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.

Frogress Is Made/KO PHA NGAN

Enough sitting around. I book a boat tour of the island, especially interested in a series of waterfalls that are supposed to be spectacular, and a special beach that some tourist brochures had me really psyched about. Anything to get out of Haad Rin for a bit.

An awful heat hangs over the morning, a real crack-sluicer, as I wait for the tour van to pick me up. The van stops at a place called Friendly Resort near Haad Rin Nok, the sunset beach, where I meet the rest of the tour group. They register my presence with some surprise, as it turns out everyone else going is from a travel package group, making me the outsider butting into their planned boat ride. Play it cool, Jamie. Don't let 'em see your crack sweat. The head of their travel group makes some introductions, but I confess I was too distracted by the very angry cold sore on her lip to memorize a dozen British names on the spot.

Once the boat leaves the dock, the waters start to chop and wave. Our captain has a chat with the cold sore girl, which she relays back to us: Due to possibility of getting trapped by a storm, we won't be stopping at the waterfalls or the special beach. Alright, I probably had that coming. Anyways, I have bigger concerns: This is the first time I've worn my swim trunks since the night I tried my hand at fire rope-jumping, and I never noticed that a 3-inch hole was burned into the crotch, so now I get to spend the rest of the boat ride playing How Many British Strangers Are Going To See My White American Dick.

Quit lookin' perv

The boat pulls into our first stop at Bottle Beach, where the group is led to lunch at a beachside open-air restaurant. After eating a plate of fried rice, I find myself back on the boat sunbathing with a couple other guys from the group, chatting about the Dragon Tattoo movies, The Inbetweeners, the general state of British film and television, and...goddammit. They were nerds. Stupid, smart, interesting nerds. Still, baby steps. I was making progress. Friend progress. Frogress, if you will. No, definitely friend progress.

The tour stops next at a snorkeling spot about a half mile from shore. Masks and flippers are handed out for everyone who wants to get wet. While half the boat is jumping in, the captain starts throwing bride slices out onto the water, setting off a feeding frenzy among the sputtering neon-banded fish nearby. Really, the opposite of everything I had just learned about not disturbing marine life in scuba diving classes. I watch the sight for a bit before diving in myself.

Sorry, Environment.

The area has a great deal of coral, but in lifeless gray-green hues, like the pea-soup screen of an old Game Boy. Still, the water feels great after the day's oppressive heat. Back on the boat, the woman who we'll just call Cold Sore Sally is warning her travel group about fire rope swinging. Apparently one of the Thai rope swingers she knows dropped the rope for whatever reason, only to have it coil around his leg, while his jeans were soaked in kerosene. His legs were horribly burnt, and being too poor for medical care, became infected.  In the end, both legs had to be amputated.

Meanwhile some other assholes complain about their boo-boos.

Snorkeling turns out to be the last activity for the day, and the boat heads back to port. Almost as soon as we start moving, I realize I have to pee, and this is one of those apocalyptic all-consuming needs to pee. Without any handy sinks around, I consider my options. I could try and sit as nonchalantly as possible, legs crossed tighter than the Gordian Knot, feet spasming uncontrollably, and wait for my kidneys to explode, or I could simply announce to the others my basic bodily needs, and have a beautiful, soul-soaring piss over the side of the boat, announcing myself before all creation. I go with not peeing, which somehow feels more shameful, and wait to die.

After three or four years, we come in sight of the dock. "Does anyone else feel like jumping off the boat right now, they have to pee so bad?" someone pipes up. All round the boat, every single person shouts and/or painfully moans their agreement. To think, what would have happened had I been the pioneer to let it fly over the side? What could I have started? Imagine the sight; the boat floating magically, wonderfully into the air, carried aloft by the sheer force of so many desperate golden arcs, our ship soaring out of this world and into the story-swapping sessions of grizzled sailors at their drunkest, telling the impossible tale with hushed voice into an empty whiskey bottle. 

Our group disembarks and the dozen of us all crabwalk over and around each other to the nearest bathrooms. As much as I'd like to make plans to meet up with my new nerd-friends again, my bladder trumps all. I ditch everyone else running into their bungalows to have a good, old-fashioned public urine-bonanza right there on the pier.

Now the narrative is going to try and stumble on.  In the meantime, here's a crab spitting bubbles out of its mouth.

"Blurble"

Feeling like a sufficiently active and outgoing human being once again, I eat dinner for one at an Italian place called Mona Lisa. I order their homemade limoncello cream and chocolate mousse, but they're out of both, and I can only get regular limoncello, and tiramisu. That's the story of this whole trip, really. If you were just reading this blog until I nailed the perfect travel analogy, because you're the most weirdly specific reader in the world, well here's your stopping point, because home run!

Life is pain.

The ritual continues; paying 5 dollar ATM fees to get drunk in the afternoon, and by night dodging the Thais playing badminton in the street and the dogs sleeping on the beach. I'm starting to recognize the locals, and for better or worse they're recognizing me.

The next afternoon I'm having lunch in a Friends bar called Lazy House. On the TV is a UK Jackass-alike called Balls of Steel, which is a lot like Jackass, minus the charisma, personalities, creativity, or humor. While I sit and consider how far-gone a mind has to be to get pretentious about Jackass, the Lazy House bartender starts up a conversation with me. He confirms for me that the island is indeed now filled with Israelis and Estonians (?) for reasons unknown to him, and shares anecdotes about how after the Full Moon Party he'll find the restaurant filled with people after closing who just seem to wander in, despite the walls and furniture being put up.  He also complains bitterly about the same people who stop in, look at the menu, and then leave to find places that are 10 or 15 baht cheaper. "Assholes," I agree, all of a sudden very worried that he can see into my soul, and the guilt therein.

Along with a pork kebab, I order a few cocktails, including a mai tai, which has become something of a game for me. I've found that every bar and restaurant has them on the menu, but will make them completely different, usually with no idea as to what is actually supposed to go in one, so I get a surprise every time. A cat and dog pair saunter into Lazy House, looking for handouts. After playing Jackass 3D, they close early.

With nothing else to do, and not feeling particularly energetic, I'm about go home when I notice Club 9, a bar I had thought closed following the Full Moon Party, was open for the night. Curious, I go for in a drink.

Inside, the club is completely deserted save for two bartenders and myself. After perusing the menu, I order a "rocknrolla", because James Bond and Charlie Sheen taught me if you're just going to have one drink, make it count.

Club 9 offered Hangover Cures at the bar, which I thought a brilliant innovation. And maybe just a little foreboding.

While one of the bartenders futzes with the sound system, and I sip my oversold and overpriced vodka-Red Bull, the other bartender asks me if I'd like to play a game. Intrigued, and not sure how I could say no in an empty bar, I agree. From behind the counter, he produces...Connect Four. Not just the favored game of prepubescent scam artists, it would seem. What the hell. We play a few games, and the bartender predictably dominates. To make up for my loss, he pours me a whiskey sour, although I'm pretty sure I ended up paying for it anyway.

Two guys walk through the door, and I happen to recognize them. They're both from the group I was with on the boat trip, and they also both happen to be the only non-Brits of said group: Sander, from the Netherlands, and Ted, from Australia. Happy to get away from more embarrassing Connect Four defeats, I join them at a table in the corner. After a round or two of skittles shots, they mention that the rest of the group is going to be partying on the beach, and invite me to come. It would cut into my valuable losing-Hasbro-games-to-a-bored-bartender-in-a-depressing-nightclub time, but I tag along anyway.

Sander, Ted, and I find the others at the beach, and I'm greeted with a few surprised cries of recognition. My nerd-friends aren't here, and I got the feeling they weren't entirely missed. For a while I share in the others' drink buckets and make small talk with a Spanish girl who is oddly insistent about me friending her on Facebook, and then the fire rope comes out.

Hello, old friend.

This time, I abstain. Sander leaves for bed, and the rest of them have too much healthy self-preservation instinct to jump in. Without any interest to keep it going, the fire rope guys pack it in, and are replaced by fire jugglers, whom we watch transfixed while draining more heinously intoxicating and intoxicatingly heinous buckets.

Fire jugglers: Stroking the ego of amateur photographers the world over

Then out comes the fire ring. Sorry, let me rephrase that: they brought out a literal Ring of Fire. This time, abstinence is for ugly teens and dudes named Morrissey. I'mma go live a misinterpreted Johnny Cash song.

Sometimes I really goddamn love you, Ko Pha Ngan.

I jump through the ring again, and again, and again. My draw to it is so powerful, it's practically encoded in my DNA. 

Even though you can't actually see my face, I feel like in this second it's become at least three times as handsome.

Once I've got all the ring-jumping out of my system, I settle down, dance a little, and have a couple beers to celebrate a successful injury-free experience. However, something feels amiss. I check my pockets. My keys are missing.

They're nowhere around the table, or the ground beneath. Clearly, they must have fallen out while I was jumping through a flaming hoop, not that there is anything about this sentence I could have seen coming. Desperate, I hunt the surrounding sand, but with all the foot traffic and the tide coming in, the search becomes hopeless.

I hope you're happy. And goddammit, I know you are.

I have no way of contacting the people at Venus to let me in, and it's far too late to get a room somewhere else for the night. I have two options left: Sleep on the beach, or find someone to go home with. Not wanting to be robbed and/or marked as territory by stray dogs, I put my game face on. My seduction face. Which sounds like I was making kissy lips or something, but it was really pretty much my normal face, except I tried to make my eyes more brooding-er.

With the stakes this high, I got to see just what kind of man I was. Turns out, I'm a man who's not very good at picking up girls. After Ted starts making out with the Spanish Facebook-enthusiast, and takes her off the market, I set my sights on a British girl named Cyndi. Cyndi is the kind of girl with a face that's made to be drunk, possessing the perfect elastic qualities and expression of coy bewilderment. She's already rebuffed Tyler, the playboy of their little group, but she's kept drinking steadily since then and seems very interested in Seattle (even if she does think it's somewhere in California). Let me be clear on this: all I really wanted was a place to stay for the night. If anything, sex would be working against my purpose, since everyone had roommates and any busted hanky-panky could result in me getting thrown out. I wouldn't say I was quite on the Light side of the Force here, but I certainly wasn't Darth Vader neither.

However, Cyndi is being very hot/cold, and just when I think I'm getting somewhere, she's pulled aside by the other girls and given a talking-to. There are a lot of comforting gestures, and every once in awhile Cyndi nods in my direction and loudly exclaims "He?!" I don't know what kind of grammar she's using to do it, but I can feel her slipping away.

I turn my laser-guided attentions elsewhere. A cute Asian girl joins the party, who turns out to have actually lived in Seattle for a bit. And, she's even lost her flip-flops in the sand to boot! I help her look for them for awhile, but they've been sucked out into that same bitch ocean with my room key. She thanks me for my help, compliments me for being such a nice guy, but she's really got to get to bed and good luck with your room situation! Exeunt cute Asian girl.

It's past 3 a.m. now, and I've given up hope. The group is disbanding, and starting to make their way back to their rooms in Haad Rin Nok. I tag along for a bit, wondering which part of the beach is neutral dog territory,  when another one of the stragglers, Janice, an attractive brunette with a stern air, asks where I'm headed. 

"Oh, nowhere really. I'm kind of homeless at the moment," I reply, and fill her in on my plight. To my relief, she's sympathetic.

"I suppose...you might be able to stay in our room. My roommate is probably going to be gone for the night, so there's an extra bed."

Yes! Salvation! Elated, I walk with her to get a couple toasties, while she makes some surprisingly catty remarks about the other girls in her travel group. But hey, whatever you want to bitch about, I'm interested. I even humor her by trying some of her Marmite and cheese toastie, and further humor her by not instantly spitting the Marmite out and rinsing my mouth with Abraxo and holy water.

Once in her room, I ask which bed she wants me to take. She doesn't care. I climb in the one nearest the door, and to my surprise, she climbs in with me. I mean, it wasn't a complete surprise, as I've read in books that girls like to do intercourse stuff too. Still, it was something of a concern. Not only was it past 4 in the morning now, and I was way too tired to be doing anything, but after talking to her it was clear that her roommate was likely to come back at any moment.

Not wanting to offend her or her hospitality, I did the only thing I could: scootched as far as possible to the edge of the bed and pretended to sleep. Janice wasn't satisfied. Every time I would trail off in conversation and close my eyes, she would wait a couple minutes, and then broach a new topic, her hand slowly and steadily moving across the divide towards me the whole time. By the time she started asking if I had seen "this American show 'Glee'", I decided to bite the bullet. Maybe the roommate wouldn't come home after all, and Janice and I could get in a quickie before she would finally let me sleep. I slip my arm around her, and by the waist pull her close. We make out, my reluctance and reservations melting away...

Then her roommate comes home, because of course she does. "Fucking hell!" gasps Bethany, Miss Roommate Herself. Janice and I disentangle ourselves and I go back to the fetal position against the wall.

"Look at this! Haw! Haw!" Behind Bethany is Jake, a topless brodude with the lumpy, ungainly physique of someone who eats too much protein powder. While Bethany gets into her bed, Jake can't sit still, and bounds around the room.  Janice and Bethany argue with each other for a spell about nothing in particular, mostly Janice asking where she's been, and Bethany trying her hardest not to say dry-humping with this guy in the sand. She looks embarrassed to have been caught with him, whereas I don't think Jake has ever been embarrassed in his entire life. Ripping off his pants, he jumps boxer-clad into our bed.

"Let's get this party started!" Jake bellows, starting a tug-of-war with us for our covers.

"Ja-ake! Come on love, just get into bed, yeah?" Bethany pleads with him. He's not having any of it.  He can smell sex in the air, and he's going to be involved in some fashion.

"Whaddaya say we have a four-way? Haw haw! Eh? You know you wanna!" I've started to burrito myself into the sheets, trying not to stare Jake's swinging junk, flapping in and out of the front of his boxers, in the eye.

But neither Janice nor Bethany wanna.  After being stared down by Janice, and berated by Bethany, Jake finally surrenders himself to bed. Bethany turns on the aircon full blast, and switches off the lights, pointless now that it's past 6 and the sun is rising.

"Only spooning, you two!" Bethany chides us before going back to bed, and wrapping herself around Jake.  You got it. If I fall asleep now, I can still get maybe 3 and a half hours of sleep before the girls have to check out of the room.

But Janice isn't interested in sleep. Just as soon as rest was in sight, she starts to grind into me, slowly at first, then gradually picking up speed. Like a sexual Terminator, she wasn't going to quit. Grabbing my available hand under the covers, she presses it to her breast as she continues to grind her ass along my pelvis. In the other bed, I can hear Bethany complain as Jake tries something similar with her. Whether they can see what we're doing, I don't know.

Janice is done playing around. She takes my hand in her left and moves it downtown, pushing two of my fingers into her vagina, while with her other hand she reaches back and starts giving me a very awkward, backwards, over-the-pants handjob. That she does all this while still facing away from me I found extremely impressive. That she was facing her roommate 3-feet away, well, that was something too. She keeps right on fingering herself using my hand as a prop, though if it's making any effect I can't tell. Her backwards handie wasn't doing much for me, but to be fair she would need at least a couple double-joints, and just about every other bit of this situation to be completely different, if she wanted to be very successful.

In the other bed, Bethany has finally had enough of Jake's molestations, and yells at him to either go to sleep, or get out. He chooses to leave, and collects his clothes, muttering the way out. I freeze, not wanting to disturb anybody. Janice has stopped working my hand, and seems to fall asleep, with my fingers still inside her. Without wanting to move, and risk waking her, or angering her roommate, I stay like that, holding hands with her pussy, for an impossibly long time. Minutes, hours, days, I couldn't say. I wonder if it'd be rude to wash my hands after this. My fingers have probably pruned.

After I'm sure Bethany is asleep, I finally withdraw my hand and release my sticky fingers to the light of day. Even if there was time, sleep is impossible thanks to the freezing aircon and morning light filling the room. Didn't I have the option to sleep on a nice, comfortable beach at some point? What happened to that?

Around 9 a.m., the girls awaken to the screech of a travel alarm clock. Bethany heads downstairs to see about extending their stay in the room, while Janice showers. I manage to at least wash my hands before I leave, making vague plans to meet Janice somewhere on the beach, sometime tonight.

I walk of shame back to Venus, but there's nobody there. In all my genius, I got myself locked out on the night before Easter Sunday, and now I get to wait for the family who runs the place to get back from Mass, whenever that would be.

The grandmother finally shows up, but the spare key to my room's padlock, wouldn't you know it, doesn't work. She unlocks the bungalow next door for me to shower in, while she attempts to saw the lock off.  The sawing is unsuccessful, so finally she calls her son in to bash at the door with a hammer, as the locksmith is unavailable because of the holiday.

This is what you get when you "fall into a burning ring of fire." That song is full of shit.

After an hour, he finally smashes the lock off, and I'm able to get inside and nap for a few precious hours. Once I finally feel fit enough to go outside again, I head down to the lobby for breakfast. It's there, on one of the tables, that I spy a familiar bottle.

Hello, beautiful!

The gigolo didn't steal it after all! So, there's a moral to all this bullshit in the end. Don't be quick to judge people. Or something.

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.