Essays

The lost souls we see wandering into Thailand today seeking the warmth and solace of a woman, any woman, started out with the hippie movement back in the 1960’s.

Find me 40 coolies, 1 fat Indian to play a Maharaja, 30 middle aged westerners, 12 dusky girls one of whom must be exactly 7 months pregnant at the time we shoot. Oh, and I need 2 elephants as well.

Whether you are just visiting Thailand or actually live here, you must have seen this mysterious creature, most notably on Thai bank and insurance company buildings. The unmistakable figure adorns the façades of government ministries and all other official edifices.

This article is not my work. It was written for another list in 1999, and I have reproduced it here with the permission of the author. It was originally written in four parts, and this may be obvious to some.

. . . you are going to tumble down the well of love like a rag doll down a mine shaft. A mine shaft baby. Like a rag doll. And you are going to get penis sores.

Hello ThailandStoryites: Dana here to talk about one of my private pleasures. You know what private pleasures are. We all have them. Something inconsequential that gives pleasure.

The Flotto Lauro liner, The Sydney, berthed at the Penang docks, bringing me and my family to an exciting new world. I was just 13 at the time. My father had been posted to RAAF Butterworth for a three-year tour. This was the start of an adventure I will never forget. It shaped my life.

You are standing in the operating theater and a miracle is about to happen. Soon your wife will give birth to your (meaning the two of you) baby! The child will be the living embodiment of your social contract of equalness. The final point in the triangle of love and commitment and selfless instinctive mating.

Death in the West has been so sanitized that we rarely get to see it in all its glory. We use euphemisms to disguise the reality of death. Even when a body is displayed in an open casket, undertakers use makeup to hide any disfigurations. And we rarely see pictures of the gruesome reality in the newspapers.

Because of the excesses of the Christian and Muslim fundamentalists, I have been musing on Thai politics, history, and Buddhism for a while.

Of all the writers on Stickman, Dana is the most prolific. But if that’s all there was to him it wouldn’t count for anything at all.

"I went to (Thailand) because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived."

Some men know where they are supposed to be. Most men don't. Some men are where they are supposed to be. Most men aren't. Some men have been where they were supposed to be. Most men have not.

Last week I was cleaning up my e-mail inbox and suddenly started reading the e-mails from my wife when we first started our correspondence. Back then I used to wait eagerly every day for her e-mail.