobility until smoking high-THC cannabis within this last year.
A mini-dose of only two or three morning tokes of good Cannabis sativa before my shower is all it takes to put me into a therapeutic Gymnasium Mentality. It is unique in inducing me to complete my three healthy exercise components intensively and fully: Tai Chi, Calisthenics, and Stretching.
1. Tai Chi – I only know a handful of forms, but, after a couple of tokes of weed, I explore them, improvise on them, and I carefully and mindfully work out all my painful and stiff body areas. It loosens up my sorry old body like nothing else. I think of it as a Gymnastic Dance.
2. The Calisthenics that follow are light, carefully mindful warm-ups – limbering up and loosening up routines. They are derived from our initial warm-ups in US Marine Corps boot camp PT sessions in the 1960s. Light – not violent – comprehensive range-of-motion flexibility.
3. The Stretching is mainly my leg muscles, so I can march again on long walks in my Thai neighborhood. Stretching is very boring, and I tend to neglect a completely adequate stretching routine unless toking.
Two or three morning tokes and it is like I am transported to the Gym. I do the above 1, 2, & 3 exercise routines again and again throughout the day as much as needed. I really get into it. If you want to call this “recreational” use, so be it – but I will admit, it is great fun to feel physically fit and healthy again. I feel stronger and more pain-free at the end of that day.
It had been a long time since I was able to walk my normal multi-kilometer neighborhood marching loop. I could barely walk, even with a cane. After several weeks of cannabis THC therapy (two or three tokes in the morning, followed by inspired repetitions of the three above exercises), I increased my walking distances in increments, and I finally completed this loop again. Now I can march again, comfortably, no cane, and I have been going further and further distances ever since. Feeling stronger every day. It is great to feel so healthy again.
I must emphasize again that this is a profoundly significant effect, with an astounding difference between exercising on a day when I micro-dose THC versus days attempting to exercise without it. It is the huge increase in the degree of Motivation to Exercise that makes THC beneficial therapeutic medicine. (In my old-age, I tend to be lazy, and I consider laziness a bit of a sin.) Smoking a micro-dose of weed makes this old guy Get Up and Move Out, like never before.
If you want to smoke weed that energizes you to exercise, as it does for me, choose the C. Sativa strain. Used in judicious Moderation, it is wonderfully therapeutic. Smoke it on your feet – do not sit down or stall out – have your exercise shoes on, and have a To-Do List formulated in advance to steer you through your day’s activities. Excelsior!
Remember: Micro-dosing makes sense. If you drink way too much alcohol, you tend to get stupid – I know I do. Likewise, if you smoke too much cannabis, you also get a bit stoned and may lose track of your exercise purpose. Be sensible. Be moderate. Enjoy your fitness. It is fun to be healthy.
“Intelligent Micro-Dosing is the Key/ To the health benefits of THC.”
-Zenwind.
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Bourbon Street Restaurant and Oyster Bar. BTS Ekkamai, north on Ekkamai about 200 yards on west side of street. Authentic Cajun food, New Orleans style, plus great variety of many other cuisines. I go there for their Reuben Sandwiches and great service.
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I light Mosquito Coils downstairs before dark and often use spray repellants on my ankles when going out.
DEET is still the gold standard in repellants, but it is a solvent, so you must be very careful and selective using it. E.g., it delaminates layers of shoe or sandal soles and often melts plastic and other materials. I rarely use it here unless outside for extended periods at night when needing many hours of protection. Around home, I use weaker repellants, such as Citronella spray, which only lasts an hour or so for me.
For mosquito Coils, I put them in a steel dish with a lid (at least six inches in diameter). If I don’t need the coil’s smoke anymore, I put the lid back on, which extinguishes the coil and saves the remainder for another time. When sitting outside at night, I sit in front of a fan with a lit coil at my feet. When using my (outdoor) toilet or shower, I put a burning coil in the room a few minutes before using. The steel dish makes it easy to move around.
I always have a fan blowing on me when sleeping.
-Zenwind.
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I don't have much success either sending or receiving mail here in Nonthaburi, but I did receive that SSA mailing earlier this year. I mailed the form and its envelope to my sister in the USA via DHL, and she re-mailed it to SSA. (Although she said the DHL envelope had been opened.) She remailed it Registered.
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Rooster, some Americans like me may honor you by calling you a "libertarian" (lower case "l"). That is, a "classical liberal", in the revolutionary British tradition of the Levelers, Locke, the Glorious Revolution and Cato's Letters, and in the American tradition of Thomas Jefferson et al. We may want to conserve such perennial values of personal freedom, but please do not ever call me a "conservative". Both Left and Right lust for obscene amounts of power these days.
Live and let live. Refuse the seduction of acquiring political power to dictate the lives of others. Tolerate peaceful differences. Let me alone, and I will tolerate you.
Thank you for your above meditation.
-Zenwind.
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For many, many years, I have had trouble mailing letters to the USA, even when registered. They simply do not arrive there. And incoming mail from the USA is seldom better, especially in the last few years of the plague. In email communications, I've been told that all Christmas cards, bank mailings, etc. mailed to me have been returned to the US. I live in Nonthaburi on the rim of greater Bangkok.
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Good OP questions. And good forum member replies. I retired here 15 years ago, but my perspective is limited since I live on the outer rim of greater Bangkok, am the only farang in the neighborhood, and I also tend to be a bit of a hermit. Through the years, I have attended a routine monthly meet up with Western friends in the city, and I’ve seen a lot these folks eventually return to their home countries. Only a few stayed.
In 2006 my US dollar went a lot farther – which was a shock after the exchange rate changed – yet I live frugally and can get by. As a war veteran, I was initially horrified by Thaksin’s “drug pusher” executions, where he had his cop triggermen gun down a couple of thousand citizens – extra-judicially; no due process – in a very short period of time. (Welcome back to SE Asia!)
I’ve seen the elections, coups, “elections”, coups, etc., etc., and I do not have any immediate hopes of the situation improving. And there are extreme cultural/political divides here that are much like in the USA and elsewhere. Some things never change.
What leaves me most pessimistic about much of the world, including Thailand, is that there are few, or often no, traditions of the Rule of Law, with the principled constitutional restraint on any government’s power to violate the legitimate rights of every individual.
This lack of strict control over political power means that the worst villains will claw their way to the top via any means (see Hayek’s classic 1944 take on the “gangster states of Europe” in the first half of the 20th century). Even democracy can be “the tyranny of the majority” (Madison) if majority prejudice is not constrained by law. (Ask Socrates about his experience with unrestrained democracy.)
Still, I love living in Thailand – despite the heat – and intend to stay. I don’t break the law, if I can help it, and I’m too poor to be the target of corrupt cops or politicians. It is a harbor of peace.
The good things in the last 15 years? Steady improvements in urban rail transit have revolutionized my life, connecting me like never before. I don’t feel like an absolute outsider in my neighborhood, even though I’m the lone farang. I have a fine Thai wife and am (the odd) part of her family. And I dig the Buddhist vibe, although my dharma style is more secular than most.
-Zenwind.
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I have never been able to do the online 90-Day Report at Nonthaburi Immigration. So, I always do the in-person visit. I must say that their office has been much better, quicker, and more efficient recently. Smooth and professional. And not crowded.
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I was born in 1950 in NW Pennsylvania. On our black and white TV during the 50s, I watched the series, Lowell Thomas Adventures. The episode that riveted me was the documentary of Mt. Everest’s first (proven) ascent, with Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norkay summiting in 1953. I saw men struggling upward under heavy loads into wind and storm. As a little kid, I thought, “Wow!”
In the 1960s, my teenage years, I was into Boxing. My early hero was Emile Griffith, a welterweight moving up into middleweight. In 1963 My father and I watched his live fight on TV with an unknown fighter who knocked out my hero in the first round! This unknown was Rubin “Hurricane” Carter. Later, I admired the incredible boxing skill of Cassius Clay, but when he was stripped of his title for political reasons, I stopped following the sport.
Auto Racing was also a sport I followed in the 60s. My father told me stories of Sterling Moss, and we would listen to the Indy 500 race every Memorial Day on radio on our family picnic. My Formula-1 hero, Graham Hill, won it in 1966.
In the 1970s, returning from Vietnam, Mountaineering became my passion. It was hard to follow closely because it is considered such a minor niche sport, thus not in the news much. But I devoured the books and periodicals found in climbing shops, getting the slightly delayed news.
Reinhold Messner was the Man. When I was a beginning technical climber, he was THE inspiration to me with his bold solo ascents, and in his well-written personal accounts he articulated the psychological and physical training attitude required for extreme climbing. Every year in the late-70s, several news items revealed his new record-breaking adventures in the mountains. I would stumble down from a (rather humble) solo climbing expedition and go right to the nearest climbing store, heading for the book section. Here is a new book by Messner: he did what?!? His pace of newer and ever more audacious extreme climbs was astounding. Breathtaking.
E.g.: As a training climb, Messner, with Peter Habeler, did record time climbing the North Face of the Eiger. In 1978, he and Habeler were the first to climb Mt Everest without supplementary oxygen. (Messner never used oxygen, ever.) In 1980, he was the first to climb Everest solo, bottom to top with no support. He was the first to climb all 14 of the highest mountains in the world (all over 8,000 meters). Many climbers since – most of them inspired by Messner – have set newer records. But in those days when I was learning the craft, I saw him as the most incredible sportsman on the planet. He astonished me like no other athlete.
-Zenwind.
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The Rock Pub, at BTS Ratchathewi (N1). The great music is the foremost attraction. Food is available. Staff is great. My home away from home.
-Zenwind.
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5 hours ago, Emdog said:
I'm waiting for Godot vaccine.... that's my choice. Should be here any time now.....
I am with you here, also waiting and (forlornly) hoping for the promise of the Waiting for Godot vaccine. It seems to be a fitting dream for us who still cling to any fragments of hope in this mad 21st century.
What would Beckett do?
-Zenwind.
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Can anyone advise me on where to find Tincture of Benzoin in Bangkok? My usual pharmacist is unable to get it for me, but I’m quite sure I was able to get a small vial of it here in Thailand a dozen years ago or so (although I don’t remember how I got it).
Tincture of Benzoin, for me, is an old Boy Scout remedy for general foot abrasions and blisters. It toughens the skin and prevents it from getting ripped up. (It is smelly and sticky, but it works.) It also helps athletic tape to adhere securely to a wound, with a bit of antiseptic help in the bargain.
My feet have always abraded easily, in Boy Scouts, in the Marines in Vietnam, and in my many years of wilderness expedition adventuring since then. (Ok, maybe I’m still just a perennial “Tenderfoot”!)
These days, in Thailand, I wear sports sandals in this hellish heat, and my feet get torn up on long marches. Tincture of Benzoin helped years ago, but I cannot find it now. Any help acquiring it now would be most appreciated. Thanks in advance.
-Zenwind.
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I haven’t been to the Hard Rock Cafe Bangkok in many, many years. Expensive, but it had a very cool a/c system and great memorabilia on the walls. It was a good stopover after visiting matinees at the once-great Apex theaters in Siam Square: Lido, Scala and Siam (before they burned the latter down in 2010).
My wife and I used to stop into the Hard Rock for lunch after finishing our excruciating visits/ordeals at the Immigration Office when I (who live in Nonthaburi) had to use that hot, uncomfortable office located further to the south in Bangkok. We relished the cool, clean atmosphere after the immigration nightmare.
The last time I was at the Hard Rock was probably a decade ago on a visit to Bangkok for movies, shopping and music. For me, it was a stop in a comfortable a/c place where I could kill time and get a meal before walking the mile or so north to hear better music at The Rock Pub.
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Yanhee International. I've been getting great all round treatment there for years. It is now accessible via MRT.
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My local AmVets clubhouse back in Pennsylvania bestowed an honor on Hanoi Jane when they inaugurated, in the Men’s Room, the “Jane Fonda Memorial Urinal”, with the above photo permanently glazed/laminated onto the face of the bowl.
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"Duh ... Matt Damon."
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Lock him up!
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I met most of my very few friends here in Thailand through the Meet Up websites, but also in several Bangkok music venues, or a couple of English-speaking Thais in my immediate neighborhood.
I’ve lived here on the fringes of greater Bangkok for just under 20 years after retiring from teaching in the USA. My best friend is my wonderful Thai wife, although our language communications are less than comprehensive – since I have an acute disability in foreign language auditory-processing (from childhood accidental brain damage to my left Planum Temporale), and her English is rudimentary. We get along very well nonetheless. I am a life-long hermit by nature, so I live easily without excessive social contacts.
Upon moving to Thailand, I found the Meet Up websites extremely helpful in finding like-minded folks. Movie groups, book clubs, outdoor and recreational groups, philosophical and political groups, etc. My oldest and best friends here are from a local political Meet Up group (I am a classical liberal/libertarian).
In my years here, I have looked up music venues online and wandered through many Bangkok bars searching for great Blues and Rock music. Many years ago, the great Peter Driscoll (an English expat here, now retired) played phenomenal old-time Rock n Roll and Rockabilly in long-gone venues like Tokyo Joe’s, Nomads, etc. Peter is a treasured friend and an incredible encyclopedia of Rock history, and I really miss his live performances.
Most of my Thai friends are Rock n Roll musicians who have long played at The Rock Pub. I have been a regular there for a long time and have got to know these bands who love Rock like I do. We talk about our memories and experiences with Rock music, and how it has enriched our lives. This venue is my ultimate home away from home. Dear friends.
I also have a couple of English-speaking Thai friends in my neighborhood, who I talk to weekly on my walking rambles, and we share our wisdom and insights.
I have very few friends here, but they are well-chosen and cherished.
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It is said that there is to be no singing in bars. So, does this mean that live music by house bands is prohibited?
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Live music venues
in ASEAN NOW Community Pub
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The Rock Pub, my city home-away-from-home.