Thailand loves a good a protest. Most of it isn’t worth mentioning. Last year (I think) the international airport in BKK was overtaken and held hostage, and parliament was stormed. For me, even living close to the centre of the city, daily life didn’t change. Even when the government or military announces a nighttime curfew, you can still drink beer on a plastic seat by the side of the road until 4am and remain blissfully unaware. I arrived here when the country was under martial law, and, meh, all these words are kind of scary, but the reality is pretty mundane.

So the latest round has had protesters locking down the central business district for nearly two months. Traffic is terrible. The company I work for has been completely ass fucked by it. There have been nasty street battles with grenades and machine guns. All in all, the most serious stuff happening in my three years here. If you want to know the details of it… read about it for yourself, I’m too lazy and vastly under-qualified to have any real opinion. It is kind of surreal to see places I usually go to par-tay blockaded with car tires and sharpened bamboo spears manned by guys with covered faces, or 18 yr old kid soldiers/police in full riot gear.

The current seems to be partly a result of the massive income disparity here and lack of social security, partly along ethnic lines, partly on issues I don’t want to mention, but mostly just greed. I really don’t care much for any of this, except for how it affects me directly, cold motherfucker that I am, and that I’m should really keep abreast of it because of work.

What is interesting is how wired this whole thing is (hence the title of this, except for the sexy part, that just adds some spice). Half of this little hoe-down is taking place in cyberland. Every player has himself a twitter account and a facebook. I don’t mean loud mouth opinionated dickwads, I mean the politicians and riot leaders. Tweets make front lines in national newspapers. When things got really exciting on April 10th, twenty something dead and over 800 injured in a single night of serious party time, I heard it first on twitter, then dusted off the old TV remote (it was under the bed somewhere). This is the one where bombs went off on Khao San road, which, if you have ever traveled to Thailand, I’m sure you went to and wandered around in baggy hippy pants and horribly sunburnt skin, never showing the photos to your rivet head buddies back home.

I don’t mean to compare this to the revolution of television and its impact during the Vietnam War. What we have here is more of a refinement and broadening of what happened there. Vietnam was a shock because you could on the ground footage of what war looks like. The Thai situation is mobile phone videos of street riots. We are still only talking video footage, and this is also far cry from total war. The big difference is we’re not talking about professional journalists or embedded lap dogs. This is material from ordinary people on the ground straight on to the internet. Make of that what you will (on a side note, forget the Iraq/Afghan wars, if you want to see some real action check out the Chechen wars).

And so, Youtube is a point of action action action… Just go in and search for “red shirts”… you will get a lot of stuff from previous year’s party times, but if you want to see some really entertaining stuff look for the riots on April 10th at Democracy Monument and the Sala Daeng BTS grenade attack. Here are some random ones:

One from the democracy monument riot. Listen to the music around 00:50 + the funny lights and you will be in Apocalypse Now, the bridge scene…

Just after the Silom grenade attack. The wounded white guy sounds Australian. Damn that accent…

On a more old school note, most groups run their own TV stations and radio stations and do their darnest to fuck up the others by blocking signals or physically attacking the broadcasting buildings. The protesters have even been making propaganda VCDs (a thing of the past really, and they never really caught on in the west) to give away to people.

Given how often my American co-workers are asked by people back in the States “is there running water and electricity in Taiwanland?” (I joke not), this might come as a bit of a surprise. Like I said, this place is one wired up nation. The poorest slums have satellite dishes. The internet might run through cables thrown up in trees, but every mofo, from rich to poor, is a net using mofo. This latest shin ding has really highlighted it.

It has been a while since I have done anything for the site. Curse my lethargic sole. It is 11pm and I’m on a holiday trip around the south of Thai and I’m a little bored, so I thought it would be a good idea to unzip, unroll, and rub it around the table a little bit. 

So to start with, as chance would have it… what the learn-ed Kong thinks of the south of Thailand.  

“What?” you say, why in the hell is the dark Jedi master Kong swanning around on tropical islands? Well… because, much as I’m still most totally bad-ass, white sand and freakishly fluorescent water turns me on, and I hope your still enjoying going to the same damn one-industrial-room-one-goth-room nightclub you have been going to for the last ten years. Snap. 

This is my second trip down here in 2 months. Once with a co-worker and again now with a girlfriend (who is currently asleep, hence me being left alone with my little thoughts). Just to make things clear… I have been to Krabi town, Ao Nang, Kor Phi Phi, Phuket town, and most of the beaches on the west side of Phuket island. Not a particularly comprehensive list (and nowhere near the little skirmishes the Thai army is having with some antsy pants folk down there). As you might be able to guess from the list, these are pretty much all tourist hot spots, and coming here has been my first real look at tourism in Thailand, despite having been here for a year and a half now. 

Coming here is almost the same as going back to the old country for a visit. I mean I am surrounded by a majority white people, the only Thais you see are service people and the occasional bar-girl (or boy) going long-time… and oh boy does it remind me of everything I hate about white folk. People say the culture shock is the worst when you arrive back to your country of origin, and in a lot ways that is what happened when I arrived in the south. 

So here is a quick piece on what I saw and thought while doing the south thing. 

Dear lord and the sweet virgin Mary do people have shitty tattoos. Being in a hot beach like place, there are a lot of shirtless people around, and a lot of shit tattoo work to be seen. It is sort of a two-fold problem as I see it. One, it is shitty work done by shitty scratchers. Two, getting your skin roasted into an unhealthy shade of purple brown is not the best thing for one’s ink. The next time I see a blurry dark green un-comprehensible mess on a man of just 30yrs of age I think I will open a can… and I’m sure that time will be all of 8 hours away when I get out of bed and venture out of my hotel room. 

And another thing, never ever get a tattoo in a language you don’t understand. I mean NEVER. There are always the urban legends of the girl who had “fuck my dumb white slutty ass” tattooed on her shoulder in Japanese thinking it was saying “butterflies and ponies are just AWESOME… urban legends because I don’t think even the worst tattooist would do that as a generalization. In most cases I think it is just language barriers coming into play. I have seen quite a few Thai tattoos on the skin of foreigners here, and being with a girl who is Thai, I now have it on good authority that most of what is coming out just doesn’t make any sense…. It reminds me of a good story I read in the BME encyclopedia. A Spanish guy wanted and English tattoo expressing the fashionably existentialist nature of his lifestyle on his chest. Rather than getting “crazy boy”, he got “boy crazy”. Unless you’re fluent in a language, perhaps you shouldn’t get it permanently etched in your skin.  

It has been in Phuket that I have also had my first real experience with the boys in brown (i.e. the police). It was really something which I have had coming for a while; riding a motorcycle without a license or a helmet. I do it quite a bit here, so it was really just a matter of time. It’s the kind of thing that would lead to one nasty ass fine in most western countries and most people wouldn’t dream of doing it. Here, it is more or less something that everyone does, and occasionally the gods with give you one up the ass just to let you know who is really calling the shots. So, amongst a myriad of uncertified and un-helmeted motorcycle driver, I was the turtle that didn’t quite make it past the shore. 

What was interesting about it was the finely tuned symbiotic system in place. The police were at a street you are almost forced to drive through due to a heap of plastic barriers on the road (a point which will be elaborated on later), and more conveniently within a short distance of the police station. The police stop people, write the ticket whereupon they take the keys from your bike. Then you have to take a motorcycle taxi to the police station to pay the fine. You don’t even have to tell the driver where you are going, he’s at that street because taking people to the station on a round trip each day is his bread and butter. So the police are making a tidy profit, and so are the motorcycle taxi drivers… half of whom aren’t wearing helmets. 

The whole process was very polite. The man at the station even tried to teach some Thai, which is normally nice except that he was doing it while shoving is dick in my asshole with his fine. The funniest part was that after returning and getting my keys back we headed off, only to be lead back to the exact same spot through a series of no left/right turn signs, random one way streets and plastic barricades. So yet again I got pulled over. I pulled out the ticket I had just paid and then the original cop who got me came over and told the new cop I had already done my bit for the day. The cop then wrote down the date on the ticket (so I can’t try the same stunt tomorrow) and that was that. I suppose that’s how it is… breaking the law can be punished once a day only, after that the same crime can be repeated with impunity. Good to know. 

As to be expected, the prices of just about everything are pretty ridiculous down here. Getting sick of going to stupidly priced restaurants, we ended up eating at the street stalls with the locals. This was the first time I witnessed the fabled one-price-for-Thais-another-for-Whitey legend. One place we stopped pulled out two menus, one in English and another Thai, with massively different prices. I cannot read any Thai, but I can speak enough to order food, which I did, and when it came to the cheque the desired effect was not achieved. Assholes, enough said. It did make me appreciate my little corner of BKK so much more, where folk are decent and prices aren’t based on skin colour. 

Another interesting point is the readily available dope down there (I use the word ‘dope’ in the American sense, ie. the expansive way). This wasn’t so much on Phuket, though I’m sure it’s plenty there. On Phi Phi it borders on the absurd. There are very few Thai people on the island, and those that are there seem to be all dope-slinging, Muslim, long-tail drivers (long-tails are a kind of small boat with a lawn mower engine slapped onto a propeller sticking out on a long shaft behind the boat… hence the long tail). It would be kind of a nice lifestyle in a way… spending all day stoned, driving fat Russians around tropical islands safe in the knowledge you are probably the only fit enough to swim back if the thing capsizes (and yes, I say Russians, Americans don’t have the money for tropical holidays anymore haha). We went out with a guy called Aom, and the first thing we saw in the boat was a big bamboo bong. The rest of the time spent on the island, wherever we went, there was Aom trying to sell us pot, big stoned grin on his face. 

But enough of the shit… If you can ignore the prices and the crowds it really is a beautiful area. Is it worth flying half across the world to see it?? Not quite, but if you live close by it is worth going for a couple of days. Like most places on the planet, it looks a million times better in photos than it does in real life…

Apart from this, we checked out the temples and even spent a few days on an island - nothing funnier than 3 goths from an industrial band kicking it on a tropical island.  Unfortunately between the sights, bars and extensively playing a Quake III mod called DeFRaG at Kong’s apartment, we didn’t get any music done, but it was mainly a holiday. 

Below are some shots of some night-scapes.  I fucking love big, grimey cities, and Bangkok is as big and grimey as they come.  Only bad side is the EXTREME humidity, which made walking for more than 5 minutes at a time during the day impossible (apart from on the islands, mind).  I’ve found the true meaning of a city that never sleeps to be a city that when you walk through it in the middle of the night, you see markets, businessmen and general bustle in the streets comparable to what you’d find during the daytime.  Conversely, Australian cities, for example, are big, but if you venture out around midnight, the only people you see will be intoxicated couples and sparse groups - no balanced life after business hours, just empty recreation.  Bangkok is a city that never sleeps, and feels immense and faintly violent.  I can see why Kong digs it…

When I lived in Australia I was a poor motherfucker. I took the bus the work. Most of you probably still take the bus or train, but unlike your poor ass, I moved up in the world. I have never caught a bus in Bangkok… and I never will. Big American man gets to work in a taxi. I’m not a big American man. I am more daring and go to work by motorcycle taxi (which is a another story in itself). At all other times, however, I’m in a taxi. Sometimes the security guards at work even open the door of the taxi for me. Sometimes they even salute me. Now you have to understand how out of control my ego is.

But, now I’m not on the train / bus bandwagon there are side-effects. Anyone who has visited Bangkok will know the supreme pain in the ass that is 1b coins. Most thais use them to catch a 7b bus. No buses for me means no way to rid myself of change. I could count them out when purchasing something cheap from the 7-11, but seriously, there isn’t enough time in the world for that nonsense. So now I have a pile of about 300 1b coins sitting on my cabinet…

So what in the fuck am I going to do with growing collection? Seeing as I seem to be getting into the habit of writing lists, this is what I spent my 500b per/hr day at work thinking about.

- give them to poor people… though I’m sure a bag of 1b coins would just be patronising.

- dish them out to students as a reward for doing something right. Just like Pavlov’s dogs. I have tried this already but rather than performing better, they just asked 10b coins. Little spoiled cunts, Pavlov chose dogs because he could slap them around without losing his job.

- Put them in a bag, tie it to the feet of the scottish asshole at work who always asks me if I have PA. Throw him and the bag into the Chao Phraya river, hurl the Chao Phraya into space then obliterate space and time with a ray gun powered by my newly found ego.

- Take them to the bank (the voice of reason). I hate to think of what kind of person takes their loose change to the bank, but I’m sure as hell not one of them.

- Keep them as a kind of war chest. There is always the possibility the army will come back and do a proper coup, rather than the muppet show the last one was. I’m thinking there is enough there to get me at least half way to the airport.

- Melt them down and sell the metal on ebay. Like the equally useless penny, I’m sure the metal used is worth more than the coin itself.

- Throw them off my balcony at the guy who rides the ice-cream cart. If I were still recording vox, that fucking inane tune would be in the background of every take. I don’t know why they come here. I live on a deserted soi. That means some fucker in my building is buying the ice-cream, otherwise he wouldn’t come. I have a lot of these coins…

- Use them for tipping. There has recently been an influx of Americans where I work, meaning service people in the building who were never tipped before are now getting tipped. This is setting a dangerous precedent and making me look tight.

- Save up for a hooker. I should have enough in about 4 years.

- Start catching buses. bahahahahahahahahahahaha.

1. ‘Bangkok is a good tourist city’. It’s not. A great city to live in, but not much to visit. Like most big cities, you can get a feel for it after about 2 days. You go see the big dirty river which looks a lot like all the other big dirty rivers in other major cities. You go to Wat Pra Khaw, get your pants pulled down over the price and get disappointed as none of the machine gun toting guards actually have magazines in their guns (no sissy sub-machine guns here though). Get ripped off by a taxi driver. Walk down Sukumvhit and marvel at all the scantily clad women who seem to like waiting for the bus all night. And if you must, go to Khao San and behave like the drunken backpacker you really are. You have done Bangkok. Perhaps the most striking thing is the uniformity of this city. When people visit me here, I don’t know what to do with them except take them to nice restaurants I couldn’t afford except for that they are paying with their big farang (whitey) wallets.

2. ‘Khao San is the bomba’. I fucking hate Khao San. Khao San has nought to do with Thailand. Do yourself a favour and don’t go there. It’s a little world that backpackers created in the image of what they wanted Thailand to be… it is so culturally removed (and geographically… its a bitch to get to) from Thailand that among expats it’s a bit of a joke.

3. ‘The sex industry is the bomba’. Yes, it’s big. Yes, it’s cheap. If you’re into whores, go nuts. Thailand wants you to waste your big american dollars on B-grade sex. Thailand has changed my attitude towards the sex industry, it’s not the sleazy toothless HIV ridden streetwalking thing it is in some other countries. The biggest revelation is that although the industry is huge for westerners (it is sort of racially segregated), the western part only accounts for a very small proportion of the actual industry. Every night the innocent streets in the nice part of town I live in transform into karaoke bar after karaoke bar (and if you don’t know what that means, you never understood karaoke). Nobody loves whores more than Thai men. Some people call banging whores the national past time. Before you get on your moral horse and start bitching with your western liberal shite, remember this. Prostitution was here before American GIs, and will be long after your big american dollars are used for wallpaper. This is how the world is. Grow up and accept it.

4. “They love westerners, inside every *blank* there is an American trying to come out”. No, it’s a difficult pill to swallow, but most of the world doesn’t like us. They like our money, they used to like our technology until we were surpassed by just about everybody, but as people westerners are often viewed in a dim light. We brought it on ourselves. Thai families often object to their daughters dating Western men for obvious reasons. Women are still expected to be virgins. Men are still expected to pay ‘dowries’ or look after the girls family. It’s old school. I can see your foot sliding into the stirrup of the western liberalism saddle again. Stop right now. What makes you think they don’t like it this way?

5. “Don’t spend too much time in BKK, get out and see the rest of it”. This is probably true, but I wouldn’t know because I’m a CITY man.

Finally. People are much the same wherever you. It’s all the same lying, stealing, cheating and so on as every place in the world, it’s just done in a different way. I don’t try to understand it. I have a vocabulary of about 20 Thai phrases which are either for telling taxi drivers where to go or offending people. I should learn more (especially for food so I don’t have to do everything with pointing, that and it is kind of rude to live here but not take any major effort), but I’m too busy writing bangn’ tunes for you. Don’t get me wrong, I love Thailand, just not for the reasons most think I do.