For those of you who are new to my blog I'll give you the rundown. George Carlin, one of the greatest comedians of all time, once said in a stand up act he did right before he was put into the ground "Its all bullshit and its bad for you," so in memory of Carlin I've chosen to make this the central theme of my blog.
I took this picture at the main Northern bus Terminal in Bangkok at 3 in the morning. I was about to travel to Cambodia and was told over the phone by information that the bus station had an 8PM bus departing for there. Unfortunately she was feeding me bullshit so when I arrived at the station I was left with no other option but to sleep there until 4 o’clock the next morning at which time the next bus to Cambodia would leave.
I think this is personally MY favorite picture from Thailand. There is something about the sleeping mans face that just looks so tired to me, it’s a look that can't be achieved from simply a lack of sleep. The bus stations in Thailand are interesting places. For the most part not many people speak English so a little Thai goes a long way when you need to find something out. After the general confusion and chaos that is involved upon entering the bus station I proceeded to grab the most comfortable seat since my ass would be occupying it for the next 9 hours. While I was waiting I began chatting with a Thai woman who was on her way to her hometown for a vacation. She asked me to watch her bags while she went to the bathroom and when she got back she went on to talk about how she had trusted me because I was a foreigner.
I was an American! The country that bred such good and honest men as Bernie Madoff, and Kenneth Lay. Such respectable, intelligent, good hearted people would never even ponder the thought of stealing even a piece of lint out of someone’s pants pockets. I found her initial perception of me to be a little too generous and those of her fellow Thai people a little to negative. Throughout my encounters through Thailand, as a whole I can honestly say I have never met a nicer, friendlier, generous people then Thai's. When it was time for her to take her leave we said our goodbyes and I went on to ponder her perception of me and people’s perceptions in general. For the rest of my time stranded in that bus station I brooded over how subjective we think our perceptions are and how un-subjective they genuinely tend to be.
Go into a bar, any bar, classy, trashy, artsy, I don’t care where you go just go somewhere, and ask the first person you see what language Thai people speak and see what answers you get. For all the knowledge and intelligence we preach we're all really full of bullshit, we don't know dick. Outside of our own little box of experience we don't know anything and yet we still have perceptions of the unknown. We have perceptions of how our government works, we have perceptions of what heaven will look like, and these perceptions are nothing more than images we've painted in our minds from information we've been told by various persons and medias. Whenever I tell someone that I lived in Thailand for a year I can see the brush in their mind go to work as it paints a picture of prostitutes and poverty. A dark, dank dangerous place where if you turn your back from a second you're likely to be robbed and raped, but travel to Thailand and if you’re welcomed by anything but smiling faces and generosity I will buy you a beer. I find it simply amazing how we have allowed people to complete the construction of our knowledge with sparse or false factual information and from that created an un-sturdy house of perceptions based around a television set of experiences. This is a worldwide phenomenon, no one is spared, myself included. In south East Asia westerners are idolized. Their perception of us is not of a people who blow up civilians for oil, or steal billions from their own country, and that’s simply because their perception is an un-subjective one.
Weeks after I finally trekked my way through Cambodia I met a Thai girl who had been robbed by a Canadian guy. Her "boyfriend" stole 200 American dollars from her, and her diary to boot. Had the woman at the bus station encountered the Canadian man instead of myself she most probably would have been traveling a lot lighter to her destination. We can't make perceptions about people, places, or things we don't know because what we are fed about these things is often nothing but a steaming pile of bullshit. We have to learn to rely solely on our own experience when it comes to making judgments about these things, so next time you find the brush stroke against the canvas of your mind, painting a picture of the unknown just remember "It's all bullshit and its bad for you."
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