The Dog King/KO PHA NGAN

I needed to move on. No one should remain in Haad Rin this long. North of Ko Pha Ngan is the island Ko Tao, supposedly the best spot for scuba diving in the Gulf of Thailand. That's where I wanted to be. However, my stomach burn wasn't quite healed yet, so I was stuck killing time just a little while longer.

After taking some Xanax to celebrate finding their bottle, I try to think of something to do. Haad Rin seemed to have nothing left for me. I had no idea where the group from last night was, so I eat dinner alone, drink beers alone, walk the same loud beach alone. As I got to the north end, it occurred to me there still was something I hadn't done yet.

Once I've drugged my body into laughing, then I'll know I'm having fun!

So, I head to The Rock, situated on the opposite end of the beach from Mellow Mountain. It's built on the rock cliff face overlooking the beach, hence the name. Maybe it was popular in the days leading up to the Full Moon Party, but now it's totally empty.

After one of the workers disengages from bored conversation with the other employees, I order a Singha and some nitrous, for which they're charging 200 baht a hit. While I sip my beer, the guy puts a canister of nitrous into what looks like a whipped cream dispenser, and uses the machine to blow up a balloon. He gives me some instructions, but come on, I've been to the dentist. I think I know how to huff some fumes.

I grab a table by the railing, with a view of the entire shore. In one go, I inhale the entire balloon, curious if I'm being watched by any of the workers. I'm not. Unsurprisingly, the sight of another stoned foreigner is one they've long since tired of.

The effects of the nitrous come on quickly, scant seconds after inhalation. My vision expands and contracts, like I'm seeing through the eyes of a Stretch Armstrong being fought over. Upstairs in the brain box, it feels like a pile of quilts have been thrown over my cerebral cortex, comfortably smothering all higher and unnecessary faculties. Complex thought processes simplify themselves, until they resemble the pithy urges in a cartoon caveman's thought bubbles. The beach is nice. I wish that sign was lit up. Lights are pretty. The air is warmmmmm.

And then it's over. Logic, reasoning, and all the rest return, and my tunnel vision snaps back to normalcy. 5 bucks for 5 minutes of lights getting a little brighter, and me getting a lot stupider. Maybe doing it by myself, at night, looking at an existentially depressing beach scene wasn't the best environment for getting all the laughs out of my laughing gas.

This is all your fault, sign.

Still, there was a tempting simplicity to the experience. Maybe that explains what happened later. But I'm getting ahead of myself.

I return to the beach, where I buy a whiskey bucket from the first drink stand to catch my eye. With the bucket comes a free shot, and more plastic jewelry. I was more excited about one of these than the other. The whiskey bottle's seal is broken, but the drink stand girl addresses my concern by showing me that the cap itself is still unbroken. However, when she pours out the bottle, I notice that she seems to have found a way to take off the entire cap without breaking the seal. Clever girl. She couldn't have watered my drink down too much, though, since the bucket still reeked of liquor just one grade above moonshine.

I drink my bucket at one of the benches and watch the midnight dancing. The fire ring comes out once again, and I join in. This time my keys were totally safe, because I no longer had keys, due to my room no longer having a lock of any kind. I have to say, the drinking was doing a good job of squashing any worries I might have had, though.

Once I got too woozy to keep jumping, I stumbled on down the beach and found myself heading up the steps to Mellow Mountain. I hadn't been back here since my last trip to Thailand, so why not hang out for a bit?

Mellow Mountain is divided into two levels. The bottom level is called Kangaroo Bar, which has much nicer tables and decor, and is generally a more legitimate, nicer place to hang out, and the top level is the Mellow Mountain bar, which has much sparer decoration, but is where the more illegitimate, namesake items can be purchased. I head to the top level.

The guy working the bar is very open and forthcoming about what they sell, so I inquire about prices. A mushroom shake is 500 baht, a half-cup of just mushrooms is 1,000, and a full cup 2,000. I buy a joint, for 250, and am soon joined by a Finnish guy, asking if he can share.

"Sure." I shrug, and he buys me a Chang. The Finnish man stays long enough to teach me how to say cheers (something like "Holkan kolkan"), before leaving for parts unknown. I take my joint downstairs to Kangaroo Bar, and finish it while watching a girl throw up over the balcony.

I snap a photo, because I'm all about the memories, and this pisses the guy she's with right off. "Oy! Wot the fuck?!" His voice sounds familiar somehow...He walks over. Just as I start to prepare myself for a fight by hoping really hard that his morals prevent him from hitting a drunk man, he steps into my light.

"Jamie?! Long time no see, mate!" It's Jake, from last night. And by the look of things, he's moved on from Bethany.

"Hey, Jake. Your friend okay?"

"Aw, she's fine! Jos' too much mushroom shake." He gestures to a cup on their table, still two-thirds full. "These things are fuckin' strong! A full shake is jes' too much for one person. Want summa' this one?" He indicates again to the girl's cup, which I have to assume she isn't coming back for. Well, I don't want to be rude.

Voyeuristic maybe, but never rude.

Jake and I split the rest of the cup, and eventually he leaves with the girl to presumably have freaky pukey hallucinatory sex. I leave the beach, and wander back into town. Mushroom shakes have never really affected me in the past, although they were giving an interesting edge to the booze and weed, not to mention the Xanax from earlier still in the background, fuzzing out the edges. I become very interested in a dog trying to eat something in the sand.

Something about the image...spoke to me. Or spoke to the drugs, and really, they'll speak to anything. I drift through the streets as if on walkabout, my consciousness compressing, my sanity disintegrating. I found a video on my camera not too long ago from this night, which I don't remember taking at all:

Speaking of memories, have you ever had a blackout that you can actually remember? Where you can recall glimpses of what you got up to after losing all control? That was the rest of the night for me. A real stare-into-the-abyss-and-the-abyss-stares-back kind of night.

As I pinball around the town in an impenetrable haze, I come across a small pack of street dogs. The animals flock to me, craving attention, and I must have really wanted some companionship, because it's hard to explain what happened next...After hanging out with the dogs for awhile, I notice that they start to walk with me, loyally following in my steps. "Alright," I think. "I accept." I became King of the Dogs.

Together with my pack, we roam through the alleys and backstreets of Haad Rin, looking for trouble. They had accepted me as one of their own, and I was determined not to fail them as a leader. My first order of business was growth. Whenever we came across another dog, I would offer my hand, as an olive branch. Some dogs would accept, and allow themselves to be pet, and joined our pack. Other dogs, afraid of our gang's power, would instead bark and growl, but they would be immediately shouted down and drowned out by my troops. Before long, my pack of three or four had grown to almost a dozen. And they all obeyed me, their Alpha.

After a few run-ins with other packs and some thoroughly perplexed storeowners, our pack finally disbanded. The last thing I remember is seeing some sort of horrible monster in the sand, and ogling it with extreme trepidation, before passing out back in Venus. The ravings of a dangerously unbalanced mind, I assumed at the time, after waking up, feeling sober and absolutely shitty. But, once again, I found something enlightening in my camera much later:

So, yeah. Monster.

Fuck you, ocean.

The sun dawns on a new day, and I'm thrown from canine royalty back to lowly human commoner.The Half Moon Party's tonight, so after eating some recovery pizza and a fruit shake, I stop by Friendly Resort to see if anyone's around and interested in going. By the pool, I find Sander and Tyler, who tell me the whole group's going. Well alright then. I walk with them to the travel agent and buy a ticket to the party.

Back at Friendly, we're soon joined by the rest of the group. Whereas most Dutch people I've met walk around eyes half-lidded and seemingly on the verge of sleep, Sander is fearsomely energetic. To pass the time, he does backflips in the grass, while I find out that Tyler and I are both fans of the ska band Less Than Jake. Not really important, but I'm always pleasantly surprised when I meet anyone overseas who wants to talk about any music besides Oasis.

A van comes by to pick us up, and inside I have a conversation about horror movies with Sander, who remains to this day the only person I've met, and indeed probably the only person who exists, who thinks Hannibal was a better movie than Silence of the Lambs. I just...I chalk it up to him being Dutch, somehow.  The driver slips in a CD, and the entire van erupts into a nasally singalong of "Wonderwall", including Tyler, who was now dead to me musically. Last night I lost all sense of civilization and became nothing more than an animal, and this is worse. "Hotel California" comes on next, and in retaliation I sing it as loudly and aggressively as possible over their groans, with Sander's enthusiastic accompaniment. What is friendmaking if not naturally adversarial, anyway?

Janice looks much cuter tonight, which I think is due to wearing her hair differently. I cannot stress this enough: British people need bangs. If you're British and you're reading this, you are not exempt. Consider this your PSA. Bangs. Wear them.

At the entrance to the Half Moon Party, which happens to be situated rather deep into the jungle, we're issued free drink tickets in exchange for our entrance passes. Cashing in the drink ticket grants me a weak, watered-down strawberry daiquiri. Once inside, I buy a slightly stronger Sang Som bucket, for twice the normal price. Since the Half Moon Party is a closed event, they get to control the merchants and their prices, so everything is double what you'd normally pay around Haad Rin.

Everywhere are vendors hawking day-glo body paint, but it's rather easy to find some expats who've already brought a load and want nothing more than to share. Once my face has been painted up by some Europeans, I get to dancing on tables with the remains of our group that hasn't already wandered off to some other corner of the event.

Just casual as all hell.

The decor is certainly impressive, even if the atmosphere is ruthlessly capitalistic, what with the 20 dollar entrance fee, and 10 dollar drinks prices. The central decoration is a massive white tree surrounded by abstract spikes, ripped seemingly straight from the nearest tribal tattoo.

Wife beaters mandatory.

Skilled fire-twirlers twirl their fire to the beat of professional DJs, spinning club tunes only slightly indistinguishable from any other night on the beach. There's a flyer listing the DJ schedule, but none of them are the four or five maximum DJs I could name off the top of my head. Still, they are all very adequate at pushing play on a deck and making the speakers go "uhn tsh uhn tsh uhn tsh".

As more members of the group splinter off, I find myself talking to a German, who is very insistent about me acting as his wing-man during the party. "Ve shall get ze girls together, ja?" Sorry, but nicht. I've got enough drama keeping up with this crowd as is. I go to find Sander, who is currently chasing after Cyndi, the most naturally drunk girl in all the land, who keeps burning people with her mooched cigarettes. Cyndi, meanwhile, wants no one but Tyler, because he's tall and she's predictable. Elsewhere, I notice that Bethany has sussed out Jake somewhere in the party, and they're most definitely back on, the Mellow Mountain girl vomiting over the railing a thing of the distant past.

But my attentions keep coming back to Janice. Those bangs, man. They make all the difference. I chat with her and Ted from Australia about ping pong shows, which Ted claims to have never seen, despite living 9 years in Ko Samui. Bullshit, says I. There's just no way you can live in Thailand for 9 years, and not end up seeing a baby chick being swallowed up and then emerging from a woman's vagina at some point in your life.

Ah, Thailand.

Janice and I leave the party together, but I'm shut down at the door to her room. "I'm really just so tired..." says she. But...the bangs...

I should've known. I wanted it too bad. I wasn't expecting the unexpected. I leave her to be tired or whatever, and return to my own room to brood. To think I pruned my fingers for nothing. Certainly food for thought. Also, gross.

The next day I'm supposed to meet Sander to rent scooters and see more of the island, but I don't know his room number, and anyways I'd rather sleep in. Finally I've resolved to get off this island, so I've bought a ticket for a boat early the next morning to Ko Tao. I head out for food, eating a subpar bacon sandwich and end up drinking in another Friends bar, where I'm approached by a Burmese man who asks my name, where I'm from, says nice to meet me, and leaves. My last night in Ko Pha Ngan, and I can already tell it's going to be something special.

As if on cue, I walk back to Venus to drop some things off, and in the almost-total darkness, I swear I see a willow-the-wisp. Or, whatever optical phenomenon begat the willow-the-wisp story. For context, I was walking around in this:

When a green light, just a dot, starts moving around my eye line, before zipping off into the trees to my right. It was too immaterial for a firefly, and far too green, but too independent and lazy for a sunspot or effect from the inside of my eyelids. Whatever it was, I put it out of my mind, and continue on to Friendly Resort, to meet the Sander and the rest of them.

After regaling Sander with an extremely abridged story about trying nitrous the other night, I get him curious enough to try it with me at Pla-Bla. They charge the same price as The Rock, and deliver the gas in the same balloon-filled manner. Being in a brighter bar however, filled with patrons, huffing the gas at the same time with a compatriot, makes quite a lot of difference.

Look at that smile! And I'm not even high yet!

Even better, Pla-Bla is showing a movie, so we have some visual stimulation. Unfortunately, the movie is The Beach, and it's at the very nihilistic end, which is not so great for doing drugs to. Still, Sander has a great time, while I just kind of wish it was the scene with the glowing jellyfish. That would have been nice.

On the way back from the bar, we run into the main group, and venture to the beach together. They're set to make their last night in Ko Pha Ngan something to remember, and immediately start ordering round after round of drinks. But not me. I actually have something different in mind for tonight. I'm going to finally try mushrooms, totally sober.

I've always been disappointed with my shroom experiences, and a friend pointed out to me that the common denominator seems to be that I'm always drunk when I try them, which dampens their effect. So tonight I'm going to go in totally clean (well, except for the laughing gas, but come on) and see what happens. I excuse myself from the group partying on the beach, and make my way to Mellow Mountain and order a shroom shake.

On the walk back, I notice an old woman reading tarot in the sand, and it's one of those great idea moments, light bulb over the head and everything. The mushrooms haven't kicked in yet, if they would indeed have any effect at all. After paying for the session, the woman asks me to cut the deck, which I do. She has me draw several cards, and then turn them over in order, analyzing each one in turn.

"You...are very good with money. Yes?" Whoof. Not a great start to divining the universe. "Sure, I'm great with money. Love the stuff," I reply. "Keep going."

She turns over another card. "You...have many girls back home! Yes, many girls I can see." Swing and a miss! But I don't want to be a dick about her fortune telling: "Oh yes. Lots of girls. All the girls." She nods sagely, turning over the next card. She explains something about cups, and further elucidates just how good I am with girls. It's my turn to nod sagely. "But they want your money!" she explains. I wouldn't count gold-diggers on my top 5 list of life problems, but she continues on without pause.

Another card is turned. This time, she hesitates before speaking. "You like...men," she states, matter-of-fact. There isn't any question in her voice. She waits for my confirmation.

"No?" I'm not quite sure how to let her down. She's so confident, I feel bad for being straight. Maybe I have been living a lie, and I just chose the weirdest possible way to be outed. That kind of adds up, I think.

"You're sure? But...you like men." She examines the cards more closely, looking back and forth between them and me, positive that they very clearly reveal my homosexuality. After refusing a few more times, she relents, although I can see in her eyes that she's going to continue under the assumption that I've lied to her and will continue lying about my sexuality, asshole that I am. She turns over another card.

"Okay, your future." Serious business now. "You will marry girl in foreign country, and have," another card turned, "three child!" I shrug, and accept my fate. With no more cards to turn over, she indicates for a tip, but in a kind of resentful way that says she still knows I lied about being gay, and ruined my own tarot reading. I give her a buck.

Walking on, I rejoin the group on the beach, one of whom, Hefina, has order a hookah for the table.

The foam machine started up, prompting the others to get on their feet. As everyone dances in the sand around me, I take seat at the table as the mushrooms come on in full force. Finally, I have what they call a breakthrough experience. Everything becomes poignant, and full of incredible meaning. I could see into the actions of everyone around me, understanding their thought processes in full, as they happened, and realize that person's ultimate place int he world. Everything became obvious, and okay.

Somehow I end up sitting cross-legged on top of the table. I am a buddha amidst the fire and foam. Even the douchebag tourist meatheads had their place, and it is in a way reassuring to see them perfectly filling that role. The prepubescent Connect Four girl makes an appearance, and her hostility is revealed to be a gimmick, as I catch her smiling while pulling out Jake's chest hair, trying to goad him into a match.

I was people watching on a sublime level. I could almost hear Ken Kesey saying "That's her thing, and she's doing it" as Hefina, a Welsh girl known to have a boyfriend back home, makes out with a birthday boy in another group. Janice, who would talk so much about not liking or needing these girls, still finds herself following them into pictures, into their dance circles. Cyndi, drenched in foam and seawater, a desperate guy tentatively touching her ass as she mooches cigarette after cigarette, hands me her cell phone, so fucked up that the screen only glows white and won't stop vibrating.

And the hookah, neverending. I'm Alice's caterpillar over here, the only one puffing. Hefina tries briefly to learn from me how to blow smoke rings, but soon gives up and dances back into the bubbles. Everything, its place. I am peaceful, and complete. Very groovy thoughts, man, like "I should get water. Water is just in general a good idea" or "Cigarettes are just so...dangerous," of course after I get burned by one of Cyndi's as I stumble my way into the foam, on a whim. I simply stand there, enjoying the texture of it, before taking my place back on top of the bench. I look up occasionally, and see the stars moving, shifting slowly about each other. The moon is orange, and for all I know the moon is actually orange tonight. Still, I try not to stare, because I've decided this is a secret trip, for paranoid and druggy reasons. I tell no one, and they seem to not notice. Occasionally I'm asked to dance, which I do for a minute, loose-limbed and with an enigmatic smile, before going back to the bench. I understand the difficulty I've been having with Ko Pha Ngan: I'm a big dog in a small house, left alone.

There's something of a wrench in the works when it's getting on to 5 in the morning, and I'm still the little buddha at peace with everything, but man I've also got to be up and moving to another island in 4 hours. I know better than to fight the trip, so I just go with it, sleep be damned. The others leave, one by one, but every time I think the shrooms are done with me, they come right back and show me who's really enlightened. The sun breaks over the horizon, and I walk sleepily back to Venus..

I respected the mushrooms, and they treat me in kind. I lie in bed for a few moments in soft euphoria, before lazily drifting off. One with everything. And just in case that's all bullshit, I set an alarm.

On the Full Moon/KO PHA NGAN

The first order of the day is first aid.  Even for me, I was feeling abnormally blase about the whole burned flesh business.  It was more the continued lack of a hangover that made me awfully uneasy.  Maybe it was cumulative, and at some inopportune time I would suddenly be struck with the skull-rending force of two months of pent-up morning-after suffering, spontaneously-combusting my liver and bursting my brain.  Or maybe it was the humidity.  Still, uneasy...

I saunter over to a Friends bar to google burn treatments, only for the town to have another power outage.  After a few drinks (to taunt the looming specter of hangovers to come), the power comes back on, and I sit down in an internet cafe to do some research.

First, I sign up for travel insurance, while I still have some sliver of self-preservation instinct left.  Also, the laws of irony dictate that by doing so, I'm guaranteed to never get injured again.  Next, I do a search along the lines of "what to do if you're an idiot who burned themselves doing something stupid in Ko Pha Ngan."  There turns out to be a great deal of information on the topic.

It seems many backpackers will get the "Ko Pha Ngan Tattoo" from rental scooter accidents, by either burning themselves on overheated tail pipes, or road rash after wiping out on one of the many dangerous and unfinished roads around the island.  What idiots!  It's those kind of irresponsible assholes who give us careful, sensitive, God-fearing backpackers a bad name.  But, somehow against all odds the same medical advice applied to my case.  And as it turns out, you're not supposed to pop the blisters ever.  So if you're ever in the same situation, make sure to keep the dirty fingernails of that gay whore off your stomach blisters.  A life tip you can take with you.

I amble over to the local clinic, situated very conveniently near the beach, and an unending source of customers.  After talking with the nurse, I find that my shiny new hundred-dollar travel insurance isn't taken up front, and I would have to send off the doctor bill to the insurance company for reimbursement.  Not wanting to spend 3 months waiting to get a check back for 15 bucks, I head to the pharmacy instead.  The way I figure it, the pharmacist'll point me to the same gear the doctor would have, plus I've already got my free internet medical advice.  After an hour of painstaking web research slash Facebooking, I'm practically qualified for surgery.

Inside the pharmacy a young, tanned British woman is consulting the pharmacist, an equally young and very perplexed Thai man.

"You know," she stammers, "When you have in-ter-course...but next day...you regret?"  He nods his head slightly, more of an idle bob, unable to parse out the hussy's demand.

"What do you call it...the pill..." she wonders aloud, before delivering more euphemistic descriptions of her predicament and the kind of help she wanted.

Just as I was about to say the words, it comes to her and she exclaims "Plan B!  I need Plan B!" and to my infinite dismay, the pharmacist understands and fetches the pills, ruining the chance of her resorting to the greatest and most humiliating sign language.

Once the walking paradox of a girl who has one night stands but doesn't know what the morning after pill is leaves, I show the pharmacist my burn and he immediately fetches the necessary supplies.  Either he has House-level powers of diagnosis and treatment, or he's seen the Ko Pha Ngan Tattoo before.  I end up buying antibiotics, bandages, Silverderm cream, and just for kicks, a pack of Xanax.  And seeing as how 10 Xanax costs 10 bucks, it looks like I'll be restricting myself to their intended use: hangovers and drug come-downs.

Speaking of good parties, tomorrow's the full moon.  Twenty thousand desperate fools dancing, thrashing, fucking, pissing, and puking in every predominate European language and custom...A drunk beach of horny werewolves only half-tamed by trance music.  It could be a bit of a spectacle.  I do a final count of limbs and digits before bed.

The day of the full moon begins with another power outage.  In addition to the burn on my stomach, my legs and ass are killing me, and I've found a bloody hole in the bottom of my right foot.  All in all, could be worse.

Before heading down to Sunrise Beach where the Full Moon Party is going to take place, I walk along Sunset Beach for the first time, and watch the sunset with a grocery bag of cold Changs.

I recommend trying it sometime.

Another power outage makes choosing a place to eat very simple, and I grab some food and drinks in a nearby restaurant that has their generator up and running.  As Jackass plays on the surrounding half dozen TVs, I'm chatted up by a German backpacker named Christian.  It would seem he was in Vang Vieng just a week and a half ago, possibly the same time as me.  While he was there, some guy died on the river.  Not wanting to be outdone in brushes with death, I share the story of my sunburn and the more recent actual-fire burn, and my ingenious DIY treatment thereof.

"Wait, jew are dreenkeeng on antibiotics?" he asks.

"Well, maybe, kinda..." comes my sheepish reply.  I hadn't really thought about it.  I come to the conclusion that if I can safely drink and take Xanax (and by safely, I mean hasn't yet made me die), antibiotics should be a cinch.  After all, they're pretty much just vitamins, right?  Like, strong vitamins.  I should be fine.

After a really great discussion about those yellow infected bumps you get on your legs after a killer burn, Christian leaves to search for some missing friends.

"Maybe jew und me will find each other later," he says.  I wonder if I'll be completely alone for the Party tonight.  Even the guy whose friends clearly stood him up doesn't want to stick it out with me.  No time for a pity-party, though.  Only time now for a party-party.

I head back to my bungalow to make final preparations for the night.  As I'm walking through town, I notice one of the cops on security duty playing with something in his hands, and grinning like a Punch doll.

Even with a picture this blurry, you know he's up to no good.  That's not a smile you should trust.

Now, I have three major fears in life.  One: compound fractures, because man that would suck.  Two: candiru, because oh man that would suck even more.  Three: the foul abomination this officer was holding in his hands at this very moment.  Something I always told myself was an irrational fear, because much like candiru, terrifying though they may be, my chances of ever encountering them were pretty low.  Well, here's irrational:

That's right.  Fear number three is giant centipedes, and here's a guy in the middle of Wonderful Paradise Island who sees fit to play with one of the nightmare factories.  After I stop to take a picture, to document the atrocity that I once thought so irrational, the officer gestures to me.  He wants me to hold it.

Hell, what's the Full Moon Party for if not a bit of immersion therapy.

Oh God I was so right it's so awful

After successfully not dying of the heebiest of jeebies, or from the centipede itself (although the cop did look visibly concerned when the monster started crawling towards my neck, at which point he snatched it away), I shiver uncontrollably all the way back to Venus and make final preparations for the night.  After I've pissed one last time, I ditch my debit card and flip flops to be safe.  I take about a hundred bucks in cash, divided into different pockets around my body to stymy pickpocketers.  And most importantly, I conquered one of my biggest fears in life.  There's nothing like a bit of emotional catharsis to get you in the mood to shake your fucking ass.  Let's do this.

I stop for one last drink in the Venus lounge, to see if anyone I've previously met is around.  There isn't, so I sup my gin and tonic and watch the end of Bruno with some UK girls.  We lightly chat, and as I pay for my drink one of them asks why I'm not buying a bucket.  I'll get one at the beach, I reply, which prompts the Venus employee to warn me about a scam some bucket stalls have where they half-fill their whiskey bottles with water.  It would explain some of the super-faded bottles I've been seeing at some of the stalls.  He advises me to listen for the "click" when they crack open the bottle.  I'm reminded of one of the banners I keep seeing around town, that makes much more sense now:

Another girl pipes in about a specific drink stall that will hold the bottle up to your ear every time so you can listen for the crack.  I'm genuinely enthused about this advice, and the first girl asks if I'd like to join them.  They're meeting eleven other girls, and I would be the only guy.  Well, that was a gimme.

I follow the gals to their meeting point in one of the Friends bars, where the group inside is discussing the gruesome medical photos the government puts on cigarette packs.

Being forced to stare at foot cancer or whatever is still worth the crazy-low prices of overseas cigs.

I make the world's most transparent attempt at learning and remembering names, and am privy to the conclusion that the most choice cigarette pack to have is one where a man's smoke is being blown into the face of a baby in his arms (probably his baby, but who's to say).  Because "while it is 'orrible 'n that, at least there's nofink real nasty."

Maybe the baby's a real dick.  The point is, we don't have all the facts here people.

The ladies tell me they're leaving at 6 a.m. tomorrow morning, but should be fine because they're all completely addicted to M-150, a potent Thai energy drink.  The clock hits 11.  The streets begin to fill.  We head to the beach.

My wolfesspack.

The noise starts from far off, a thunderous hum of a dozen different and insistent sound systems battling each other for supremacy.  I recognize a few of the playlists as the same from earlier nights, but they're now joined by music from new parties along the beach, offering bass-ed up techno in numerous and slight genre variations I am nowhere near qualified enough to identify.

I'm immediately reminded of tubing in Vang Vieng.  Like the bars there, there was such variety that you just wandered to whichever party along the sandbar was playing your taste in dance music and had the best bucket drink gimmicks.

Then we hit the crowd.  You can't even see sand, for all the thousands of day-glo painted Europeans dancing together in a half-mile long, claustrophobia-inducing flesh pit.

In other words, the party was hella bumpin'.

I buy a Sang Som and Coke bucket from the girls' favorite place, and we make our way through the shirtless, screaming amoeba that has covered the peninsula.  I dance occasionally, but mostly talk to the de facto mother hen of the group about sunburns and blisters, the usual.

The party keeps building.

It becomes hard to breathe, let alone think, amidst the Great White Throng.  At least, that's the excuse I'm going to go with in a second.  It turns out one of the side effects of drinking a giant bucket of alcohol is a pretty constant need to piss.  One of the girls and I split off from the group to try our luck at finding a bathroom.  What I hadn't counted on, foolishly, was that such massive piss-pot demand would drive all the business owners around here to either close their bathroom doors to the public, or cause them to start charging exorbitant amounts of money.

Now, I've never been a fan of paying money to use a restroom.  Even if I did cough up the cash, the lines were a staggering exercise in bladder torture.  And I wasn't about to pee in the ocean, like some others, like ANIMALS.

Anyways I'm not really sure how it happened, but we ended up sneaking into some store's generator room and peeing in the dark.  On their generator, I'm fairly sure.  And then the store worker walked in.

I freeze, no idea what plan of action to take.  Banking just a little on the worker only being able to see by movement, like a T-Rex.  It's hard to say what emotions played out across his face.  Anger, sure, but more...disappointment.  I let him down.  In a way, it felt like I had let America down.  The British girl had no such qualms.  With the cool arrogance that can only come to those born in a bullshit monarchy, she blows right by the dumbfounded Thai man and mixes back into the street, somehow managing to look bored the whole while.

His gaze returns to me, unfathoming.  Well, maybe a little fathoming.  He knows why his generator stinks of piss.  But there's nothing to be done now.  I shrug.  "Sorry!" I state stupidly, eyes wide, shoulders around my ears.  I follow the girl out.  I didn't even get to shake it off.

I continue down towards the end of the beach, towards Mellow Mountain, alone or with the group I don't remember.  From here I get a better view of the lights of the Party, even if my camera doesn't. This is really something, I think to myself.  Then I black out.

I wake up in bed, and it's almost noon.  Maybe it's because I was drinking on antibiotics.  Maybe it's because I was drinking on Xanax.  Maybe it's because I was drinking on antibiotics AND Xanax.  I don't know.  I'm not a doctor.

This man is not a doctor.

I take inventory.  There are no signs of puke or sex, the first items on my blackout checklist.  Next, nothing seems to be stolen, broken, or otherwise violated.  So far, looking good.  Curiously, I find an empty cigarette pack in one of my pockets, and I don't smoke.

And it's not even the sweet baby-smoke pack, either.

I probably should've listened to Christian, and taken it easier.  The Full Moon Party is a pretty big thing to just lose half my memory of.  I imagine myself partying bravely and honorably into the dust, like the orchestra on the Titanic, or Slurms MacKenzie.  But I also know that is not ever, ever the story behind a blackout.  Maybe it's better this way.  Maybe shit got dark.  Sometimes it's better not knowing.

I have a slight hangover, despite drinking enough to have retroactively given myself FAS.  The relief of knowing I can still get hangovers, and remain a mortal, corporeal being, is small comfort.  My pain is more spiritual than physical, likely due to complete seratonin crash.  I feel like Captain Willard at the beginning of Apocalypse Now, and wish my room had a slow-turning ceiling fan I could stare into.  All I want to do is read Lovecraft and watch Chris Cunningham videos and be dark.  And really, the Full Moon Party is dumb if you think about it.  The same party they do every night, just with 100 times as many people and anyways it's all commercial and lame ever since the 90s when the cool people did it.  And I really, really wish I had been conscious for it.  I take a couple Xanax, a shit, and walk to the beach.

Most people must have had plans similar to the girls and left in the morning.  The beach is practically deserted compared to the last week.

While I slept, there was a community clean-up event that picked up the trash from the night before, and to my incredible surprise left the beach looking pretty good considering the bacchanalian scale of last night.  A few deserted dance stages still stand, a sobering monument to bittersweet morning-afters.

Much of the town shuts down following the Full Moon.  Food vendors keep earlier hours, there are fewer parties on the beach, and some dance clubs I was planning to check out close down until the next Party.  I spend the next few days drinking, eating, and collecting wifi passwords around town.  I want to move on to Ko Tao, an island north of Ko Pha Ngan renowned for its diving, but I'm still waiting on my stomach burn to heal.  Here, the tourist population seems to have dwindled to just the injured like me, and, for some reason, Israelis.  Everywhere, stores and restaurants start to incorporate Hebrew into their hand-written signs, and advertise Israeli Breakfast, rather than the usual American or British.  Many restaurants put up notices that they have run out of Matzah.

These days of nothing to do last longer.  A kind of Hedonistic Relativity occurs, and time expands.  I become concerned with trying a new restaurant and bar for every meal and drink.

And that's how I ended up eating a bacon sandwich.  Australians,  you're growing on me.

Now that I have the time and resources to find such things out, I realize I vastly overpaid for both my ticket to Ko Pha Ngan, and my scuba lessons.  But that's how it goes.  On nights, I continue to go out to the beach.  New games spring up, where you try to throw a basketball hoop from a distance for a chance at winning a free bucket drinks.

One night I run into the hooker who I told I had no money.  She recognizes me and slaps me on the shoulder, smiling drolly.  It was a relief to know she had a sense of humor about it, as opposed to stabbing me to death.  I also see the boy/girl/brother/sister/whatever hooker team, but they either don't recognize or ignore me.  Which I am totally cool with.

Finally, I have to do something to get off my ass, if just to keep from waking up any more with half-drunk buckets on the floor attracting ants and free drink counters written in haphazard marker on my arm.

I buy a ticket for another Muay Thai event, this time at a different arena.  What’s that, you ask?   You want an exhaustive list of comparisons of these matches to the 80s Jean-Claude van Damme vehicle Kickboxer?  

I mean, I guess I could do that.  Since you asked.

For one, the white guy is always heavily favored, even if you can't do split-kicks!  They also really don't appreciate it when you chant "Nak Soo Khao!" in a fevered bloodlust.  Medical treatment tended to happen inside the ring, instead of not happening at all and the loser being dumped outside in an alley, and the fighters did not once beat and rape women before a fight (Geez, what a movie).  Very few split-punches were thrown, and even fewer split-kicks performed.  At one point a cocaine-addled black sidekick almost stormed the place with a machine gun, but then it turned out I don't have mind powers and it didn't happen.

Just boring ol' concussions.

After the fights, I end up at a bar called Moonstone.  The whole place has a Playboy bunny theme, Jackass 3D is playing on the TV but impossible to hear over the dance music, and when I order a drink, it comes in a baby bottle.

I was also completely alone in the bar, as I sucked on the horridly sweet cocktail through its plastic nipple.  Everything seemed normal and alien and awful all at the same time.  I couldn't tell what I was doing here anymore.  I didn't even know if I was enjoying myself.  All I could feel was my mind becoming more and more unhinged.

Also, the place had one of the most stocked bathrooms I have ever seen.  A lint roller and mouthwash?!

Outside, there's a 3-legged dog lying in the street, trying to sleep.  I don't know why, but I watch it for awhile before going back to my room.

The next day, I'm eating at an Italian place called Fellini (that is decorated entirely in Fellini film posters and movie stills) when Christian, the German antibiotic-police, walks in.  As it turns out, he actually did end up finding his friends, and he tells me I was right to be optimistic.  We have a nice chat, until he leaves to rejoin his friends.  And he's right (about me being right).  I should be optimistic.  More productive.  Meet people!  I'm a traveler (testify!), and it's time to get back into the spirit of things.  So long as my sanity doesn't finally crumble into shards of drink bucket plastic and ridiculous platitudes about "freedom", everything'll be peaches and cream.  Delicious peaches and cream.

Getting Wet/KO PHA NGAN

Sarah left early in the morning.  She gave me these parting words: "Don't take Xanax and drink, or you'll die."  Psh.  Whatever, mom.  For the first time in four weeks and four countries, I spent the day alone.

Well, not totally alone. Here's a watch ad by Nicolas Cage, where he is pictured not wearing a watch.

I ate some sadness flan.

And I found one of Shanghai's favorite piss-corners.

In the morning I rode the 20 subway stops back to the airport, mostly standing, because I had made the mistake of wondering how the subway ride could possibly get any worse.  I was worried about airport security.  I hadn't had any problems with the security checkpoints in the subway, or with my previous airport entry, but carrying around a full bottle of prescription medication did make me a little uneasy.  And then, after putting my backpack on the conveyor belt, I got flagged.  Time slowed down as the conveyor belt was ran backwards, and my bag went back under the x-ray, and then pulled back out to be examined by hand.  A security officer addressed me sternly, brandishing an item from my bag.  It was my alarm clock.

One of these things is illegal, and one looks like a bomb if you don't really know anything about bombs.

"What...is...this?" she asked, holding the clock gingerly with her fingertips.  "Clock!  Alarm clock!  Time!" I replied, relieved, then realizing I shouldn't look too relieved.  She gave it one last glance, and stuffed it back in my bag without another word.  I felt like Jason Bourne.  I felt like James Motherfucking Bond.  If those Xanax pills were state secrets, I thought, I just totally espionaged you assholes.  The victory was short-lived, however, when I spent twenty dollars on fried rice and ice coffee in one of the airport restaurants.  I felt like James Bond's cousin Doug who works at the mall and knows his wife cheats on him with the high school kid at the Orange Julius.

On the plus side (?), this store exists.

My flight is with Sri Lankan Airlines, a welcome change from the usual Air Asia budget flight.  Not only do we get headrest TVs, but an actual menu for the food as well.  I watch The Tourist and drink complimentary Scotch, which comes in handy when watching a movie like The Tourist.

Thanks, Scotch!

From the Bangkok airport, I ask how to get to the train station, and am put on a bus.  I was trying to get to the island of Ko Pha Ngan, and had read that I could get a cheap train ticket to the dock.  And that was exactly the extent of my planning.  Once we near the train station, a Thai woman in charge of the bus asks me where I'm going.  I tell her Ko Pha Ngan, and she becomes very adamant that I follow her to "her" travel agency.  It'll be as cheap as the train, she tells me.

What the hell, right?  I follow her to the travel agency office, where she presides as I'm sold a joint bus-boat ticket that is actually far more expensive than the train, but the addition of the boat ticket makes me okay with it.  Sure, I've just played into this stranger's cunning hands and padded the pockets of an exploitative travel agency, but there's something nice about not having to lift a finger as other people organize my plans for me while I lie back in apathy.  Like being sedated before oral surgery; I may feel extorted and slightly frightened, but I'm free to shut my brain down and get in some good drool time.  Once I've handed over the money, the lady disappears, and I'm directed to a bus waiting just down the street that'll take me to the port at Surat Thani, and from there I'll get a boat to Ko Pha Ngan.

The really worrying thing is, I was never actually given a ticket.  They put me on the bus, and then tell me to stay while they bring one back for me.  Outside the bus on the street is an impromptu dance party, which only made me more suspicious.  What do they have to be so happy about, I thought.

The travel agency people still hadn't come back with my ticket, and the bus began to leave.  This could be a murder bus, I think.  I'm on a murder bus, and I don't even have a ticket.  That would be so typical.

The overnight bus ride is a feared and hated staple of backpacker life.  Fortunately, this was one of the better buses, just below a Greyhound in terms of comfort (as one should hope, at 30 bucks a ticket), and I had the foresight to grab some food and beer from a 7-11 before we took off.  Unfortunately, all the window seats were taken, which can make for an uncomfortable night.

I'm no stranger to long bus rides, and over the years I've developed a strategy for what experts call the "Aisle Seat Conundrum".  I find an empty seat next to a nice-looking non-skinny girl.  We make pleasant small talk, after which I offer some food, maybe some beer, maybe some invaluable witticisms about whatever movie is playing (this is 100% always a hit).  I let a decent amount of time pass, and then pretend to nod off in my seat.  Ever so slowly, I let myself slide over, until my head falls on my shoulder, and then I "wake up"!  I stammer an apology, smile sheepishly, to which she'll say something like "Aw, that's alright..."  Now it's time to grin, but only in my brain, because she's just fallen into my trap.  Now I can happily rest against a total stranger's shoulder, while all the suckers around me in aisle seats are forced into more and more intricate yoga positions in their fruitless bid for sleep.  You can even try it with a skinny girl, provided she's got a soft coat or hipster scarf or something.  I guess guys work too, if you're less prejudiced about your meat-pillow.  The muscly ones feel real nice, I bet.

Don't try to hang out with your human cushion afterwards.  Don't make it weird.

The ride to Surat Thani takes about 8 hours, after which we waited in the bus depot for another hour before being driven to the pier.  Our bus tickets are swapped for boat tickets, which I'm given despite not having the boat ticket.  Things are working out after all, it looked like.

It's on this last leg of the drive that my bladder finally reached critical mass.  I had peed at the last stop, but the beers broke a seal that every bump in the road painfully worsened.  And there are a lot of frigging bumps  on a Thai road.  With my back hunched over and knees locked together, I made my way to the bathroom on the board, only to discover that it was locked.  I knocked on the door, waited a few moments, knocked again, and nothing.  It was unoccupied, and locked for reasons unknown but almost certainly diabolical.  I had a few options now.  The most obvious was I could wait until the bus stopped again, while my bladder exploded and I died.  That was unacceptable.  The other options required more creativity.  But I didn't get a B.A. in Fine Art for nothing.

The bathroom was at the bottom of the stairwell, connecting the first class seating in the front of the bus on the lower deck with the economy seating on the upper deck, where I was seated.  All was quiet at the moment, and everyone seemed to be asleep.  The toilet may have been locked, but I noticed that the sink was outside, in the open.  Opposite the sink was the door to the first class cabin, which looked sturdy and easy to block.  The trouble would be the upper deck, as there would be no stopping anyone from coming down the stairs.  One look over the railing and I was busted, but I had no choice.  I was desperate.  So, with legs splayed apart to both straddle the sink and block the first class door, my eyes desperately scanning the upper railing like a cornered mongrel, I peed in the sink.  A bright, never-ending stream of liquid yellow shame.

It wasn't easy.  I have a shy bladder in the best of times, and rabid paranoia makes for a poor diuretic, not to mention the sheer logistics of trying to piss with your legs angled wildly four feet apart on a moving bus.  And then the faucet wouldn't work.  I had no choice but to hope the urine would finish trickling down the drain by the time we stopped again.

We reached the pier and while it hadn't finished draining, at least there was no tell-tale foam.  Unfortunately, the smell had not fully dissipated.  I got to watch an entire bus of sleep-deprived backpackers wince as they passed one-by-one through the ammonia-drenched failure box.

I am so sorry.

I shouldn't have peed on that.  Another thing I wish I could stop saying.

At the pier we have another hour wait before we can board the boat, which provides enough time to visit a real bathroom and wash my hands figuratively and very, very literally.  While washing up, I notice my soap dispenser has a little guest.

If you could harness uncontrollable shivering as an energy, this soap would be a perpetual motion machine.

The boat first stopped at Ko Samui, then continued on to Ko Pha Ngan.  After the shuffle of passengers disembarking and the crew unloading luggage, I overheard a British girl sobbing to her friends.  At some point during the voyage, all of her cash was stolen from her bag in the luggage compartment.  Earlier, I had read quite a bit about this sort of thing happening on buses, and thus tried to never leave anything valuable in my larger backpack.  I empathized with her, but felt sufficiently superior in my own savvy travel sense.  Who leaves a great deal of money in an unattended bag?  The girl was practically begging for it to be stolen.

We finally reached the dock in Ko Pha Ngan around noon.  Once disembarked, I was struck by a great mix of relief, joy, and homecoming.

Yup, drink it in.  Drink it all in.

I had been to Thailand once before, but until this moment I had had no chance to appreciate the nostalgia of return, having been caught up in relentless cross-country movement since boarding my flight.  More excitingly, this was where my plans ended.  I had booked a bungalow for a week here, and had nothing planned beyond that.  I could go anywhere, with anyone, and my actions were limited only by my ever-loosening sense of morality and civil behavior.  This was what made people quit their jobs and empty their savings. This was what sold millions of Lonely Planets.   This was pharmaceutical-grade freedom.

I still had to get to my bungalow, which very quickly presented some hurdles.  For one, I hadn't printed out an address.  This was an easy fix, though: I ducked inside the first internet cafe I saw and wrote the pertinent info down.  The bigger hurdle was I had come during the Songkran festival, a New Year's celebration that consists of everyone in Thailand drenching everyone else in as much water as humanly possible

Here's a little girl kindly spraying passersby with a hose, like the cutest riot police.

Sure, there are some traditional religious underpinnings to the whole thing, but that sort of shit isn't going to fly in Ko Pha Ngan.  Unless that shit is colored talc, which was very popular for throwing on people who had been recently doused.  I hopped on a tuk tuk bound for the vague direction of my lodging, and we would be ambushed every minute on all sides by buckets, hoses, bottles, and water guns of every caliber.  Having learned my lesson about mixing water and electronics already through my MP3 player, I decided I should probably do something about the backpack that was starting to soak through on account of being in the general vicinity of me.  There was a luggage rack on the roof (that the smarter passengers had taken advantage of before they got in), and so I hung off the back off the tuk tuk, one arm clutching the railing and the other arm attempting to lift my entire backpack and fling it on top.

My sunglasses were clipped to the neck of my shirt, and in the midst of my flailing they came unhooked and went flying into the street.  I watched dumbly as our tuk-tuk drove on, leaving them behind.  It was about 5 minutes later that it occurred to me I might've asked the driver to, well, stop.  Too late now.  Of all the things I had bought for this trip, only my swim trunks and my netbook were left, and that was only providing the latter had escaped the festivities un-soaked.

The tuk tuk dropped me off in Haad Rin, at the southern tip of the island.  My bungalow was supposed to be near Haad Rin Nok, or Sunrise Beach, also the location of the monthly Full Moon Party.  After hiking around the hills for an embarrassingly long time and getting multiple conflicting directions from people, at last I found the Venus Resort.  The resort sits along a hill overlooking the far end of the beach, not quite in view but within easy walking distance.  Once let into my room, I looked over the damage.

The contents of my bags had made it through okay, but everything in my pockets was utterly soaked.  This included my passport, which now had many stamps leaking ink through the pages, and my wallet with all my Thai and Chinese cash.  I laid the passport out on the desk to dry, along with 30-odd cash bills, and prayed that I hadn't just set off the spidey sense of every burglar in Thailand.

The room itself was bare to a fault, as can be expected for a 10 dollar-a-night bungalow.  There was no towel, no toilet paper, no promised wi-fi, and the shower was so busted that it seemed to want to conserve as much water as was being wasted outside.

You could get the same pressure and amount of water if you just had a guy stand above you and squirt a mouthful of water between his teeth.

The most worrying thing about the room was the door that wouldn't shut.  So, I'll just keep it locked all the time, I figured.  I locked the door, and discovered that it would still open if pulled hard enough.  Not the greatest situation when you have 500 bucks lying on a desk in the open.  Maybe stealing from tourists is really exaggerated, I thought.  That sort of stuff probably almost never happens.  Like, say, someone's bag getting robbed on a boat.  Never happens.

I tried to nap but to no avail, so instead I took a quick hobo shower (just wet the important bits) and headed out to rediscover Sunrise Beach.

This is what no responsibility looks like.

This was my second time visiting this particular beach, after a trip to Thailand nearly a year earlier.  I had forgotten about the massive heat, for which the ocean breeze was a welcome tonic.  April is the beginning of the hottest time of the year for Thailand, which made me real thankful for the shorts I had bought back in Shanghai.  Travel Tip: when traveling to Southeast Asia during the hottest time of the year, pack shorts.  Don't forget them because you packed your shit in 20 minutes before your flight, while drunk.  I really can't stress this enough.

It was past noon, but there were still crowds milling about, some people playing volleyball, some sunbathing, some swimming.  For the off season it seemed to be an awful lot of people, but then it was also only 5 days till the Full Moon Party, one of the biggest and most famous beach parties in the world.  It was going to get a little crowded.  I walked along the beach, remembering the sights...

The tide carrying in last night's bucket drink straws...

Creepy inbred island dogs scavenging for food...

Mellow Mountain's siren call of hallucinogenic treats...

The line of bucket drink stands were intact, but the signs had changed.  I looked with concern for my personal favorite JAMIE ROCK STAR bucket stand, and found it in good health, although slightly modified from when I had last seen it.

Now with 900% more Paul Rudd references.

Although I think I have a new favorite, in BETHLEHEM'S FUCK BUCKET.

Seeing the beach again reminded me of Jessie, who had been with me on my last visit.  I realized again how alone I was.  If I got too fucked up, there was no cavalry, no shoulder for support.  This was it.

Fuck it.  I bought some counterfeit Ray Bans and signed up for scuba lessons.  Freedom's still a hell of a thing.