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"You want to live forever or something?"

Posted by Rick Salasar

To which I reply, "No, but now that we've stretched this mortal coil into the 21st century, making it past about eighteen does seem a fairly reasonable goal for anybody without a terminal illness or a job in a Chinese mine."

Aside from places like Thailand, that is. As far as I can tell, Thailand is basically one huge population control measure - a country, culture and mentality designed to deal with the fact that it also seems to be a country, culture and mentality obsessed with sex. Or erectile dysfunction. I think they pretty well amount to the same thing here.

I also think I must take a photo of the massive wooden penis - sorry, I mean "phallus" - I saw perched atop a small food stand the other day. Yeah, yeah, good fortune and fertility. Whatever. You go, girlfriend.

Anyway, it's seven in the morning, and my motorcycle taxi driver, though a nice kid, is apparently trying to cut out the middlemen and is about to dump us both straight into the back of a large, painfully slow-moving garbage truck. At forty miles an hour.

He doesn't actually want to kill me, of course. He wants to kill us both. Unconsciously, that is.

We're surrounded by other suicidal motorbikes, banzai cyclists, buses blaring their horns at the cyclists trying their damndest to get underneath the buses, buses trying their damndest to run over the few cyclists actually trying to avoid the buses, minibuses trying to kill everybody (and regularly succeeding), pickup trucks with fifty-eight construction workers standing up for their two-hour trip to work (see minibuses, above), taxis on a mission from God, and trucks adorned with worrying, hand-painted renditions of Pacino in Serpico or Stallone in Rambo (you often can't tell which one it's supposed to be), driven by spindly-legged, aging, speed freaks who've been at the wheel of the same old truck for the last ten hours.

That's speed, as in methamphetamine, not driving fast. After all, these are clapped-out Thai trucks that struggle up a 1 in 1000 gradient, even when empty. Get stuck on a decent hill behind one of these soot-belching monstrocities as it overtakes another mobile smokefest with the feverish urgency of a glacier and you can lose a week. And a lung.

The three times around the odometer on one change of coconut oil might have something to do with it. Or maybe it's just that even the "yaba" ("crazy drug") can't help those skeletal legs pedal any faster. In any case, the trucks' inability to out-accelerate blind beggers missing several limbs on skateboards missing several wheels must be some kind of saving grace.

And then, we have the green buses:

1. The drivers earn commission based on the number of passengers they can pick up.
   
2. For bigger thrills than air-combat at less than the price of a cookie at Disneyland, try riding a green bus.
   
3. Even many Thais are too scared to travel on the green buses.
   

Fatalism alone can only take you so far. The green number 12 from Victory Monument is happy to take you to heaven.

Posted May 03, 2005 at 12:54 PM | Permalink |