Motivated by a mysterious inner prompting, I’ve started a no grain diet. I have almost zero background in planned, organised dieting, but yesterday a voice inside my stomach (possibly an ingrown conjoined twin) said, ‘Hey, why don’t you stop eating grains for a while?’ I looked up ‘no grain diet’ and sure enough, such a thing exists. I won’t bother here with the benefits claimed for it; as always there are claims and counterclaims and the only way you can find out if it works for you is to try it.

I don’t have any particular health problems, but as I’ve moved through my late twenties and early thirties my energy levels have dropped, and while I’m down the low end of normal (whatever that means) weight for my height and even have muscle definition here and there I do have about 4 kilos (9 pounds or so) of fat I’d like to lose - yeah, I’m talking to you, squishy bit on lower stomach, and you, wobbly bit on thigh! But the energy is the priority. As for exercise, I’m still doing the tai chi and a bit of kung fu, and have found an ice rink, which I want to get to once a week. Other than that, I’m not adding anything. I want to see what the diet does on its own. And I hate the gym, there’s nothing more boring; I would actually rather keep the weight than endure any more hamster hours on treadmills or penitential sessions with the shoulder press.

There are things I already don’t eat because I don’t like them - dairy milk, red meat, poultry except for chicken, soda pop, brussels sprouts, French beans, strawberries, durian, and fried grasshoppers. So they’re off the menu. But everything else is on - coffee, tea, sugar, alcohol, cooked, canned, genetically modified, and if I eat yoghurt you can be sure it’s the kind with fat, sugar, emulsifiers, chemicals, and probably not a single lactobacterium. I’m not measuring portions or denying myself candy when I want it; this is purely about cutting grains out.

So, yesterday I ate tinned tuna with three bean mix; salads made with cucumber, tomato, raw salmon, sunflower seeds, cashew nuts, edamame, oil and wasabi; yoghurt, dried figs, coffee with sweetened soymilk, tea, sesame peanuts, pumpkin chips and three or four toffees. Today I ate similarly, with the addition of Asian salad veggies in some kind of butter sauce, and tinned apricot halves with the yoghurt (I have to put yoghurt or cream on most fruits before I can eat them without feeling immediately sick - no idea why). And water. And a shot of Baileys. I feel pretty chipper, have had less in the way of sugar cravings than usual today, and, incidentally, seem to have completely gone off cheese. I’ve been enjoying my food and am not missing bread and the like. It’s now 8:30. I feel like I’ve got more mental energy and maybe a bit more physical energy than I normally would have by this hour, though today wasn’t particularly hot, which also might explain it.

I think my stomach’s now going ftw at the unprecedented amount of greenery (bearing in mind that dinner at Chez Bishop is usually anything from cheese cubes with raspberry jam to chocolate cake to the scrag end of yesterday’s curry served on a bed of peanut butter, but definitely not anything green and leafy), but I guess it’ll cope. Unless I get sick I’m going to keep trying this for a few more days and see how it goes.

Had to get away from red this time.

As I was doing a bit of research for the doujinshi I found this gem. A treat for Molesworth fans.

Well, back again after the hiatus. Biro and black pencil. Nothing really happens here, I know, sorry - but that makes it true to the spirit of the novel, right?

I’m looking at this site where there are two photos of half-naked guys. The model in the first one has his briefs pulled halfway down, exposing some dick. The model in the second is lying on his side on a sofa, again briefs down, twisted to show his butt crack. I can view the large version of the first, but not the second - it’s blocked by a very big man in a Batman suit MICT, the Ministry for an Ignorant and Clean Thailand. So why is dick ok and butt not? Is seme-ism fine with the manly men of MICT, while intimations of uke-ism make them squicky?

Oh, and YouTube is still off the air.

The other night I went with a friend to a Muay Thai match, the first time I’ve ever gone in the nearly two years I’ve been here. I’m not a fan of western boxing. I can intellectually appreciate the skills, stamina and courage of the fighters but I’ve never seen a boxing match that I didn’t consider an ugly spectacle and a boring one. I can only watch two guys punch each other for so long before my attention starts to wander. It just isn’t my cup of tea, or even my cup of blood, spit and manly perspiration. Perhaps my real problem is that I don’t care about the guys (or women) in the ring. I’ve got zilch emotional investment in either of them. The very fact that they’ve chosen to put on gloves and clobber each other puts them out of the reach of my interest. They might be, for all I know, lovely, informed people with great conversation and truckloads of wit and charm, but I don’t get to see that side of them. They might as well be sides of beef animated by rat neurons.

However, in Muay Thai the combatants don’t just punch, but kick and use knees and elbows, so I figured there’d probably be more variety in the visual spectacle. And, on the subject of visual spectacles, we come to the part where I have to shamelessly say that the athletic Thai male body appeals to my preference for a sleek, slender look, with muscles all present and accounted for without being bulked up. Having seen some of this in the show at the gay bar, I wasn’t averse to the idea of seeing it again and comparing the effects of watching such male beauties fuck versus watching them fight (the S&M skit where they beat each other with floppy black rubber things doesn’t count).

We went to Lumpini stadium, which was expensive, but my friend was flying out of Bangkok the next day, so there wasn’t time to wait for a cheaper show at another stadium later in the week. The stadium was small, basic and grotty. Our seats were wooden benches with a good view of the ring. There were ten fights on the card, with #7 being the main one. The first fight was between two kids. Legally you have to be fifteen to fight professionally. These boys didn’t look a day over thirteen, but I was no doubt looking at them with an age gauge calibrated to western sizes and they might well have been fifteen. According to the card they weighed 100 pounds a piece, which is the minimum weight a fighter can compete at. They looked like they each weighed about as much as one of my legs, and I was reminded that muscle weighs more than fat - or maybe they just weighed these kids with rocks in their pockets. At any rate, they were the most in-shape teenagers I’ve ever seen outside of Olympic gymnastics - skinny, muscle-wrapped, sharp-cut little fighting toothpicks.

They performed the wai kru dance, a part of every Muay Thai bout, performed to the accompaniment of traditional Thai music, then the fight started, with the music continuing through it. It was less brutal than I thought it would be; both the kids seemed to be technicians, looking to score points rather than beat the crap out of each other. That was pretty much the case for all the fights on the card. There were no KOs and no blood. Having heard about the awesome brutality of Muay Thai I was a bit surprised. Maybe it was just one of those nights. The nastiest thing we saw was a move where one guy kicks and the other guy grabs his knee and twists it, which made my guts twist in sympathy. There were a few impressive kicks and throwdowns, but there was still a general sense of sameness about it all after a while. The kicks, knees and elbows stopped being novel after a while.

Which left me with the bodies to look at. And they were lovely, with defined musculature packed gracefully around delicate skeletons and wrapped in smooth golden skin. These were all young, lithe men with smooth attractive faces. I would have been upset if any of them had been badly hurt. I can be as much of an armchair sadist as the next moron bathing in the glow of the TV: when it’s all fake I happily revel in the pornography of violence. However, in this situation, where it was real, I didn’t want to see those beautiful youths harm each other. I found myself wishing the stadium would turn magically into a boy bar so that they could incarnate Eros rather than Ares. My favourite couple of minutes for the night were in fact during a wai kru. The boy wearing blue had great moves and obviously enjoyed the dance. He didn’t win the fight, though.

Watching all that striving male young flesh, I couldn’t help thinking of Yukio Mishima, who wrote extensively on his own pursuit of the perfect body and the idea that such a body was the vehicle for a perfect death. He was obsessed with youth, the tragedy of the death of youth, and the male body. In a sense, I suppose, the male body is built with death in its pattern. It is built to hunt, to fight, to kill. Which is not to say that women can’t do these things, but the primary pattern of the female body is life-giving. That this giving of life is an heroic physical act is usually overlooked (which I’m going to blog about soon) - so much so that I wonder whether the whole human race, across a great majority of cultures, is a bit fixated, Mishima-style, on the embattled male body, particularly in its youth, which is always a doomed state because youth must die if the body does not die first.

One could even say that fighting, in its most extreme, deadliest form, is a way for youth to preserve its integrity and its myth, albeit at the cost of the life of the body that supports youth’s temporary incarnation in an individual. Fighting with the intent to simply win, not kill, presents an allegory of youth chasing after death. I can’t help wondering, how potent would it be, what effect would it have on one, if some of these fights were to the death of one combatant? What would we feel for a beautiful young man lying broken and bloodied on the floor of the ring? Would we feel sorry and ashamed, or would we feel that this, at last, was what we really wanted?

I’ve been watching Samurai Champloo the last few days and had the urge to draw Jin and Mugen. Jin is my type (gentlemanly + lethal + long black hair + glasses = what’s not to like?) but Mugen is undeniably cool and his face is fun to draw. The photoshop job I did on his picture here is admittedly a bit horrid. I need to learn how to sketch and paint in deeper tones to begin with rather than relying on the dark strokes filter.

Jin

Jin drawble

Mugen

The sun’s coming up. I’ve missed the colours of the Bangkok dawn, which are still alien to my eyes and might always be. At this hour, the Melbourne sky is most likely to be moving through shades of delphinium and lavender, colours that seem as deep as space; clouds will glow iridescent pink and tangerine, and the east-facing sides of the glass office towers will be golden, the hot colours sharp and distinct as trumpet blasts against the droning blues. As the sky lightens to impasto pale blue the sense of endless depth reverses, like a dimension turning inside out, until, as daylight stabilises, there comes a sense of no depth at all: the sky is a paradox, it never begins, it ends before it begins.

Today’s dawn in Bangkok begins with  smears of celadon green, juicy red and powdery cool brown, a brown waking from a dream of purple. Layers and layers of cloud come out of hiding, wisps and veils that flush soft rose and apricot against the pale green sky, slivers of grey and smoky coils of brown. The distance comes vaguely to light in a pale cinnamon fog, housing towers standing up like matchboxes. A broad tide of gold announces the sun, which makes its appearance in glaring molten orange, looking more like metal than gas; the pale gold seeps through all the layers of cloud and mist, turning everything to a print in yellow that lasts for about a minute before the show winds down and the eastern sky settles into a palette of creamy blue and shades of palomino that meets the edge of a great raft of gunmetal raincloud, the latter overhanging much of the city.

Our apartment in Melbourne has views to the east and west, which I miss here. It was a luxury to have the sky at both ends of the day. Watching the sky is one of the great pleasures of life for me, but I’m a daytime skygazer; stars are lovely, but it’s the variety and unpredictability of the sunlit sky with its shapes, colours, textures and depths, its effects of light and atmosphere, that appeals to me.

I’m back in Bangkok. It’s been a night of wild amethyst lightning chasing its own forked tails, rumbling thunder and warm, plodding rain. Just a few minutes ago I had the strange feeling of being rocked back and forth as if I were on a gently moving swing. At the same time a creaking sound came from the ceiling. It really felt like the building was swaying in the wind - only when I opened the window to check, there was hardly any wind to speak of. If it was indeed moving, and not just my inner ear going a bit funny, I can only think that it had  something to do with water rising underground and the foundations wobbling slightly in the squishy earth of the floodplain. Weird.

According to CNN today, the allegedly wild hog shot by 11-year-old Jamison Stone in Alabama was in fact a farm-raised pig called Fred.

‘ The not-so-wild pig had been raised on an Alabama farm and was sold to the Lost Creek Plantation just four days before it was shot there in a 150-acre fenced area, the animal’s former owner said.

Phil Blissitt told The Anniston Star in a story Friday that he bought the 6-week-old pig in December 2004 as a Christmas gift for his wife, Rhonda, and that they sold it after deciding to get rid of all the pigs at their farm.

[…]

Stone said he and his son met Blissitt on Friday morning to get more details about the hog. Blissitt said that he had about 15 hogs and decided to sell them for slaughter, but that no one would buy that particular animal because it was too big for slaughter or breeding, Stone said.

Blissitt said that the pig had become a nuisance and that visitors were often frightened by it, Stone said.

“He was nice enough to tell my son that the pig was too big and needed killing,” Stone said. “He shook Jamison’s hand and said he did not kill the family pet.” ‘

Poor Fred Goliath Pig. Maybe his ghost will come back to haunt those woods.