The Chicken Whisperer

I knew it was going to be a fucked up day when I awoke to find all of my chapsticks had melted.  Growing up in freeze your balls off Chicago, has made me a chapstick addict since the age of 10.  Years of bleeding, frost bitten lips, with pieces of flesh hanging off of them had made me a slave to the wax opiate.  Now I am in Khantaralak, Issan Thailand, In the middle of nowhere, and all of my chapsticks are gone.  I have come here only to be with my girl and see her family.  Also to train in Muay Thai, and Lerd Rit, shoot guns, swat mosquitoes, bathe with a bucket of water, shit in a hole in the ground, eat food cooked on a dirt floor, and finally have 3 weeks with no Kim Kardashian, Paris Hilton, or Lindsey fucking Lohan.

I haven't slept in days.  Intermittent alpha states are all I can achieve in this place.  At midnight the packs of feral dogs begin howling.  At 3 AM, the roosters begin screaming.  All that bullshit about roosters only calling at the break of dawn is a myth.  The roosters here never shut the fuck up unless it rains.  One particular rooster is right outside my window.  I have timed his calls to every 11 seconds -- day in and day out.  He is Gobbles from South Park.  I can see him out the window, pecking at the ground, when he looks up and I can see the surprise on his face "Oh shit!  There's the fucking sun!  Cocka doodle fucking do!"  I time his screams by counting to 11 Mississippi.  I was surprised to find that even Thai/Lao people who don't speak English use the system of counting involving 1 Mississippi, 2 Mississippi, 3 Mississippi, etc. to establish accurate timing.  Must be some American influence from movies or TV. 

I am now plotting the death of the rooster.  Can I just kill it with a Machete?  Whack it with a stick?  I emerge from my mosquito net and step out into the outdoor kitchen for a cigarette.  My girl is already making breakfast, consisting of sticky rice, Kai Giao which is a Thai omelet, and Pad gap pow.  The rooster calls again, and it pierces my cranium.  "Honey, can I please kill the fucking rooster? I can't sleep."  My girl looks at me perplexed.  She simply tunes it out.  The jungle/farm cacophony is like a lullaby to these people.  Much like when I used to live next to the elevated train in Chicago...you just get used to it.
"Why you want to kill chicken?"  she asks.
"Because it's driving me fucking nuts.  I mean, boy chicken making me ting tong mak mak! I swear to God that the boy chicken has some kind of internal clock that makes him scream every eleven seconds."
My girl looks at me "Mai kaojai (I don't understand)"
"You know, like a clock.  The boy chicken has some kind of clock inside of him that makes him scream every eleven seconds.  It's making me crazy.  I'm sick.  I can't sleep.  i want to go back to Bangkok where it's quiet."
After a long pause, I can see the wheels turning in my girlfriends head.  She is trying to comprehend what I am saying, to which she replies "You funny.  Chicken don't own a watch."
I slap my forehead.
"I know the chicken doesn't own a watch."
"But you just say that boy chicken have a clock.  Chickens can't tell time."
"Jesus fucking Christ, can I just kill it please?"
"I don't know whose chicken it is.  Maybe they get mad if you kill somebody's chicken."
"It's not yours or your neighbors?"
"No, boy chicken just like to walk around and boom boom lady chicken.  Then they have baby chicken."
I rub my temples.  Inside, I am really happy that my girlfriend is pretty, because at times like these, I am convinced she is retarded.
Now the rest of my girls family comes outside to eat.  They ask her why I am angry and she explains to them in Lao/Isaan, that I want to kill the boy chicken.
"My mom say boy chicken taste no good.  Why you want to kill it?"

We go back and forth for ten minutes about chickens owning watches, my un-Buddhist desire to extinguish a creatures life simply because it annoys the shit out of me, and in the end, the guy who wires the Western union money every month (Me) wins out.  My girl's mom gives me the nod.  I have permission to kill the rooster.  I grab a huge, cast iron machete, and begin to walk towards the soon to be dead rooster.  There is some Lao/Isaan conversation going on, followed by laughter.  I turn around and ten people are watching me.  Then more kids from neighboring houses show up and soon the crowd has grown to 20.  I am thinking of the George Orwell scene in Burmese Days where he has to go kill the elephant.
"Why is everybody laughing?"  I ask
"Because you bring big knife to kill little boy chicken.  You maybe use big knife like that to kill Tiger."  My girl hands me a long stick that they use to walk the water buffalo with.  "Use this instead."

I trade my Machete for the stick and now there are even more people who have come to see the strange white man execute the boy chicken because it talks too much.  I approach the Rooster.  I don't want to kill it, but my sanity demands it.  I decide to give it one last chance.  I close my eyes and send the rooster a mental projection.  I tell the rooster in my mind, that it is driving me crazy.  That If it limits its calling to dawn only, that I will let it live.  This every 11 seconds thing is a form of psychic torture, and I will kill it if it doesn't shut the fuck up.
I open my eyes and raise my stick.  I am going to kill it the next time it cock a doodle doo's.  I wait,  and wait, and wait some more.  It doesn't make a sound.  I turn around to the crowd of onlookers, and shrug my shoulders.
"Go ahead and kill it."  my girl says.
"No, I'm good.  I think it stopped.  I talked to the chicken with my mind and told it to be quiet or I would kill it.  I think it understands now."

My girlfriend translates this into Lao/Isaan for the crowd of people.  They nod as if this was a good outcome. No chickens had to die today.   One man asks my girl something to ask me.
"This man want to know if you can talk to his wife.  He says she never shuts up either."

To this, the crowd roared with laughter.  I went back inside, crawled under my mosquito net, and finally fell asleep.

Our lady of Ecoli

Diary entry 09-12-10.

8 hour bus ride from Bangkok to Trat, which is near the border of Cambodia in the South East of Thailand.  We cannot afford the hotels in Phuket, so we opted for the low budget Hippie haven called Koh Chang.  The bus is the Bird Flu express.  No other farangs on board like me.  Many of the passengers are wearing SARS masks, whether to keep something in, or keep something out is anyone's guess.  The Thai version of the twin girls from the Shinning movie sit in front of me, starring over the seat.  No emotion in their eyes.  Just the look of disturbed children of the corn....or children of the rice for that matter.  I am reading Ammianus Marcelinus "The later Roman Empire".  I am just getting to the part of the Gothic wars and invasion of the Huns, when the bus stops and 6 or 7 people get on the bus offering to sell cold chicken on a stick, bags of soda, and mango slices.  My girl buys all of it.  I don't know where it all goes but I have never seen a person eat as much as her.  She proffers me a cold Salmonella laden chicken skewer and I eat it anyway.

Not 30 minutes after of which, the bubble guts start churning inside of me. I am balancing in the buses "hong nam" or rest room, as it sways back and forth, as I try to aim the jet of liquid shit from my ass in the general direction of the toilet.  I am supposedly supposed to use a provided tub of water to clean myself with but opt for a combination of napkins and using a bottle of water with a sport top on it as a sort of field improvised bidet.  After 15 minutes of this cleansing process, I emerge from the rest room.  The Driver of the bus looks in the rear view mirror and sees me coming out and slams on the brakes.  Our bus pulls to the side of the road and the driver jumps up from his seat, yelling at me in Thai.  He is speaking too fast for me to understand, but I can make out the words "Key" meaning shit, "Kwai"  meaning buffalo (a euphemism for a dumb person).  My girl begins yelling back at him in the Issan dialect, and then I am totally lost.  She turns and explains to me that the driver is saying that the toilet is broken and couldn't I read the "out of order" sign written in Thai on the rest room door?

The Driver walks down the aisle and stands before the restroom door.  He carefully opens it to examine the crime scene.  He gasps and begins yelling again "Ma nii ! Ma Nii !"  or come here, come here.  I am beckoned over to him and made to examine the carnage I have unleashed.  My lava flow, had gone down into the toilet and flooded the floor through a broken fixture.  Now the Shinning Twins appear below each of my arms and are marveling at my creation.  My girl is readily at my defense, asking the driver why he didn't tell the Farang (me) that the toilet was broken.  He should have known that I didn't read Thai.  While all this is happening, I can feel the second wave percolating inside of me.  I tell the driver "Tawnii, Phom dtong gon bpai hong nam!" or I have to go to the rest room NOW.  Our bus is in the middle of nowhere, and the driver points outside.  I look out the window of the bus.  It is a landscape of flat rice fields with no trees nearby.  I look further down the road and can see some higher plants that appear to be sugar cane.  I tell my girl to tell him to drive further down the road, to tell him that I am sorry but I am sick from the chicken that I ate earlier.  How bacteria ridden something has to be in order for it to have such an immediate onset is scarring the shit out of me....literally.

After some cajoling on my girls part, the driver goes further down the road, and stops the bus.  He opens the door and yells for me to "Bpai! Bpai!" or Go! Go!.  My girl digs into her bag and hands me a roll of tissue.  I am utterly defeated but beyond caring.  I get off the bus with my Tissue and water bottle in hand and walk into the sugar cane field.  I turn around and look at the bus.  Every passenger is starring at me...of course, along with the Shinning twins, who now look like conjoined twins (ah! Siamese twins) because of the way their heads are tilting and resting on each other temples.

I do my business and return to the bus.  The Thai's are gentle and considerate people.  A culture of Buddhism has left them for compassion for the pasty white farang with no intestinal fortitude and they graciously spare me their ridicule.  I return to my seat and begin to read my book.  My girl acts as though nothing has happened.  To lighten the mood the driver starts playing Thai Karaoke music on the TV set.  The volume is way too loud and I can't concentrate on my book.  I ask my girl to tell the driver to turn it down and she says she wont.  Why? I ask her.  "Because you already make poo poo on his floor, and I don't want to ask him for anything."  I try for 30 minutes to deal with the brain piercing vocals of Thai pop music but I can't handle it anymore.  I walk up to the driver and ask him in Thai to turn down the music.  He looks at me with hatred in his eyes.  Then I look at him with hatred in my eyes.  He reaches for the volume knob and turns it down one notch.  I then reach for the knob and turn it down 3 more.  The driver just shakes his head.
I have won.

Free Range Roaches

I am now back to what passes for life in Los Angeles California.  It seems like only yesterday (it was a week ago), that I was squatting over a hole with volcanic, explosive diarrhea in Khantaralak Thailand.  The hole I speak of is known as an Issan Toilet, which is right next to the Issan shower.  Issan being the very rural Eastern part of Thailand where the love of my life happens to live.  Her name is not important as she has many nicknames-- "Look Ling" being my favorite for her as it means little monkey...because that's what she is...in every way....except that she's really quite beautiful.
After my third trip to Thailand this year, and coming home with ridiculous stories about fights, sicknesses, jungle treks, and just about every other thing that can go wrong on a vacation, I decided, after the prompting of my friends, to start this blog.

I make no claims to being an explorer.  I don't wear a safari vest, a pith helmet, or have any claims to great discoveries.  Quite the contrary...I am a borderline retarded traveler who is a magnet for assholes and bad luck.  I don't want this blog to seem like "Heart of Darkness".  It's not.  Nothing in my life is that noble.  I don't cut through the jungle with a machete to reveal the temple of the monkey king, or other such swashbuckling bullshit.  Instead, I stumble over the broken terrain with a bad hip, a bad shoulder, all the while trying to fend off the mosquitoes from eating me alive.

Folklorists use a word called "Ostension" to describe the acting out of the mythic hero script (thank you Andrienne Mayor for the term).  This could be either the Pontic king Mithradates acting out the life of Hercules, thereby becoming Hercules, or it could be your average douchebag boxer, acting out the Rocky movies in order to become Rocky in reality.

I have no mythic hero script.  Nothing that I have done is heroic or mythic.  Simply put...my vacations are an exercise in futility.  I often look up to the sky and repeat the cliche' "Not this shit again"...it's a staple of Hollywood movies, which is good enough for me.  If I ever think of something more original I will use that as my mantra.

I kept a diary throughout my travels.  Being that most places I go to don't have internet, I have to write this down now.  I will not embellish anything in this blog.  I will simply write through the perception I had of events at the time I wrote them down.  The title of this blog is myfuckedupvacations (originally).  I hope my contribution to travel writing will simply be a as a cautionary tale to those who travel with their head in the clouds.  Yes! This could happen to you!  If it doesn't, then may the Gods continue to feed you honey.

This is my intro....now I have to go to work.  Rather, I have to go to work so I can make money to send to my little Third World darling, so she can finally buy a real fucking toilet for the next time I go.