Mad Ups, My Buddha.

I have a burning addiction and it goes by the name Big Buddha. I’ve begun weekly hikes up this little mountain, basking in the uphill climb that Florida has denied me for the past 23 years. I park my moto at the first elephant trek place at the bottom of the hill and begin my journey. Today, after I parked and chatted up the fellas for a bit, one asks:

You go alone? No friends?

            Yes, all alone, I don’t have any friends.

Haha, no friends. Well I think alone is best. Time for think.

Ladies and gentleman, this Thai elephant wrangler gets it. I often feel guilty because I tell people of the relaxation wonders this hike does for my soul and yet I rarely invite people into my sanctuary for fear of tarnishing its luster. I'm even a little hesitant to put the amazingness down for all to experience but I also don't want to discountnthis large portion of my sanity while living in a foreign place.

So after a dollop of wisdom from my friend in the child-sized jorts, I head up the first and steepest hill. The hill winds me and prepares me for the rest of the mountain, which really isn’t so bad. And so is life, once you climb that first hill you can just traipse along and enjoy the scenery for the rest of the trip. And oh what scenery Buddha’s trek has to offer. The road, bustling with tourist vans and moto traffic headed up to the popular travel sight, cuts through thick jungle, brimming with life far beyond the comforts of cement.

On the way up, I receive encouragements from all angles. I pass the old man peddling bananas and he flashes me an all-gum smile; to my left a group of Burmese construction workers shoot me the thumbs-up signal; countless tourists on motorbikes shout borderline inappropriate words of support. And I continue my uphill climb, smiling like an idiot and waving to everyone that passes, no matter if they’re smiling back or attempting to eat my soul with a hateful gaze. I used to make fun of people that smiled for seemingly no reason. Then I moved to Thailand. Now I feel like that middle-aged accountant who saved up his entire life for a speedboat and now spends weekends wearing a captain’s hat and frantically waving at any and all passerby while his wife and kids groan at the embarrassing sight of drunk euphoria. Sure, I may look like a raving lunatic: smiling, thizz-facing and two stepping up a mountain to some jams but I suspect there’s no better place to unleash the cooped up crazy than the middle of the jungle.

I channel my inner Katniss, donning a single braid and a fearless sense of oneness with nature and, against my better western judgment, I climb over a fence onto the side of a cliff that overlooks a deep valley of lush, untouched greenery. I carefully step along the small dirt path that hangs perilously above a free fall that Tom Petty would want no part in. Eventually I come across a rock situated perfectly between a break in the trees that overlooks all of Phuket Town and Chalong Bay. The type of view that blurs the line between sea and sky and the type of multipurpose rock that can be utilized for thoughts, trots or Asian squats.

I refuse to divulge any sort of guidelines to reaching this spot, as my inner balance hinges upon its isolation.  As I sat down upon my rock today, raindrops begin to fall and I thank someone somewhere for turning on that faucet that will smear the distinction between sweat stains and rain spots. After a few minutes of enjoying nature’s bath (okay, I promise I did actually shower after this hike, for those of you doubting my cleanliness over here), I began the trek down refusing goodwilled attempts to hitch rides in favor of a downward spiral in the storm. Maybe one day I’ll start my own Big Buddha Trek company: Faubel’s Super Sweaty Hikes, Antiperspirant Optional, Singalongs Enforced.  

Wuuuuuuu Time

Most of the time, we’re fixated on time. Running from it, wasting it, trying to find it. Regardless of escape tactics, uninspired wastefulness or eagle eye watchfulness, time continues to slip through our fingers into a grey moonscape. I’ve had a bit too much time lately with this ‘summer break’ and I guess you could say I’ve developed a case of island fever. In a place where routine bounces between feeding time, beaching time and hobby time, one feels trapped in an hourglass surrounded by granules of time without the ability to break out and scatter them. In Thailand, it’s easy to forget that for members of “reality,” time travels methodically along the continuum, while seconds here seem to stand fixed in parallel universe where nothing matters but the moment. The Buddhist sense of the present blankets the future with a shadow of today. 

My friends and family back home continue life along the scale, growing and changing in response to adjustments in their worlds. I skype my little brother and he’s grown a foot and is in love with a little girl with a blonde braid. My Facebook floods with engagement photos and newborn alien baby pictures. When did this happen? Was I not invited to the meeting that explained the life transformations to ensue at home while I play Peter Pan across the world? I’m caught somewhere between an eight-year-old with a Kool-aid ‘stache and Blanch from the Golden Girls, laying my pajamas out at 9am and tucking my shirt into my underwear. Somewhere there's a hoverround with a streamers parked illegally in a handicapped spot. 

Strangely, island life is almost too easy, especially when work has subsided. No one expects me to be productive. No one is riding my ass to finish some proposal before Monday. I leave work and my work leaves me. And while that sounds like the ideal situation for a lazy beach bum, I find myself striving to find ways to foster productivity in this asylum of sandy naps and misdrawn road maps. But there’s something extremely liberating about forcing yourself to create, on your own time.

I’m currently reading a book called, “The Tao of Writing” in the hopes that some inspirational idea for my next venture will spill off the pages and into my notebook. Rather, the book is all based around the Tao belief of Wu Wei or “Doing without doing.” Instead of ‘wasting’ time editing and revising, I’m told to throw caution to the window and dive in headfirst. Now, I know the rules about swimming before my hamburger is digested: I’ll cramp up, flail around a bit, then drown. And maybe those skewed attempts at parenting have poisoned my idea of productivity… or maybe each day I do one thing is just as valuable as a day on the grind. 

The book stresses that grand ideas come from anywhere at the exact moment you stop searching. Writer’s block stems from the anal-retentive need to produce within a given time frame, for a given purpose, on a given subject. And the only block I experience is the one when I cease to create. Creation is what we do until we die. By creating a piece of art, a human life, a clever joke or just the release of a thought into the universe, we’ve created something lasting that ceases to exist at some point in time, yet endures forever. So I may be missing a few integral creations back home—my mom’s new cheetah-print couch, my brother’s braceface and flatbill fetish, the closing of my favorite TCBY—but I can’t stop time, the best I can do is create within my time a parallel universe where we’re all filling the spaces between ticks of a clock with things that endure, like a bag of skittles at a diebetes convention. 

And some more cheeky food for thought... http://www.just-pooh.com/tao.html ... errybody in Asia love them some POOOOOH

Holed Up in Wonderland

The other day after driving behind a small pickup truck transporting a baby elephant in the bed before grasping the situation at hand for nearly two minutes, I realized a few things. 1. I’ve been in Thailand long enough to not notice an elephant in a truck bed and 2. I wish I had teleportation powers to transport my friends and family here to witness the little things that I see on a daily basis. Things that often I forget to commit to memory, so they blur together in a strand of bizarre cultural disparities I have lodged somewhere between a tangled web of song lyrics and the correct conjugation of Spanish verbs.

The motorbike situation makes it difficult/ dangerous to capture the mobile photos of outlandish things that I would normally document and distribute to my friends. When I first decided to move to Thailand, I told my friends and family that we’d be pen pals, writing each other at least twice a month. I assured my best friends that I would keep a notebook for my creepy observations and inappropriate thoughts, which once appeared via text message each day to their smart phones.

But there is no creeper notebook and I have yet to write a letter. I’ve sent some post cards, but that hardly compensates for the five months I’ve been here. The only solution to this problem is a DeLorean and I doubt Michael J. Foxx is going to hand that over very easily.

Lately, I’ve been feeling like living in Thailand has shielded me from the future. In a place where everyone is focused on the present, it makes looking ahead an afterthought. This time last year I was frantically searching for a job as graduation steadily approached and I realized that there was a little more I needed to do for myself before I grow up.

But now I’m on that journey and I continually feel guilty that I’m “working” in an island paradise when society says I should be working a steady job with health benefits in a first world country where people don’t precariously carry a newborn baby on moto in the same manner they’d carry a sack of potatoes.

Should I apologize for not being ready to “grow up”? Maybe. Perhaps I should take into consideration the fact that this Wonderland I’m living in can’t last forever and eventually Alice needs to exit the rabbit hole. The sheen has worn off of this glittery adventure and I’m in a normal routine in a place that is anything but normal—but people don’t glimpse that side of the experience.

They see the weekend travels to distant places and photos of images from travel books. They don’t see afternoon trips to Big C for milk and cereal or trips to the doctor for check-ups. This may not appear to be “real life” to the outside observer; but the day-to-day is as normal as anything.  So I’ll continue my long-standing relationship with immaturity and make no apologies for the path I’ve chosen.   

Don't PhiPhi on the Bunks

This past weekend grannies 1 and 2 left nursing home life behind for a night of debauchery and arsenic filled liquor buckets at the Bermuda triangle of the party life in Thailand, Koh Phi Phi. This sudden decision occurred Friday night when we assembled a solid squad for the festivities to this special place. Most of us had never experienced the debauchery that PhiPhi offers, and I for one did not know what to expect. Some of us ‘took a vacation from our everyday vacation’ while others enjoyed vacation to the third degree.

Ironically, this particular weekend falls during our annual Key Weird spring break action. Since the adult world has no “spring break” and most of my friends were stuck at a desk silently protesting adult life via neon tanks beneath business casual attire, I took one for the team and decided to re-live the weirdness that ensues once one steps foot onto Duval Street.

We replaced Fat Tuesdays mugs with infamous PhiPhi buckets, into which they pour an entire pint of Thai whiskey/battery acid. At one point I realize everyone had their personal buckets, yet each individually attempted to slow the descent into final inebriation by coaxing the surrounding bucketers into helping to empty their own bucket.

Somewhere between painting neon trees, crushing dance floors and eating the worst pad thai this country has to offer, Lindser and I found time to Houdini our way out of sight and into a seedy bar where we obtained new middle aged male companions. After being rescued from this establishment, we made it back to the boat shaped backpacker haven and into the bunkbed sanctuary set in a labyrinth of offensively wonderful wall art in which people could find themselves sucked into for centuries to come.

Day antics and night shenanigans blurred together, but thankfully someone had my camera to document forty-seven pictures of us vehemently sucking down liquor buckets. I’d say in 24 hours PhiPhi damaged my soul just as much as it damaged my liver. Such a beautiful soul-eater, that neverland island.