Perceptions of a Sleeping Thai

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."

Taofucianhauism?????

All, or most of, the pictures that I will be posting on this blog will be from my trip to Asia. I had grandiose plans of starting a picture blog while I was there but dumbing down my English all day every day definitely made it difficult to write intelligently and stunted my creativity. I think it's been good for me to remove myself from the pictures for a while anyway. It's given me a chance to examine exactly what it is I saw and look at them from a more subjective eye. I think if I had written this while I was in the midst of my travels I would have missed the point behind a lot of them.

First of all, I don't remember who said it, but someone once said, "we should cherish our comedians, they contribute more to our society then we realize." Tonight I watched the last stand up HBO comedy special George Carlin did before he passed away. He spoke on religion, politics, and family amongst other things and constantly repeated the line "It's all bullshit, and it's bad for you." In homage to Carlin and because I feel that that statement is one of the most universally true statements I've ever heard that will thread through many of my own posts I’ve decided to name my blog "Bullshit is bad for you."

I took this picture in a famous temple in Hoi An, Vietnam. I chose it as a topic centerpiece for my first post because it was always a good friend's favorite and because of that I always wanted to use it for something. I didn't ask the monk to pose for this picture he was actually performing temple duties at the time.
Vietnam is an interesting country with an interesting religion, a religion I personally admire for numerous reasons. Since I'm never amazed by the ignorance of people here (if one more person asks if they speak Taiwanese in Thailand I really think I'm going to have to blatantly call them out as mildly retarded) I'll explain a little about the religion the majority of Vietnamese people claim to identify with. If you were to go out on the streets of Hanoi or Ho Chi Minh city and survey people most would probably claim to be Buddhist, BUT only because it would be too confusing and complicated to explain what they really are, which is essentially a hodgepodge of three different religions or philosophies. Due to the overwhelming influence from China and other countries years ago Vietnam has sculpted it's own religion from the clays of Buddhism, Taoism, and Confucianism. While they still call it Buddhism, and there still are a lot of similarities, there are still many obvious differences that I'll choose not to delve into.

I'm not "that guy" that thinks believing in God, Buddha, nirvana, heaven or whatever it is you want to believe in, is a bad thing. They’re all great stories that help a lot of people get through rough times in their life but ultimately they’re stories, the star wars of the BC generation. If these stories had been written in contemporary time and been placed in the non-fiction section of your favorite Barnes and Nobles, the author would be bitched out on Oprah within two days of the book hitting the shelves. The problem with religion for me is it takes away the ability for people to think for themselves and determine for themselves what good and bad is. Instead they are told the difference between "good" and "bad." They are TOLD what is acceptable and what is not, and millions of people around the world blindly follow it. What I loved about the Vietnamese people, and what I have tried to do in my own life, is they took pieces from different religions, ideals that THEY thought were good, and made set their OWN sets of morals based upon them. Now I'm not here to endorse or censure the beliefs of the Vietnamese people, I just think it's a feat to be commended that they didn't buy into the bullshit. I'll be the first to say those books, the Bible, Koran, Preaching’s of the Buddha, they all have some really great, meaningful, fulfilling ways to live your life by, but they’re also a how to guide book for anyone with half a brain to obtain power over someone else. What I think we have to do, and what the Vietnamese people as a collective have done, is learn from these things without following them blindly. If we are blind there isn’t even the possibility of us seeing the bullshit. Ultimately I think we just have to remember "its all bullshit and its bad for you," because if we remember that we will never go blind.