Today is Chistmas Eve..So Merry Christmas everybody!

Written on December 24, 2007






The internet when it is slow is such a damn tease!

I am sorry I have so many great photos but the dang things just aren't downloading so I will just have to try later....Here's what I have..Please bare with my poor spelling as I forgot to spellcheck edit...Hey, give me a break! it's the hollidays....

Back in Bangkok…

“Its inhabitants are, as the man once said, ‘whores,
pimps, gamblers, and sons of bitches’, by which he meant Everybody. Had the man looked through another peephole, he might have said, ‘Saints and angels and martyrs and holy men,’ and he would have meant the same thing.”
























I first found this book, Cannery Row here at the Shanti Lodge two years ago. It was all torn and tattered and jammed in between several other much slicker volumes of literature who’s colorful spines competed for my attention as they ballanced themselves percariously on a tiny little mahogany shelf in Patti’s & my new and fancy room. This quiet little room was like shelter from the storm of the hot and crowded streets of Bangkok. It had cold blowing “aircon” and a nice clean bed in which to cool my jets after two months of some pretty dang tiring travel through China.

After I read that passage of Steinbeck’s written above, I felt like it had been sitting there like a time capsule written and waiting just for me to find it there. Its words resonated deep in my soul as it so defined my impression of this crazy city, and for that matter of course, the mysterious paradox of humanity in general.


Though I rarely read, I pored over Cannery Row until it was gone, and at its end, I was amused to find that here I was half way around the world, and this beaten up old paper back was stamped “Half priced books”- Austin, TX.






Bangkok or “Bangcock” as my dear friend & serrogut sister accidently (but very appropriately in many a sense) spelled it,
is just to physically dense and psychically complex for one as green and naïve as myself to even attempt to describe. Oh my, the myriad of dimensions and feelings that I experience here, it's too much to grasp...It would be really presumptious of me to give anything more than a a hip shot first impression…..bla bla bla..

Oh man, I can see where this prologue is going, and I gotta tell you, I’m really not feeling like getting all bogged down in the semantics of artful descriptions right now….The coffee has long worn off and I’m sleepy from the steamy stickyness of this late Thai afternoon. It feels a lot like June in my hometown of Victoria, Texas, where I remember actually sweating as I was drying off after a shower… Everyone else around here, like the tuk tuk driver is crashed out in the back of his buggy about 30 feet away from where I’m sitting in this out door cabana style restaurant sweating my ass off.

You know, I can remember what it was like without A/C, I didn’t even have it until 1992 when I finally got me a window unit That was a glorious day; but can you imagine a place this hot before electric fans? Holy smokes! I do recall going to a black church service in Bloomington with my beloved Lucille and Fenard when I was a kid and I remember everyone fanning themselves constantly like a parade of dragonfly wings made of wood handled white paper paddles with some kind of funeral home advertisment on them. I also remember watching glistening beads of sweat running down the beautiful smooth, dark chocolate skin all around me. I can’t remember the heat, I don’t think kids think about that kind of stuff much, At least I didn’t..But boy howdy I sure do these days..It’s hotter than hell today.

Hey I want to talk about the last few days because it seems that I miss so much if I don’t keep up with these thoughts. I love the writing once it gets going, but it’s the getting started that is hardest of course…It seems that notable experiences are coming really fast these days. Sometimes, within one of these experiences, I find myself so busy taking a mental snapshot of the moment (so I won’t forget about it later when I’m writing) that I wonder how much of the following moments I am missing on the uptake, but all said, I think my memory is getting stronger… So now that I’ve got a little writing inertia going,…..Jani ho!

More about Luang Prabang, Laos which is NOT anything like Bangkok..
There is an old saying that I've learned that goes like this:

The Cambodians plant the rice seed.
The Vietnamese grow the rice
The Thai people harvest the rice,
but the Lao people are content just watching it grow.

It took up a lot of time (though I’ll never say was wasted) getting Bar Mitzvah’d and all.

But because of all the fanfare, I might be the only “Farang” (westerner) who’s ever felt a little stress from working too hard in Luang Prabang, who’s name might also be translated as “the laid back capital of the world”.

I literally had to walk kind of fast once because I was late to Big Brother Mouse to deliver biographies that I’d promised writing and delivering to Link’s brother Khamla. Khamla is all business so I felt a little pressure to get the lead out as I had just left Chabad House to get my morning tafillin wrap.

Sounds like a breakfast fast food doesn’t it?

What was that Kinky Friedman line from his “Sold American” album?

Barrruhhhh atahhhh ahdahnoy..
What the hell ‘you doin’ back there boy?

After all was said and done, a week had already passed by. It was a great week though, hanging out with Kristi & Roger although Roger got food poisioning (bless his heart, he still managed to get it up to sing Patti happy birthday before he crashed for two days.)

There’s a lot to see and do in Luang Prabang all day and the night market is totally amazing at night..There’s some stuff that you can find there that ought to be in a museum.






My friend Philippe Klienfelter who is a leading authority and collector of Mayan “hatcha” (black jade hand tools).
He has taught me a little about these ancient tools and what to look for. Phillipe says that I have an “uncanny” ability to intuit the good ones..It’s easy, when I put a good one in my hand I immeadiatly start having these feelings of familiarity, like some sort of tactile memory..Others don’t “give off” that feeling. Here's one...







I also am fond of the Cobra snake & scorpian wine (which I unfortunately didn’t buy this time), old opium parifanalia such as the tiny bamboo and brass bladed poppy sap bleeding knives and primative poured bronze and silver opium trading ingots…So cool! This IS the golden triangle so..When in Rome…

Did I mention my favorite Lao coffee shop..This place buzzes with lots of chatty locals in the morning who are drinking glasses of sweet creamy mud and served up baby blue plates piled high with oily fried bread (“Men’s room in Tulsa” style) to dunk in it..Then you get a hot glass of Lao tea to chase it all down with. It’s a great thing! It’s the Starbucks of Luang Prabang. And it all only cost 30 cents..Well okay, along with two plane tickets..So actually this primative cup of swill cost more like $1500.30..But it dammit it’s worth every penny!

It was finally Sunday and Sunday was the day that Link said that he would spend with me, after the planned Saturday that he couldn’t.

What a great day he provided for me. We had a blast foraging the extremely rural country side in our hired tuk tuk for “Hoa Phi” which is Lao for “spirit house”. A lot of country folk were up for interviews so I learned a lot.

There are two kinds of “Hoa Phi”. The first is my favorite, and that’s the kind where a spirit is found in nature like inside of a tree or in the ground or in water etc..An offering of incense, sticky rice, water, flowers and a big yellow or a seven colored band (for good luck) of fabric ribbons are wrapped around a big old tree (usually a Banyon) and tied in a fluffy bow. This is the oldest type of shrine as it is based in anchient shamanistic “nature worship”..I can certainly get behind that…

The second is more about ancesters and found as little house or temple shaped shrines where ancestral spirits live. The Thai call this “Sarn cho tee”.

If one is properly decked out with the spirit’s best interest in mind, one might find inside this pretty little roofed reliquary (which should be as opulent a little structure as possible) objects like doll like figures of grand parents representing past generations, servants for adequate assistance, horses for transportation and elephants representing the heavy machinery/sentient family member that they been for centuries. There is always incense in a vase full of spent ashes, and usually there will be offerings of rice, water, chicken or fish, something sweet and maybe a cup of tea, all for the many spirits to indulge in as they decide the fate of your day according to your benevolence…

As I thought I understood, participants in this ritual are supposed to follow some pretty strict placement guidelines. Like for instance, the front is to always face east, or, the entire spirit house should be placed where the shadow of the family’s building never falls. It’s appearing that it doesn’t always quite happen that way and that maybe they either just don’t know better or that they are cool with doing the best that they can. They seem to range from awesome and imaculant to trashed out or even abandoned.


The spirits themselves can vary quite a bit in origin. Almost like our “ghosts”. Our first Hoa Phi encounter with an interview came just outside of Luang Prabang. It was filled with the spirit of someone who had died many years ago. That decised person’s home had long since been torn down and was now the partial structure where the lady whom we were interviewing and her family was living. It appeared that the badly cracked concrete slab had been poured a long time ago as a foundation for a sort of makeshift lumber mill that they kind of lived in and around.

I took note of the dusty mounds of faded blue and dirty cream colored clothes, scattered piles of rusty metal machine parts, hand tools with broken wooden handles, dishes, chop sticks and sawed off lumber laying all over the place and imagined that the spirit of the servant must be long gone.

Venturing out farther into the tropical Laotian countryside I began to notice that Link would only tell Pet, our Tuk tuk driver to pull over for the odd Hoa Phi…And at all of the ones that he requested that we stop at it seemed that there would be a really pretty young woman there who within a matter of minutes was like giggly putty in his hands.

Link was a novice monk from the time that he was five years old till he was seventeen. Apparently abstanance can create a lot of sexual energy that he is unconsciously transmitting en masse to all pretty young women in his path. He is very innocent about it all and it is very sweet to watch. It seems obvious that the dharma of Buddhism is so deeply ingrained in him, that when he encounters a woman, it seems that she just happens to be a much more delightful version of another human being to him.

So, here we were, me and my old friend Link, together in the happy hunting grounds, on a dual purpose safari. There seems to be an abundance of both kinds of beautiful spiritual vessels around for me to photograph and Link to flirt with. We must have worn poor Pet’s tuk tuk brakes pretty thin, because between Hoa Phi for me & girls for Link, we had to have stopped at least a hundred times along the way.

One of the more interesting stops was at a Hoa phi factory where they make them out of cast concrete. I was particulary amused by the “pissing boy” yard art statues that they produced. Especially the one with a beard that looked kind of like me..

What a day!

It was a cool 75 degrees or so and there wasn’t a cloud in the sky. Pet drove at a nice relaxed pace (between stops) through leafy green forests that receded into dusty red dirt yarded villages and then back into green forrest again. We passed over beautiful little streams on rickety one lane bridges that would squeak and groan under the slow passing load of us. We even came upon and made our way through a Hmong tribe festival..So colorful with their traditional outfits and pink balloons all stacked up in a row to be popped with a home made wooden dart by contestants in pursuit of a prize.

One of the things that I love most about being here is that every single person that I make eye contact with smiles.
So when I find myself in a place like this, I feel like I’m in heaven.

I was exhausted at the end of the day and Link went to dance all night at the big Lao discoteque that we passed coming in on the outskirts of town. I think he might have made dates that day to meet about thirty girls there…


Mission accomplished! But before the day was officially over we had to go back to Phusi (pussy) hill Monastery where we originally met and get an updated photo of the old classroom that He, Patti, Autumn and I built for him.


Link has come a long way since then for sure!!

It was bitter sweet leaving Luang Prabang..A lot happened there and I was beyond satisfaction. In fact if I was to decide to be done with gathering materials for the book, I could be at a fine stopping point right here.

The flight home was uneventful (except for the most amazing cloud formations) to the point that they had me carry on the crossbow that I’d bougt from an old (I guess he was Hmong?) ancient looking “man of the forrest” type dude….really primative. He wore a short brush sword in an old wooden scabbard and carried his own crossbow across his back.

This crossbow that I bought from him is so powerful that when I finally pulled back the twisted gut bow string and shot one of his beautiful little bamboo “bird” arrows, That thing instantly pierced the sky, and I swear it went all the way across the Mekong river. And that’s a long ass way..

I think they must have heard I was Bar Mitzvah’d so it was cool for me to carry on my crossbow and I gotta tell you, It feels good to be trusted with a lethal weapon on board a plane in the era of homeland security.

I was actually excited to get back to Bangkok because my old pal Jeff “Baje” Ragsdale was there for his last night as he was shoving off for home the next morning..He was passing through on his way back from trekking up to Khumbu or Mt. Everest base camp which even in his great physical condition he said it was the hardest trek he’d ever done…and he’s even done Kilamanjaro!

Seperately It seems like we are doing these big reflective solos at the same time. I think if you looked at chronological graphs of Jeff’s & my searching and growing lives, I think they’d be surprisingly parallel. And as I have mentioned before, Bangkok is one of the two most profound portals of my life’s experience, and I have never passed through here without seeing Jeff at least once.

The other “most” profound portal is the flagstone path that cuts through the little magical black bamboo and nandina forrest between my place & Patti’s.

It’s not one speck less exotic of an experience passing through that tunnel of love and then just grazing the tops of my last surviving hairs on her clothesline on the way to a happy embrace from my one and only at her cozy little house.

Awwwwh!

Oh..did I get carried away? Am I home sick and sentimental in Buddhaland on Christmas eve??..Hell yes!

It was sad watching Jeff get in that Taxi…That was the first time that I felt pretty much all alone here.

But hey, that’s what foot massages are for right?!




The day after jeff went home I had a good time..I got to hang out with Thana Lauhakaikul.



I met Thana maybe in 1994 or ‘95 out at my house at the lake one Thanksgiving. Pebbles brought him out for the celebration dinner with her as a guest. He was so sweet and I remember his vibe was very plesant to be around. Thana was a very well known art professor at UT and had been one of Jeff Ragsdale’s favorite art teachers, along with Vincent Mariani of course. Different than most art teachers, these guys were secure enough in their own selves and they had the wisdom to support Jeff by letting him go off into his own private Idaho rather than critiquing him to death.

Sounds great doesn’t it?

That was a week ago, so forget it if you’re trying to make sense of the timetable dear reader..

Since then,(I’ll make it short because my battery’s running low.) I had a very spirited meeting with Satayaphorn..Man is he gung ho! He’s got a big shot crew all ready to go including a friend of Thana’s who received his honorary PhD in fine arts when Thana did..What a gentle spirit of a man this elder fellow is. I really took to him, Manote is his name and he is quite notable in the design world here. He totally gets where I’m coming from and seemed to be able to relay the “whoa trigger” message to Satayaphorn, who is champing at the bit like a race horse at the gate to do this book(s)..That’s great isn’t it, to have such enthusiam pushing you along..It could be a lot different, I tell you.

I am surfing a lucky wave here and it’s very sweet! But if it were to turn south, then it’d just be fodder for a new chapter in the Spirithouse safari tale. It’s all good, because now I realize that I’m really not looking for anything but a front row seat to my life and I am definitely “ringside” these days!

It doesn’t get any better than this, as far as “that” is concerned, that’s for sure…Oh yes, I’m off to play with elephants and hopefully learn about a sacred ritual where the Khmer people pray to the bone structure of the elephant before mounting them up for working…

Then it’s off to Burma on the 31st..Oh Boy, Oh Boy, OH BOY!!!

I hope you have the best holiday ever!

And as my brother Kevin says..

Love “unt” kisses

Neb