Midweek Memes

Omens and Auras

Good morning and greetings from Koh Samui, Thailand! It’s 1:00 AM local time on this lovely Wednesday morning and I think I’m suffering from a bit of jet lag as I can’t sleep. I suppose that stands to reason as a little over 72 hours ago I was picking up a GrubHub delivery around the corner of Maryland Parkway and Desert Inn in Las Vegas, Nevada. I took a flight out with back to back long layovers in San Francisco and Hong Kong, reunited with my husband in Phuket, then took a morning bus plus ferry combo to this lovely island. Everything was a dead battery after too many moves where I couldn’t charge anything, so other than a brief 30 minute window of an outlet at the bus stop, I haven’t been online for the past few days.

I arrived too late to attend the Meeting of the Minds forum, but I shall inquire about it tomorrow. I feel blessed to be here. I’m planning a lot of real world interactions to prove I’m not a robot. I want to see if the murals I painted 20 years ago are still here in Bang Taling Ngam and at the Big Buddha Cafe and go back to the old rental house in BoPhut and meet with my DJ friend in Chaweng. Ka, meanwhile, is doing as well as he could be for someone who just left the island he’s lived on for 40 years to possibly never return there again while facing down a Covid jab mandate next week that I am still puzzling my way through. His brother who I am definitely not marrying took 500 baht from my purse while we slept, perhaps as a lovely reminder of why we’re leaving. It’s hard to build off of the back of such blatant looting.

Speaking of blatant looting I noticed this chart regarding the debt servicing payments in the US:

If that looks like a household whose credit card debt has spiraled out of control with interest payments starting to surpass income, it’s because it is. The Fed was able to keep interest rates artificially suppressed for a very long time, but cutting rates will cause greater inflation. Individuals are reflecting this breaking point as well.

Keep an eye on those FEW resources of food, energy and water. The distraction of the Internet could go away quicker than you think.

As a related note I was on Gab looking for memes on my regular old Chrome browser and…wait a minute I’m in Thailand. Gab has been unblocked in the Land of Smiles. But when I went to the old Thailand Expats and Friends group to announce my discovery, I found out that ALL Gab groups I was in have been wiped off the Internet. I can’t click to view old posts as it says there is no history. What’s going on?

Why don’t we run our cars on sunflower oil? An honest accounting of Energy Returned on Energy Invested could yield all kinds of interesting discoveries…

I should do my in flight movie review, but I’m getting sleepy again and might save that for another post. There were good messages but in two of them you had to wade through a lot of woke to get there. Both oddly though concerned themselves a lot with actual female empowerment (Nimona and Poor Things), one with a Christian and the other with a Buddhist overarching ideology.

Back to no TV for me. I’ve now watched five movies in the past five weeks. That’s enough!

I seem to be getting a lot of screen free time lately just through moving around. Speaking of a strange omen shortly after renting a motorbike in Koh Samui we stopped at a 7 Eleven where I made use of their outside outlets to plug in my phone and computer. I needed a map of the area and a hotel booking and had no internet with everything unplugged for so long. Ka is always picking up weird things he finds on the road so he picked up this toy dinosaur which then fell behind a fence. As he was walking to retrieve it he excitedly tells me he found money on the ground.

There is an old story from 2018 where one of Ka’s lines to me was “I have one baht, in my heart.” The guy finds a one baht coin on the road at least once per day it seems and sometimes we just give them back and forth to each other. As my husband approached I noticed he had found a bill rather than a coin.

“I give for you.” He said as he always does with the one baht coins. It was one US dollar.

ForEx is how they’re holding everything together for now: most Asian currencies are very weak against the US dollar. They’re exporting the suffering everywhere. How much longer can the center hold?

It’s past my bedtime…somewhere. Is this the end or just a new beginning?

Buy me a ko-fi