That Slightly Ominous Pre-visa-run Tingle ?

[orang37]

Sawasdee, Khrup,

The Fates conspire again for visa expiry on the 16th. which means, at least, a run up to Mae Sai for a fifteen-day-top-up. Or a one week here to get around the Songkraan closures followed by the Vientiane thang, maybe ?

Watching, through the media (internet, since I am, by choice, living with no teevee right now), what is going on in Bangkok, hoping in my heart that the conflict will magically fade (again) without another inglorious chapter of damage to the country being written ...

I feel a little ... paranoid ? ... about the possible "spillage" of the conflict over into the week of Songkraan in its modern incarnation as veneers of Mardi Gras, Carnaval, over "old ways." Not that those old ways didn't include some riotous hot stuff however (read David Wyatt).

Normally I kind of psychicly "brace myself" any time a visa run is coming up, I note : there's always the possibility of the unexpected.

I hope what I am feeling are just "small personal tremors" (I certainly have no psychic powers !) : I have long felt that there is no such thing as a Farang who understands this country; in fact, I've developed a working hypothesis that the "degree" of understanding of this country by a given Farang is inversely, and exponentially, related to the extent to which said Farang believes he/she understands this country and makes pronouncements on it using authoritative modes of discourse. Of course I am not speaking here, indirectly in reverse, of the silences of the stupid, the awestruck, the c***struck, the dumbstruck, or the Lambs

Hope you are feeling Great and preparing to have a happy Songkraan in whatever way you like !

~o:37;

p.s. why write this ? well : anxiety shared is anxiety diluted ? uhhhh ... do I feel better now ? ... uhhh ... no.

[Blinky Bill]

Couldn't you use plain English for us mere mortals?

[Maejo Man]

Sawasdee, Khrup,

The Fates conspire again for visa expiry on the 16th. which means, at least, a run up to Mae Sai for a fifteen-day-top-up. Or a one week here to get around the Songkraan closures followed by the Vientiane thang, maybe ?

How many "15 day top ups" have you have so far? Why not make the effort and apply for a proper visa?

Edited April 9, 2009 by Maejo Man

[gpdjohn]

Couldn't you use plain English for us mere mortals?

Scary..

I actually understood him.

Sometimes you just have to use all that money you spent on the 4 or more years partying at the University.

One time, just one time so far, I have actually had to use that calculus class a way back when and the instructor said " you'll thank me for this"... cannot remember if I did at the time.

Rock on Orang37...

[orang37]

Couldn't you use plain English for us mere mortals?

A very reasonable request, Khun Blinky, but a slight problem is that I am not exactly "mortal," as you are. Let me explain.

Perhaps you heard of the thirty-six orang-outangs that were found hidden in the clinic of a private zoo in Bangkok when the Thai inspectors ars raided the zoo several years ago ? They were confiscated amidst great publicity (what's not to like about setting kidnapped animals free ?) and supposedly returned to Kalimantan, Poontang, and other environments suitable for Orangs.

Well, there was a thirty-seventh, me, myself, a husky male around thirty years of age, and I was very sick, but I had escaped that hel_l-hole of a private zoo where I was expected to act "cute" for visitors instead of writing elegaic poetry and composing philosophical tracts on the fractal structure of time as experienced in Tantric Yab-Yum with female Orangs.

I fled into the giant craven bleeding polluted heart of Dragon's-Breath-City (that would be Bangkok), and hid in what was then the excavation for the underground part of the new train system.

An old farang wandered by; I could read his mind which was a virtual sewer of bar girls, grandiosity, pretensions to creative and intellectual gifts camouflaged as obscenely grotesque verbiage. A kind of walking salad-bar of vocabulary and mutant conceptual vegetation.

I realized he was dying, and I knew that I was dying, and I called upon Ur-Orang the Merciful : from the depths of my red-haired chest, the great chamber of the soon-to-be-subway echoed with my special mantric hoots : and it worked ! Yes, a singularity, as your physicisits would call it, a transmigration of Soul, I moved my Soul, my Ka-Ka, into this old Farang's body; bought the farm some would say. And with my primeval vitality, my pneuma, my chi, my elan vital, I filled his sagging body with new energy, completely overhauling his serotonin, dopamine, acetyl-choline, nor-adrenalin, nor-epinephrine systems, etc. You might say I gave him the valve job that saved his life.

But, here's the deal : when I communicate through this farang body I have now pretty much rehabiltated, I have to use his old linguistic systems; in essence I have to kind of "throw" what I want to say in Orang (which is to human speech as pure artesian aquifer water is to Klong water) over to his neo-cortex and forebrain to be rendered into morphemes, and finally into phonemes, and, ultimately, into glyphs that you can read.

So, as much as I would like to communicate with you in what, for you, may be more accessible speech, this dam_n ghost of a vanity-filled Farang keeps needlessly obfuscating the meta-message with his tendency towards persiflaginous peroration, synecdoche, and euhermization. It's pathetic really, but, on some level, I feel sorry for him : maybe his excessive metaphors are the last straws of what you call "ego" he's got to scratch his arse with.

regards, ~o:37;

[Blinky Bill]

Oh okay. Now I understand.

[Ulysses G.]

I have long felt that there is no such thing as a Farang who understands this country; in fact, I've developed a working hypothesis that the "degree" of understanding of this country by a given Farang is inversely, and exponentially, related to the extent to which said Farang believes he/she understands this country and makes pronouncements on it using authoritative modes of discourse.

Me too.

[Mapguy]

I have long felt that there is no such thing as a Farang who understands this country; in fact, I've developed a working hypothesis that the "degree" of understanding of this country by a given Farang is inversely, and exponentially, related to the extent to which said Farang believes he/she understands this country and makes pronouncements on it using authoritative modes of discourse.

Me too.

Gosh! Another well-thought-out comment!

Cheers!

[RoastLamb]

In his first post the original orangutan loudly proclaims, "I certainly have no psychic powers!" Then in his second post he claims to be able to 'read the mind' of a passing human.

I don't know about anyone else, but there are certain inconsistancies in this thread that lead me to believe that this orangutan is lying to us. I do hope you explain yourself, OO, as I fear the weight of this issue on my mind may cause me to be unable to sleep through the coming night.

Edited April 10, 2009 by RoastLamb

[IanForbes]

Did Orang just buy a dictionary and is now trying out all the words? Or, did someone just give him a thesaurus? His ponderings read like one of the letters from my Thai girl friends.

[orang37]

In his first post the original orangutan loudly proclaims, "I certainly have no psychic powers!" Then in his second post he claims to be able to 'read the mind' of a passing human.

I don't know about anyone else, but there are certain inconsistancies in this thread that lead me to believe that this orangutan is lying to us. I do hope you explain yourself, OO, as I fear the weight of this issue on my mind may cause me to be unable to sleep through the coming night.

Khun RoastLamb,

You certainly have an acute angle, and I appreciate your invitation to make this angle right.

I certainly do not have any psychic powers : that one episode I mentioned where I could see into this old Farang's mind happened, I believe (without total certainty), because we were both near death, both so desperate. It might have been a pre-Miracle warm-up : like ... you know ... the way these sexy women come out in skimpy outfits before your human games, and ritually expose their underarms sending their pheromones out into the crowd and inducing a testosterone mania that contributes emotional fervor to the ensuing ritual combat over an icon of fruit. The old Farang and I were like hot dogs outside their buns at the time. It was one of those Bangkok nights, a short-time thing, a one-off, I think, a freak doppler-shift on the cosmic radio.

But, my Ka-Ka was stronger, and I doubt if he had passed his Ka-Ka into me that he would have been able to do the kind of valve job I did on him and survive. Of course I had the advantage also of knowledge of Ur-Orang and the secret mantras required for emergency transmigration. From what I can see of the old Farang's brain, the only mantras he knew were strange fragments of Thai like : "bah-beah you nai ?"

The question of whether I am lying to you, down on you, or with you, is also important. And I am afraid I have to "hedge my bets" here by saying that in Orang thought, every thought is considered to be a form of conscious lying, but thought may convey unconscious truth, in fact it is very impolite to even think about truth. The closest thing in Orang thought to your human terms "sh**thead" or "bullsh**t artist" is probably best translated as "one who tells the truth to himself and believes it."

I'm afraid this won't translate well, but I ask you to think of a mirror, and, now, imagine that every thought is like a breath : and that breath mists the mirror temporarily. While the mirror is misted a friend comes over, and after the courtesy of sniffing each others' <deleted> is over, you take turns telling each other what shapes you see in the mist in the mirror. Now the mist evaporates : for a moment you, and your friend, see each other face-to-face, and that is good. And now you can take turns picking the lice from each other's hard-to-reach places, or go find fruit, or have sex, or sleep. For us the "shapes in the mirrors" were the Truth and everything else is, as one of your human schizophrenics once said : "through a glass darkly."

As far as I can tell, the human way is completely different, with humans deeply believing what they think is true, and sometimes suspecting that what they think may contain unconscious lies. But I notice that the human always suspects other people's thoughts of being full of unconscious lies more than their own. Again, in Orang, that is reversed : we suspect ourselves most at all times, and others much less.

Who is more likely to tell the Truth : a being convinced he is a liar, so dubious about the existence of Truth that every thought he has is essentially followed by a subliminal thought that says : "and that's probably a lie," or a being who unquestioningly believes he is telling the Truth ? In Orang we have no thoughts like those conveyed when humans use words like "righteousness," and "absolutely." Could that be why we also have no psycho-somatic diseases, no anxiety attacks, no death from heart-attack, and are so generally carefree and happy ?

Again, I appreciate the spirit of inquiry in your response, and I apologize in advance if this lunatic Farang neo-cortex, and Broca's area, and all that re-plumbed neural stuff that my beautiful thoughts must go through to reach you mangles what I am trying to say into a salad-bar of stale verbiage. I did the best I could with the Farang I had.

regards, ~o:37;

p.s. one of you Humans, Walt Whitman, really could have been an Orang when he wrote :

"Do I contradict myself?

Very well then I contradict myself,

(I am large, I contain multitudes.)"

That's one of the few useful things I found in the junkyard of that old Farang's brain.

Edited April 10, 2009 by orang37

[RoastLamb]

Thanks, Orang, for that clear and concise explanation. I will now be able to commence my evenings rest with little fear of any dangerous destraction, albeit with my new and unexpected knowledge of the psychological workings of an English-speaking orangutan fizzing around my mind like an angry bee trapped inside a jamjar.

[Blinky Bill]

Xanax helps.

[realthaideal]

I'm sure our dear Orangutan-Hominid Hybrid feels a twitter of a tingle more than he lets on, as he must certainly have taken a handful of the red pills before falling down that rabbit hole and popping up in Chiang Mai Land. It is a pleasure to meet a lyrical and self-effacing Orang though, for it isn't often that one does. Would that my words could tangle n weave, delight n mushify the brains of readers the way his do. But alas! I am just another average simian typist (AST).

[Lami]

It is a pleasure to meet a lyrical and self-effacing Orang

Agreed!

Again, I appreciate the spirit of inquiry in your response

Offer your messages often, Oh Orang!

[IanForbes]

I now understand why there is double pricing at the Chiang Mai zoo. It's to supply one of our members here with a computer and internet connection...

When asked his knowledge of writing skills he replied...

Meanwhile, his friend just sat up in a tree and sulked because he wasn't allowed the use of a computer.