Generating worlds, exploring them, losing the thread.
Collin Piprell 
My fix
I’m lucky to be alive. For one thing, I began smoking cigarettes at the age of nine. By the age of 12, I was smoking at least half a pack a day and, by the time I left home at the age of 15, I had a 40-50 a day habit. By the time I was 16 going on 17, I’d smoke another pack if I spent an evening in a tavern. I eventually stopped after 28 years … Read more
Are you a Bangkok Old Hand?
Try this selection from the quiz, first published in 1993:
In which of the following situations would it be appropriate to use the common Thai expression mai pen rai (“never mind; no problem”)?
… Read more(a) A guest spills a little water on your coffee table.
(b) A waiter accidently dumps your beer into your lap.
(c) You go downstairs one morning in the rainy season and find that those of your possessions that float are
This is in response to S. Tsow’s comment on my last post.
Cautionary note. Ease off when your brain begins to bubble.
Results of the latest field trial. Once again I have followed my rule, and once again, this day following, I find cause to question it.
Bonus lore. Rx for hangovers: The Joy of Hangovers
Tbe cafe is the work of Carole Spandau.
The fix. Neil Young, in a Rolling Stone interview with Howard Stern, offers this treatment for weed-induced paranoia: chew some ‘black pepper balls.’ I’m thinking he must mean peppercorns.
On the off chance that peppercorns are the latest panacea, I tried chewing just two of them. Not because I’d been smoking dope, and not because I was feeling especially paranoid. Just because like, whatever, eh? And they were good. Not as good … Read more
Hello Kitty’s birthday has just passed, marking 40 years during which this prominent cultural icon has only ever lurked there on the periphery of my consciousness.
Though I do recall one occasion on some waterfront when I’d had enough to drink that I wondered, briefly, if I needed a tattoo. Out of nowhere — given I knew no more about Hello Kitty than this image appears everywhere around the world that you find tacky items manufactured from synthetic materials — … Read more
The future has arrived. Have you looked away from the Internet recently, taken a gander out there at what passes for the real world these days? If not, you’d better take a look.
Some oddly premature future has arrived while you were posting cute cats and inspirational quotes on Facebook. What we generally think of as the present has been skewed, bumped off-center and ahead of its time into a sci-fi realm that’s fast becoming commonplace reality (not to mention … Read more
Our word for the day is earworm. And the following definition is from the charming animation “Jazz that nobody asked for.”
“Sometimes a song can get stuck in your mind. Become a little piece of unwanted music, that keeps looping for the rest of your day.
Neurologists claim that stuck songs are like thoughts we’re trying to suppress. The harder we try not to think about them, the more we can’t help it. The phenomenon is also known … Read more
Forecast: Cloudy times, with a good chance of precipitate moral outrage.
Here in Bangkok, and just about wherever else in this world you look, the moral warriors are out and about on all sides making angry chimp faces at each other. So what’s new, eh?
In the course of a recent archaeological investigation of my hard drive, I came across the following screed, composed sometime in the mid-1990s, judging by associated potshards of popular culture and carbon 14 dating of … Read more
Bingeing writers and binge writing. Traditionally, writers have been notorious bingers. And, aside from any occupational enthusiasm for booze and suchlike, we get binge writing, where instead of turning caffeine into books, as some would have it, writers instead turn whiskey into piss and engage in binge writing in the intervals between their alchemical endeavors. (I first encountered the expression “binge writing” listening to a Letterman interview with Hunter S. Thompson. See “What is writing?”)
Binge … Read more
“[E]ssentially the camera makes everyone a tourist in other people’s reality, and eventually in one’s own.”
First published in 1973, Susan Sontag’s On Photography speaks to us with even more force today about what cameras and the mass reproduction of images have done to our appreciation of ourselves and our worlds. And she offers this insightful spin on our lemming compulsion to photograph our … Read more