streaming consciousness…

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  hardie karges 8:33 am on July 29, 2008 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: hill tribes ( 3 ), nationality, Thailan, women ( 5 )   

  Human flotsam and jetsam bob in the surf, 

  stateless girls latching on to men in girl-less states of mind and body. Their options are limited; their smiles are not. Maybe the more pathetic the state, such as Burma, the bigger the smile, the greater the willingness to go for escape velocity. Life in the hills can be hard: no home, no birthday, no rights. Lives come and go at the speed of shock waves through shit, no prom, no brownies, and no football heroes, just cheerleaders. Life is cheap and your price is known. This is the origin of slavery. This is the origin of marriage. This is ‘lives of the cheap and dirty’, coming soon to the prime-time schedule. This is the gene pool, time for a swim.

   

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  hardie karges 7:36 am on July 28, 2008 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: citizenship, IMMIGRATION ( 4 ), Thailand ( 76 )   

  If it’s shocking that there are stateless people in the modern world, 

  it’s even more shocking that it’s not uncommon at all. You would expect it in refugee situations of outright war, of course, but not otherwise. This is part of the problem, of course. Nations aren’t anxious to hand out citizenship and its benefits to casual wanderers. The world has only recently had firm borders, lines on a map defining states. They’ve never played much of a role in the lives of tribal people. Tribal people don’t get stamps in their passports when they cross borders. Most don’t even know the exact date of their birth, nor the full extent of their families. Morals break down easily in the outback, as do nationalities. In Thailand you have to prove your citizenship constantly, in the form of a national identification card and house registration. This promotes home ownership, of course, rendering anything else ‘not official’. Did I mention that rental rates are very reasonable in Thailand? Of course, now that Thailand has moved up the economic ladder, illegals do much of the work that Thai nationals won’t, or at least not for cheap. More than anything else, it seems that governments must constantly justify their existence by enforcing the rules and reinforcing the boundaries. Only an innate love of bureaucracy threatens freedom more than Communism or Islam. The political choice has always been freedom vs. control; the only question is ‘whose’?
   
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  hardie karges 8:40 am on July 27, 2008 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: Thailand ( 76 ), women ( 5 )   

  In northern Thailand there are more stateless girls than girl-less states. 

  They’re stuck in their lot, waiting for Prince Charming to come rescue them from the oblivion of life in the boondocks. Born into a bummer of a Burmese state and gone by the fourth summer of debate, they migrate southward on ancient paths of forgiveness. They look for a daddy to take them in, these bastard children of the primordial race. This is the gene pool, vast but shallow, only just deep enough that you can see your reflection in it. They’re everywhere you go, yet everywhere you look, the image looking back is yourself, naked and unadorned.

   
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  hardie karges 7:51 am on July 26, 2008 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: love ( 49 ), Thailand ( 76 )   

  Ignorance that acknowledges itself is not so ignorant after all. 

  It’s the ignorance pretending to be intelligence that’s truly dangerous, sometimes life-threateningly so. INTENT is the difference between mindlessness and ignorance, prescendence and transcendence. Roger says he’s the smartest person here, mostly to spite me of course, but bookishly intelligent enough, to be sure. When it comes to living a life, though, you’d be hard pressed to find someone stupider, complete with bankruptcy, the whole works, all THEIR fault, of course, and he’s not even a conspiracy person. He’s a freeloader. When you become a friend with Roger, there’s no doubt about who’s treating whom. When the little Thai girl, or whatever she is, dumped him, I think it injured his ego more than his heart. Though neither he nor the others would ever admit to it, how can you truly forge a marriage with someone you’ve never had a real conversation with? That, of course, is the problem with all marriages of convenience. They make up with money what they lack in understanding. Welcome to Thailand.

   
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  hardie karges 2:58 pm on July 25, 2008 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: Farang ( 5 ), love ( 49 ), Thailand ( 76 )   

  Many Farangs wash up on the beach in Thailand, 

  get a little girl to yank their little weenie, and think they’ve landed in paradise. “Fantasy” is probably the more operable concept, though I’m not sure who is the more guilty of deception, female Thais or male Farangs. Like a junkie increasing the dose to try and maintain the original exhilarating effect, so these little girls fresh out of the village quickly appraise their value on the international market. Then typically they will float their currency, letting it seek its own level while hedging their bets on multiple false fronts. A little tissue in the bra always helps get the juices flowing. More than people’s savings can get hurt in a period of rapid inflation. When Roger’s wife dumped him to take a better offer, he didn’t even see it coming, though she’d been fucking the Farang down the street for a month or so. She wasn’t a prostitute or even a bar girl, please note. She was a good girl, just looking for someone to support her… and buy her a nation. Roger thought he was getting a bargain on a stateless girl. Her married her then got fucked, by himself of course, guilty of negligence and massive ignorance. Her father was Indian, they say. Her mother, well, you know. I hear she’s Cambodian now, citizen of a state she’d never even visited.

   
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  hardie karges 9:01 am on July 24, 2008 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: housewife, Thailand ( 76 )   

  Desperate housewifery is still alive and well in Thailand. 

  It’s a fairy tale, husbands going to work and wives staying at home. Many even have maids, supplied from the legions of illegals from the neighboring pathetic countries and hill-tribes from within the country who exist without citizenship. In Thailand to have citizenship someone’s got to own a house that’s legal and registered. Anything official, from buying a car to registering a kid at school, has to be accompanied by a house registration form, which presumably form a paper trail to time immemorial. If you don’t have one, you have to show relationship to someone who does. Immigrant Chinese seem to get special consideration. Hill-tribes don’t, notwithstanding Thailand’s own tribal roots, always in cahoots with Chinese merchants. Thais don’t acknowledge their tribal roots, despite the presence of tribal Thais to this day, speaking languages mutually comprehensible. Even Laos curse local ‘black’ Tais as if they were talking about a lower form of life, their first cousins only one step removed. Tang doesn’t believe that there are no housewives in America, any more than she believes that parents might support their children until late in life. In a developing country, it’s the opposite. Kids support the parents in old age. Resident Westerners in Thailand have got the fairy tale ending to their story, but it’s the Chinese Thais who’ve got the killer deal. Farangs have no rights; Chinese do, and after a generation, Chinese ‘become’ Thai, and have full rights and economic potential. They know how to manage their money, too, so succeed rapidly. After a full generation, most Farang half-breeds probably have full rights, too. We’ll see if firewalls get erected to prevent a bedroom-door full-Farang ‘takeover’.

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    Laos Travel 9:57 am on August 11, 2008 Permalink | Reply

    i love Laos,
    Laos is one of the poorest and least visited countries in the world.

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  hardie karges 8:07 am on July 23, 2008 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: massage, tarot, Thailand ( 76 )   

  My wife’s father is a fortune teller, 

  actually a star-reader, though he has recently branched out into what the Thais call ‘Gypsy’ cards, i.e. ‘Tarot’ cards. Hey, you gotta’ stay current in your field. I can remember the first time a Thai traditional massage parlor started offering the foot Reflexology that a Farang taught them. Now, not only do they all have it, but it’s getting hard to find the original back-cracking style. That’s demographics, I guess for aging populations. Of course, the footsie style now claims Thai ancestry, as logic seeks holes to fill. Closer to home, the wooden croaking frog that I brought from Vietnam to mass-produce in Thailand, now not only takes bows for Thai ingenuity, but is also found in Indonesia, Peru, and Bolivia, at least. All of them are traceable to ‘friends’ of mine in the world handicrafts industry looking for a piece of the action. Such is evolution. But I digress. The first time Tang’s father read my stars, he warned me against getting involved with a Thai woman, assuring me that there was a 50-year-old Farang woman who was a potential ‘sponsor’. He was probably right. I should get him the Crowley deck of Tarot cards; that’ll wow ‘em in the Honglee district of ChiangRai. Every time anything important is in the works, Tang’s parents want to check the stars first. That’s cool, I guess, but that sort of determinism can hold you back, also.

   
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  hardie karges 8:34 am on July 22, 2008 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: Thailand ( 76 ), women ( 5 )   

  After thirty a woman’s chances with Thai men are getting slim anyway, 

  slimmer than their waistlines certainly, what with a new crop of 16-year-olds always there looking to move up the food chain. So for the minor adjustment of servicing a hairy smelly foreigner for an undetermined number of years, a Thai woman past her prime can likely secure a better life for her and her family, and maybe even score an inheritance in the process. Love lies hidden in the cracks of a warped existence. There’s something for everyone where the algebra of need meets the geometry of desire. Anything disgusting about it, like the sight of twenty-year-old Thai girls sacrificing themselves to fifty-year-old Western men, doesn’t apply to me. Tang’s not that young anyway, not physically at least. She’s got a loyal devoted, if not ever-present husband, not like a lot of Thai guys with as many wives as they can afford. Every time I try to cheat on my wife, my dick gets infected or swells up or something, unsympathetic magic. I like guilt complexes; it leads the world to an ultimately better place. Of course it works best if everyone is similarly possessed. Tang only gets jealous when I flirt with death; that’s her turf.

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    gregorylent 1:20 pm on July 22, 2008 Permalink | Reply

    you are smart, a damn good writer, insightful .. and if you just back off the attitude about ten percent, you could be great … unhealed stuff gets in the way of the reader ..

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    hkarges 7:37 pm on July 22, 2008 Permalink | Reply

    If you’re a professional editor, then we should talk. I’d love to know which ten percent is in the way. The hardest thing for any writer is self-editing. Regardless, thanks for the comment.

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  hardie karges 6:29 am on July 21, 2008 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: PROSTITUTION ( 4 ), Thailand ( 76 )   

  Service workers don’t make jack in Thailand, 

  unless that’s the name of one of the many foreigners who wash up on the beach here. They usually end up in one of the many GI-style bars looking for a little R & R in a World War III of the soul for which an armistice is pending but never imminent. Nurses with ten years experience make the equivalent of a couple hundred American bucks a month, which admittedly goes a lot farther here than there, but still… Prostitution is a dream job for many in a dirt-poor agrarian economy with a highly competitive Chinese-descended service sector. To actually marry a Farang is a fantasy for many Thai women with only the minimum six years of education, an expanding thirty-something waistline and only a smidgin of Pidgin, but still enough to get the new cars and houses rolling in. Of course the big jackpot is the Big D itself (no, not Dallas), inheritance, Easy Street for life if the papers are in order. Many a smart cute cookie foregoes Boogie Nights at the disco and Priapic encounters of the third kind to service an ailing foreign account and go straight for a house on the Boardwalk when the old geezer croaks. Of course some don’t like the long wait and try to help the process along. No girl would ever cop to being an inheritance-chaser, of course, and most probably aren’t, really, unless of course somehow you know in a way with special circumstances events unfold Smith-like by an unseen hand. Even the government gets in on the deal, offering cozy retirement opportunities to anyone who can cough up the minimum $25,000 to deposit in a Thai bank. Some accounts probably go unclaimed when they expire. Call it inheritance farming.

   
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  hardie karges 9:29 am on July 20, 2008 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: Buddhism ( 466 ), Thailand ( 76 )   

  Thai Buddhist monks are the ultimate slackers of all time. 

  They drop out of society to join a government-supported temple, don orange robes, and parade the streets once a day begging for food, all to the admiration of a somewhat jealous Thai society, for whose sins they die a little bit each day, not physically but socially. Most Thai males shave their heads and join the brotherhood for at least a temporary period of time. Some Farangs do also, though many more could certainly use it, considering the excesses they put themselves. Cool indeed, but it sends a mixed message to many Thai youths who see it as official vindication for their own slacker tendencies. Most Thais like nothing better than sabai sabai, which translates loosely as ‘fucking off’. The work ethic finds fertile ground only among the business-oriented community, some of them filthy rich, though still far out-numbered by the filthy poor. Of course the average Thai figures that anybody who’s rich simply got lucky and anybody who’s lucky will get rich. Work ethic is a well-guarded secret and admittedly is best utilized by those in an inside position to take full advantage of it. Tang’s teen-age son sees no reason to study beyond the bare minimum necessary to keep moving that desk up to a new level each year. Like many people caught in the gap between fantasy and reality, Thais are lost in their own mythology.eHH

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