I came back to Thailand to satisfy my desire to pick food out of my food.
Earlier today I had to sit down for a second because I found myself thinking “what patong needs is a really good bookshop” in a town where what I really ought to be thinking is “wow, I could totally just buy a person here.”
I’m thirty one now and every so often I have one of those is that his girlfriend or his daughter? Oh shit I’m 31 🙁 moments. This is one of them.
I’ve walked twice around the town, and I’ve made a couple of observations which I’ll relate to you here.
Firstly, a tattoo is a damn fine impulse purchase and the men flogging them in the street should be held up as the fiscal superheroes who harnessed a complex economic system.
Secondly, the massage women here are voracious, as is their right as women of dignity and upstanding practitioners of the sex worker profession.
One of them had a squeaky dog toy to lure men across the street. Just consider that for a second – she wouldn’t have bought the dog toy if there weren’t a chance that if she gave it the old college try it would actually work.
Thirdly, a smart man with a hammock, some cardboard signs and a box of books could make a killing here, or at least enough to fund a modest campaign to stop elderly American tourists from wearing sandals and white socks whilst abroad.
I’ve been trying to find a useful formulation of the form “(never/always) put (anything/something) in your body that you did(‘nt) buy in a (bar/pharmacy)” but the counter examples here are too many to count. I was just offered the best blow job of my life by a man dressed as a woman and – you know what? – I totally believed him.
So I took myself off for a beach massage and passed the time by adding to my collection of punny names for shops I’ll never open – so along with the pet store chain cats 22, the furniture cooperative aesops tables and the bar tequila mockingbird, you can now read my food column recipe or disaster and enjoy your convalescence in my chain of retirement homes caned unable.
Right, I need a day job.