Friday Funnies

So I think I sort of got kicked out of the Meeting of the Minds Forum in Koh Samui. Instead of enduring the normal guilt trip, gaslighting, and gossip cycle that’s come up many times in my life I figured I should set the record straight. I feel, as is often the case, like I did as a child asking questions. If I Could Just. Be Something. That I am Not. Everything Would Be okay. It’s like I am an outsider looking into the human experience. What nobody seems to grasp is that it is very lonely out here.

So I arrived too late to attend the meeting on Tuesday night. I contacted Pat with the Greenlight Bar to explain my situation. Now they have a bunker room which was enacted during Covid restrictions which I would have given my left arm to be a part of at the time. I’d like to imagine a lively facemask free debate about a range of subjects even during the worst lockdown lunacy. This all looked wonderful.

So I attended Cynthia Chung’s presentation on Wednesday night. Having never seen a picture of her I had imagined a stately and very beautiful Chinese woman perhaps in her 30’s or 40’s but as we all know Asians keep their age so well. She looked as Matthew Ehret did obscenely young for the position. I don’t know the age of the husband wife pair but I do want to know their beauty secrets.

My husband Ka did not attend the conference with me the first night. Pat had talked to me and we were in agreement that the high level English language stuff might put him off. Moreover I could not afford an extra 3000 baht for him to attend anyways.

So I saw Matthew Ehret and recognized him from a few Podcasts. He actually looked younger in real life which was remarkable to me. I got sat at a table with some Koh Samui long time residents. They were a bit stuffy for my taste but I keep on asking as I always do what I did wrong. When the one woman talked about the difficulties she had had in securing an NGO I should have asked her how she had done that and what her NGO was about. When the other woman mentioned some school initiative on Koh Samui I should have mentioned my 11 year old daughter and worries about her schooling in the fall. When I started talking about cashew nuts and how to burn them properly to get the cyanide off and how hard it was to get them right one of the women exclaimed “Well that’s why we have machinery now to do it!”

I’m not in disagreement with her. Actually I’ve pondered the ways that human innovation should have made this world into a prosperous place many times. The 14 hours per day that once was spent procuring food and water and energy is now spent staring at a television and ordering from Grubhub. All of this would be under the assumption that we have free markets, which we most certainly do not.

Cynthia Chung’s presentation regarding why the transhumanists were wrong about being able to steal the human soul, as it were, was very good. Unfortunately I had already read so much about the subject matter that jet lag started getting to me. I already felt like some sort of weird substack groupie as it didn’t seem that anybody else there had read anything either Matthew Ehret or Cynthia Chung had written. Or maybe they just weren’t telling me.

So back to being outcast. The question and answer session was going long and I’d told my husband I’d be back in the hotel room around 8 PM and I literally felt like I was falling asleep with my eyes open. I hadn’t drank a thing at least alcohol wise. I was just tired and the conversation seemed to be going in high level circles.

A kind motherly type who had lived in San Francisco for awhile escorted me out. I had been thinking about her questions about astrology and fate to Cynthia Chung which had been brushed off. Ka asked me frantically when I came back to the hotel room “Where you! I worry you!” There have been too many death threats to mention here, so yes, we’re both paranoid.

Some Koh Samui beach meditation ensued the next morning. Beyond whether Koh Samui or Phuket is better, which seemed way too Jasmine versus Eliza of a conversation for me, I asked myself whether I could try to make a new home with Ka on this island. I thought if the right opportunity presented itself that I was open to it and my husband said he was good with that too.

Ka wanted to go with me to the Meeting of the Minds Forum last night. I negotiated with Pat that since I had missed the first day the two of us attending the last day of the conference was in line with a one person three day pass. He agreed.

We bought Siam Sato wine and Chang beer beforehand from the 7 Eleven. This was a very conscious decision by me as most people in the crowd seemed to be drinking alcohol and I had felt the energy was too stuffy and pretentious the night before. So we went to the beach beforehand and my husband drank one beer and I drank one Sato wine. I told Ka we should eat the fried chicken we had bought beforehand but he didn’t want to.

We had one Chang beer and one Sato wine in the motorbike and then it started to rain as the conference was starting. We brought them in with us. Pat did talk to me about this. “You’re not supposed to bring in outside alcohol!” He implored me. “Are you okay?” He was very nervous about the whole thing. Now Sato wine is in the same dark brown bottle as Laow Khao Thai whiskey is, so perhaps he thought it was that, which if I drank that straight, would have left me shitfaced. And how dare I bring a Thai person with me to a conference being held in…checks notes…Thailand.

The presentations themselves were very good by Eamon McKinney and Alex Kraimer. My head was bouncing with a million things I wanted to ask them about 2024 being the end of history and how history is intentionally being made so boring in school and blockchain and bitcoin and whatnot. I had a feeling that even if I had raised my hand to ask a question people would have intentionally ignored me. Everybody seemed to be watching me and ignoring me simultaneously.

The Question and Answer went too long and Ka started agitating me to leave. I kept on trying to put him off but then another question would come up. I went out with him feeling like nobody wanted us there anymore. Pat told me to pay my bill at the door for the two beers we had drank. I’d say we were both more hungry than drunk. I insisted on paying the 3000 baht for the Meeting of the Minds conference because I felt it was well worth my time. I had the feeling they just wanted us to leave.

So that’s my telling of the story. Our sins were that we brought in one bottle each of outside alcohol and that my husband started bugging me about leaving when the Q and A session stretched too long. I probably was too emotive on camera. I’m just setting the record straight there.

I did cry about it after Pat insisted that there were no other gatherings that I could attend. I really would have enjoyed a more relaxed conversation. The energy was overwhelmingly we don’t like you we don’t want you here why don’t you just go away. I felt like a total freak and thank God for my husband. Public ritual humiliation is part of my wheelhouse. I’ve been there and done that more times than I care to recount.

“I think it would be better for Jasmine’s sake if you just died.” My ex Joe told me long ago. It still stands as the most hurtful thing anyone has ever said to me.

Now onto the brighter side of things. If I am just stripping down the Meeting of the Minds Forum to its essential parts, I noticed a decidedly pro China bend. It makes sense considering the speakers circumstances. But despite all these platitudes about Belt and Road initiatives and our best asset being our people and all of that good stuff, I am very skeptical. The money system stuff I understand and opposing genocide is good. But I cannot reconcile this with images out of Covid China in 2020 through 2023 of horrific atrocities. Pet dogs were put in garbage bags to suffocate while their owners were put in literal quarantine camps. Drones patrolled lockdowned streets with weird messages to turn off the yearning in your heart and just stay inside.

Cryptocurrencies seemed to be viewed as a panacea, which was far too simplistic for me. Blockchain requires both electricity and internet, two things which I do not assume are going to be infinitely reliable into the future all over the world. There’s places on Earth where they already wouldn’t be able to get off of the ground. I haven’t even started on the problems of central banking buying up all of the assets as a leverage point and that Bitcoin is not used as an actual tool in day to day transactions. There’s a lot more I could say there.

This Forum might have inadvertantly awakened the patriot in me who was, if I haven’t mentioned, born in the USA. America is so fucked right now and in my real world interactions with people on the ground there everybody knows it. I suppose I can easily separate the people from the tyrants in charge everywhere. There’s Eurasia and East Asia and the Kingdoms in the Book of Revelation. But at least we’re not willing to take a bullet for dear supreme leader anymore. They’ll throw everybody under the bus every single time.

If 2024 is the end of history and the end of empires let it commence now. But can we first address quirky issues of ego and who is getting paid by whom? Humans are a strange and easy to manipulate group. Perhaps I’m better suited to one on one events. Or maybe I should be the presenter next time? I’m not sure if I’m going to sing or talk psychology. This was so grade school.

Advocating for genocide? Have you heard some supposedly Christian pastors talking about wiping out the Palestinians? We should be arresting them!

I could blame it on the alcohol. I’m blaming it on the astrology! Dammit Ka stop having a chart that’s almost identical to mine for some reason! I am literally not sure which one of us is older. But I am on paper!

I am also still pissed at the ADL for turning my birthday 318 into a white supremacist symbol. What the hell people! I get the 319 thing more but whatever…

I am not trusting of centralized control period

Can I get some military types to represent? Why are the thinkers and fighters seperated?

Here’s some pictures from the area. This is my beach meditation spot in BoPhut. Some 17 years ago I was near the area meeting every morning for the timeshare thing. I was insanely pregnant, like two weeks late, and everybody asked me that Friday morning when my baby was coming. She arrived that lightning filled night.

Ring the bell!

This is Big Buddha Koh Samui. My older daughter was inadvertantly baptized into Buddhism here. When Jasmine was about 9 days old I took her here, being that it was very close to our rental house and I went about one time per week before. A monk who spoke very good English asked where I was from and I said America. He was very angry at me about why I had brought my newborn baby to Thailand because she was so young. It took me a little while to understand,

“No!” I said finally. “She not born America! She born here! On Koh Samui!”

The monk’s attitude changed completely. “Okay. I give you blessing both.” He tied a string around both mine and my newborn daughter’s wrist while chanting a prayer. I didn’t understand the significance of it until my second daughter Eliza was born in Phuket, when my Thai husband Oh insisted on a proper ritual for her which was the same.

Now Oh did not ever want to come to this island with me, as he associated it too closely with my ex. It’s been 17 years since I stepped foot on Koh Samui. What’s been fascinating me for the last few days is realizing how little Joe was there at all. There were so many things I did here which he had no imprint on at all.

I’m going to try to keep on smiling. We’re not dead yet!

To a new future beyond 2024!

Buy me a ko-fi