I’m doing what I hope is a final rewrite on a longish story. I “finished” it a few months ago, then let it settle for while, then someone reminded me that I had better actually finish it for real. I went through it and found a bunch of little inconsistencies and places where the writing had to change tone. Tidying everything has been taking a longer time than feels reasonable, but it’s getting there. I’ve done 12 pages out of 16 and have made progress on the last 4, all the while wondering why the simplest things sometimes are the hardest to fix. But it’s getting there. Four nights of full, medicinally induced sleep have done good things for my concentration — and my eyes, too. I was beginning to wonder whether I needed glasses, but it seems all I needed was some kip.

Meanwhile, just as we thought they’d finished demolishing the building down below, they’ve started on the foundations. They’re not using the jackhammer any more: for some time, the weapon of choice has been a bulldozer with a large drill-bit head attached. It makes a budda-budda sound from 8:30am to about 6pm with a short break for lunch and looks like a stocky metal bird pecking the ground. I have to keep reminding myself that however annoying it is up here, it must be a thousand times worse for the workers down there, who have no ear protection, and for the security guards outside our building. Usually cheerful chaps, they’re starting to look a bit stressed.

Speaking of stress, the other night Stu saw a baby elephant escape its handlers and run off, knocking down an elderly Japanese man as it barged into the traffic. Luckily the cars stopped in time not to hit it. He said the elephant was rocking, a definite sign of stress, but its owners kept it in the busy street with tourists playing their usual stupid game of teasing it with food. I’ve seen a guy do that with a full-grown bull elephant — holding out the bananas and snatching them away again. I’m waiting to see one of these morons get trampled into moron jam. But the old man was just a bystander in the road. A couple of weeks ago there was a heartbreaking picture in the newspaper of a young elephant lying in its blood on a major road, killed by a drunk driver. One of the people with it was also killed. As I’ve probably mentioned, it’s illegal to bring elephants into town — but there’s no elephant pound, so even if the cops could be bothered arresting the handlers, they’d have nowhere to put the animal itself.

On the domestic front, I went back to Chatuchak, and found on closer inspection that the giant anthurium’s leaves were badly torn from having been roughly tied up.  Way to treat a lovely plant. So I didn’t buy it after all. I did find some small shrubs with pale purple trumpet flowers that smelled gorgeously like sandalwood incense, so those are on the list of possibles for the balcony.

In other news, the v-necked t-shirt has finally come to Chatuchak. It used to be that you could only get high round necked tees there, and virtually everywhere else in Bangkok — unflattering, and too hot for this weather. But necklines have finally taken a dip. Most were still high, but maybe 10% were vees or low scoops, so I picked up one with a little bobble-headed skeleton pirate girl on it and one that I can only describe as a Team Shiva rugby shirt in green and black.

You can find some wonderfully offbeat, original designs at Chatuchak. I was particularly taken with the dress, long, grey and severe, with a wraparound front panel on which was appliqued a metre-tall picture of Jesus in loud colours, adorned with beads and sequins — a sort of vestment for the modern crusader, perhaps.

Perversion for Profit, a public service ad against pornography which probably introduced a whole generation of youngsters to the concepts of sadism and bestiality. Excerpt and commentary from cracked.com, full version here.

(Newsreader George Putnam, who narrates the ad in marvellous style, later recanted his views, at least on homosexuality, saying that he felt gays were born that way.)

More funny: “A direct ancestor of Monty Python’s renowned “Dead Parrot” sketch has been found in a book of jokes dating back to Greece in the fourth century AD…”

I’m out of melatonin, so decided to try something new. Popped into the chemist, who said she only had amitriptyline. The name sounded more like an antidepressant than a sleeping pill to me, so I just bought four. Sure enough, a check on the net confirmed that it’s a tricyclic anti-d, but it also gets prescribed for insomnia, so I gave it a go. Just one before bed — 10mg, which is a tiny dose compared to what some people out there are taking for their depression.

I woke too early, as usual, but got back to sleep again quite easily. Slept 9 hours total, woke up groggy. Tai Chi, breakfast, back to bed. More sleep, despite having drunk coffee.  Woke up groggy again. After more coffee, lapsang souchong and chocolate, I’m finally what I think I could call properly awake, at 11:20.

I think the other three pills will be going in the bin. I worry about melatonin’s untested status — no one knows what long-term consumption might do to you — so I don’t want to just keep eating the stuff, however well it works. I think I’m going to have to bite the bullet, go to the doc and get a prescription for real sleeping pills.

Oh, and I’ve gained back the 2kg I lost after I had my tooth out and when I was walking around looking for flats. 2kg doesn’t sound like much, but on someone my height it actually makes a visible difference. I look a bit soft. Muscle tone that was showing last week is suddenly hiding. I don’t seem able to make myself work on the writing and be disciplined about exercise and diet. When I push myself to stay in shape, I get tired and my brain doesn’t want to work. But it must be possible to do both — I mean, Haruki Murakami runs marathons.

Anyway, the caffeine is kicking in properly, and I am now feeling fucking perky, so back to work while it lasts…

Being on the rag again, I decided to sacrifice a pad to science and find out whether, in fact, you do only lose 8 dainty tablespoons of blood.

Pad used: Whisper Wings regular.
# of above already overflowed this month: 3

I coloured some water with grape juice and used a dessert spoon, since I don’t have a tablespoon. There are 1.25 dessert spoons to the tablespoon. The pad absorbed 10 dessert spoons before it overflowed. That’s 8 tablespoons.

So, if the 8 tbsp estimate were correct, the average woman could get through the average period on one average pad.

HA…HAHAH…HAHAHAHA… HAHA…HA… (insert infinite loop here)

Back home, I didn’t have this problem because I used tampons all the time, even at night. But the choice of tampons here is very limited, and the ones available tend to fluff, which seems unhygienic. I also worry about using them for hours on end in the tropics, since it’s easier to catch infections in the heat and humidity here, so I’m too chicken to use them at night. As for overnight pads, they feel like fucking diapers — I don’t see why any grown woman should have to wear such a thing.

Thais apparently use menstrual cups, which are rubber containers you shove up there, and…yeah. I think I’d need Lolrus’s bukkit.

On the upside, I hardly had any downswings in mood this month. But I was busy just before my period, there was the good news of finding the new flat, and I ate chocolate, so all of that might have contributed.

Anyway, I can has Nobel prize for biology now?

Yesterday I went with the landlady to look at paint, ceiling fans and airconditioners. We chose a very pale green-grey paint — very easy choice, as it was the colour we both liked best — the most tasteful fans we could find for 2000 bt, and, hopefully, a Daikin Inverter aircon unit. They’re supposed to be the quietest on the market. I’ve heard them, and quiet they certainly are. At retail price they were out of budget, but by pure luck I stumbled on a Thai website selling them to the public at wholesale prices, so, fingers crossed, we should be getting one of those.

In the afternoon I went to Chatuchak market to look for plants and escape the construction noise. I was under strict instructions from milord not to actually buy anything — which I obeyed, even when I found a giant anthurium for 150 bt ($4) –not quite as big as the one in the picture, but still very impressive. Apparently you can keep these charming monsters indoors. Stu said I actually could have bought it — he was only going to be displeased if I came home with 1000 bt worth of orchids that would all die before we move because we have no balcony to put them on here. I think he sometimes worries excessively about me getting carried away by some grandiose unreasonable passion. Why I didn’t just get it and claim that it had followed me home, I don’t know. Now I’ll have to go back on Wednesday — I want that plant. I think I’ll make it the centrepiece of the interior decor.

For the balcony, I’m going to try to get potted shrubs that flower at different times of the year, so that I can rotate them, bringing them indoors when they’re in flower. I’m on the lookout for fragrant things — so far I’ve found gardenias, frangipani and what I think might be ylang-ylang. They’re all in flower now, though, so I’ll have to do some reasearch to find things that bloom at other times. I’ve seen wonderful fragrant trumpet-flowers in gardens here, but not at Chatuchak or the other plant shop I found. As they overhang walls in profusion, I’m tempted to surreptitiously take a cutting, stick it in a pot and see if it grows. I also intend to buy a large pitcher plant, which I know I can get at Chatuchak — hopefully it will deal with the slight cockroach problem we have in this building.

I admit I’m getting rather a nesting instinct about this place. It will be our first ever home with a dining table, the first with enough storage space to put most bits and bobs away in cupboards, and, after two flats without balconies, a welcome return to balconied life. Having settled on it, I really want to appreciate it, put pictures up, buy cushions and weird green things, and make it a real home.
(Note: nesting doesn’t mean kids. Just want to clarify that.)

Well, we took the upstairs apartment. The owner agreed to our price and to renovations, and we decided the views and the convenience of moving within the same building were worth the extra rent. With that settled, my mind has also settled, and I actually got some writing done today — however, rather than work on anything serious and book-like, I let myself play with something I started idly scribbling last year (or was it the year before?) and abandoned on grounds of triviality. But maybe there are worse sins than triviality. So here’s the beginning of a lustrous, bright, soft and nutrient spaghetti eastern, set in the accommodating world of TEC (which is contained within a movie studio backlot, I’m sure). I actually have a plot for this, more or less, so you never know, it might get finished.

Sweeping with the flat of his hand in a spiral that began in the centre of the mandala and moved out to the edge, the monk erased the mandala on the low table before him. With that deliberate and measured motion, geometrical representations of spiritual forces, laid out like an ambitious decorated cake, had their physical form removed, and the painstaking efforts of two days were rendered into a mound of coloured sand which the monk swept into a round vessel of ornamented bronze which the monk placed on the altar and prayed over, his hands pressed together, for several minutes. At the conclusion of the prayer, he clapped his hands once, then took three paces back from the altar and its towering idol, bowed, and clapped his hands again. Finally, he turned around, looking towards the foreigner who lay on a couch under the dark window.

At the first clap, Gwynn had felt the sense of being awakened from a sleep he knew he had not had. He had watched the creation of the mandala since morning, becoming mesmerised by ritual and boredom, while increasing hunger and thirst had kept him from dozing off. He would have liked to say that this was the entire content of his experience, but eventually a change had occurred, as if a drug had been slipped to him, and he had felt time falling into eternity like rain into the sea. Now the shutters of time closed with a bang over the illusion of eternity. He was awake, and a monk was looking at him. Soft brown eyes went with the dark, flat, charitable face. His serenity appeared to be a complete and radiant thing, like the full moon. However, as the man himself would have said, the full moon was a fine example of a transient state.

Gwynn spoke first, after licking his dry lips. He said, “Is that how you hope to destroy yourself, Rengzhe?”

The monk laughed aloud and made a self-deprecating gesture, and immediately it was as if a monkey, launching itself from one branch to another, had jumped in front of the shining moon. “Oh, I’m not that arrogant. They say it’s possible to annihilate the illusion of oneself in an instant, but I’m a plodder, so I certainly won’t destroy myself in this lifetime.”

“There’s always the chance of an accident,” Gwynn returned offhand, at which Rengzhe beamed and laughed again. Gwynn had learned that the monk took most things  seriously and lightly at the same time, and the more seriously he took them, the more lightly he took them as well.

The idol fell outside the category of most things. Although Rengzhe would admit that it was as much an illusion as all else in all the worlds, Gwynn had not been able to manoeuvre him into laughing at it.

Yesterday morning I watched the numbers in America tick over from my box above a building site in Bangkok. When they ticked over the line I felt a strange little flutter. Well, I thought, this is interesting. And maybe this guy will be different. Maybe he won’t lose the sense of what people have invested in him.

The other week I expressed to a fellow Australian, an old bloke, my disappointment in our new PM, Kevin Rudd, who I voted for. He could be doing more, I said. He promised change. Action in the areas that matter to a greenie pacifist semi-socialist like me. Of course, I didn’t really believe him. But I did hope, because humans are as hopeful as dogs. He thought I was being hard on Rudd. One man can only do so much, he said. Well, Napoleon managed quite a bit, I thought. It might have been better to say that one man can only do so much good — especially when he’s a politician.

I hope Barack Obama will be a good President, and not just the lesser of two evils. That his colour didn’t get in the way and that Sarah Palin is nowhere near the driver’s seat are good things in themselves. No doubt, when confronted by the realities of the job, the current financial mess, and the desire to get re-elected, Obama will compromise, break promises, make mistakes, and dance to expedient tunes. But what he does between the inevitable meetings with Mr Cockup might be, just might be… well, you never know, do you?

Today Stu and I face our own momentous little decision: which apartment?
We’ve narrowed it down to two. One is in our building, on the quieter side, from which the demolitions below our present abode are inaudible. It has floor-to-ceiling windows on two sides. The views are awesome plus, and we’ll see the sunset and have our own light show during thunderstorms. Moving house will be easy. The owner has agreed to buy a new airconditioner and replace the floral wallpaper in the living room and main bedroom with paint. There’s a bit of construction noise from a different building site, but it isn’t right in your ear. Rent will be 29-32k baht a month, depending on how negotiations go. Electricity charges here are cheap, but with that much exposure to the sun, we’ll be using the aircon quite a bit. We’ll still be stuck with having to change elevators at the 14th floor, of course. The salient furniture consists of a black leather lounge and a lot of glossy white mirror-backed shelves. Beds and table are a bit blah but ok. The floor is parquet. With the new paint, the main rooms will look quite pale and bright, as the owner says we have to choose a pastel colour. I was thinking of ivory or a very pale olive green — the latter might offset the clinical look of all that white furniture.

The second place is down a street across the road. It’s low-rise, with views of greenery from the main bedroom, a wall from the second bedroom, and both the wall and the greenery from the living room. It’s older, with off-white walls and simple, tasteful dark wood and cane furniture, which suits our tastes. It’s a dead-end street with food stalls and overhanging trees — nicer and quieter than our street. There’s some construction nearby, but it’s nearly finished. When the work isn’t going on, things are very peaceful; you can actually open the windows and hear…not much. However, there’s no guarantee that the neighours won’t renovate or that someone won’t decide to pull down the house across the road and built condos. The spare room is set up as an office. A compressor on the wall out the window makes a whining noise that the aircon and computer fan will cover, but that could be annoying if we were trying to sleep there at night. However, I think that a stout wooden shutter might solve that problem, and then we could sleep there and use the sunny bedroom as the office. And it’s cheaper than upstairs — rent is 24k baht a month. Electricity is more expensive, but I think we’ll have the aircon on less, so it might even out.

Basically, we need to decide whether the views upstairs are worth a couple of thousand euro a year, and whether we’d rather go for known minor construction noise upstairs or the coin-toss chance of either peace or future noise in the other street. Since the difference in price isn’t really all that great — unless the euro takes a mighty dive — we’re trying to work out which one is likely to be the better environment. The cheaper one is homely, but I think the more expensive one could be made homely with some indoor plants, which are very cheap here. There is the point that after our stint in Bangkok — and I imagine we will leave at some point — we probably won’t have another chance to live in the sky like this. Perhaps we should take it.

As I think Buddha said, the only certainty is uncertainty…

Two things for youse all to check out:

Laurie’s story Sun Wolf in S2B2 this month. It’s yuri, but, for those who are a bit squeamish about that, the yuri section is brief. It’s mainly kickass surreal fantasy writing about kickass women — a take on Beowulf that goes well beyond the paradigm of the original.

“Into the age of wolves sailed the legendary ship Kráka, the cloud-road walker, product of the strange sorceries and sciences of that lost age of queens. She sailed over frozen seas and frozen earth alike - and, if the stories could be believed, she had once even sailed the skies above. She had a heart and mind of her own, the Earth-spine strider, the ice-sheet skimmer, deep and unfathomable, and she chose her captains with care.” And then it gets stranger…

I also want to draw attention to Kirby Crow’s photographs of ghostly autumn scenery with accompanying words. Dia de los Muertos is the most recent.

“There are old silver mines in the desert. There are musty apple cellars, cobwebbed wineries, and the strange nowhere space under bridges. There are grottos and ossuaries and abandoned wells.”

The World’s Saddest Male Models, by Michelle Collins:
Is that a crinoline in your pocket, or…?

Well, Stu’s back tomorrow. I’ve found eight flats for him to look at. I’m tired. Walking around all day in BKK is hot work and seems to leave me pretty much wrung out — I’ve hardly done any writing or drawing during the hunt. I had planned to rest this morning, but a friend was going ice skating with his daughter, who he was looking after solo for the weekend while his wife helped out with the rice harvest in her village, and I couldn’t resist tagging along. I love skating, but it’s one of those things that’s definitely more fun to do with other people than by yourself. The rink is small and the ice gets hacked up quickly, but hey. It’s an ice rink in Bangkok.

We had pizza afterwards. It wasn’t bad by Thai pizza standards, but by Melbourne standards it lacked structural integrity, so that it was unable to support much topping. Thais seem under the impression that pizza should be made the way it’s made in Italy, whereas, in fact, the Footscray model beats the traditional Italian the way a Monaro beats a Fiat Bambino in a stop-light drag.  I miss Godfather’s pizza — the Goldilocks base, not too thin, not too thick, not too doughy, not too hard, just right, stalwart support of abundant delicacies properly buried under mozzarella like inconvenient witnesses drowned in concrete.

If I ordered a Godfather’s, it would take a day to get here by express courier. Aircraft holds are cold. It’d probably be ok as long as I didn’t choose any seafood toppings. Hmm…

…when God sat on a mountain in India puffing on the rolled leaves of that spindly plant He had made back on Day Three, He looked around and thought, “Oh, Me, wouldn’t some mind-controlling fungus and worms be, like, total win?”