I want you to think back, if you are old enough to remember, to a time when Internet use was not widespread among the general population. What was it like?
First off back then personal social interactions were both personal, as in involving an interaction in the substrate of what could colloqially be called real life, and they were often social. If you lived in a small town or any community that operated as such you probably had a good idea of the general tenor of your friends and associates. You might know who is happily married, who is married but is having an affair, who is gay, who smokes, who drinks too much alcohol and who has other bad habits. These things largely came out through a series of face to face interactions and perhaps alcohol fueled third party gossip, or perhaps came down to simple things such as staying next door to the person and seeing a certain red corvette pull up late at night.
You couldn’t hide too much back then as far as how you looked either. There would be no snapchat selfies to make a 50 year old look 18 or to make a 240 pound woman look to be weighing 115. Now video has somewhat cured the worst of these excesses, but it still does not contain the same 3 dimensional context. How does she smell? What things are going on beyond the narrow scope of the camera? And most importantly what is going on when the camera is not rolling?
We all have to eat and carry on important other biological functions, such as breathing. In 2021 in Thailand my Covid dissident status was as obvious as the uncovered nose on my face.
I found the facemask mandates more concerning than vaccine mandates, as it is a visual signifier that in a highly compliant culture cannot be hidden from anyone’s view. During parts of 2021 in Phuket facemask compliance in public ran above 99%. The nightmares came back when the push was on to always and forever cover your nose. I can simply not wear one in this way for longer than I can hold my breath.
When I was 14 years old I was brutally raped, with one of the two men holding my face down against a pillow so that I was stuck gasping for air with each thrust. I passed out and woke up tied up in an unlit room with duct tape over my mouth. I escaped needless to say and eventually moved on from this tragedy, with a little PTSD no doubt. I do not know what their plans were for me, whether it was to bring me and the other two girls into a sex trafficking ring or whether I was slated for a Satanic ritual. I say this second one because it was the summer solstice, which in Satanic terms is represented as the sacrifice of virgins which I also was. What I can tell you is I absolutely believe that such things happen. You always do when it happens to you.
In a facemask when I have been told to cover my nose by the police, say, I begin to hyperventilate with the first time I try to inhale through it. This sets off a very rapid chain reaction where I pass out. Knowing the reason WHY I can’t wear one doesn’t change a damned thing in my response. The suffocation nightmares in which I cannot breath and cannot move came back for the first time in over 20 years. I had run ins with police over this and many shops banned me from entering. Some would allow me to pick up whatever I was buying outside of their door, but there was usually a warning that the police could come and arrest me there too, as it was a public area. Eventually I knew who the sympathetic ones were. I had a carefully constructed map in my head of where I could and could not go unmasked safely. I was stuck on a loop between Nai Yang beach and the bungalow. As the year progressed we only had three visitors who ever came over that were not neighbors, that being Kuhn Saak, Mr. Nathan and Kuhn Chef. 2021 was a hell year for me.
In perhaps the greatest irony considering my dissident status, the would be rapist who I wanted dead was almost certainly NOT Covid vaccinated.
Why do I think that? For one thing Kuhn Saak told me that and he expressed a very healthy distrust of the vaccines. He could have been lying to impress me, but he backed it up by working the only job available to the unvaxxed at the time, harvesting fruits and vegetables from his family land and selling them to middlemen. My unjabbed husband Ka helped him with this, of course. In 2021 Kuhn Saak was the most frequent visitor to our bungalow and he even knew enough to not wear a facemask around me, in contrast to jabbed less common visitors Mr. Nathan and Kuhn Chef. This did, I suppose, create a degree of intimacy and it was the closest I came to an on the ground dissident network in Thailand.
But I had never felt the slightest romantic inclination towards Kuhn Saak. I could think of several Thai men, Mr. Nathan and Kuhn Chef for example, who I held in higher regard other than their Covid jabbed status, but who I also had no feelings for. In my head I’d made no bones about having eyes for only my husband. But had it been seen that way?
The psychologist in me wondered often about Kuhn Saak’s motivations for trying to pretend to be Ka. Although I agreed with my husband that he was a sick man, I wondered if his Muslim upbringing had played a part in it. Had I made sweet eyes at him?
For those who don’t know, “sweet eyes” is a catch all term used by some men to justify unwanted sexual aggression, even up to the point of rape. It means that the woman was looking at him a way that implied that she wanted it. This slope gets slippery real quick though there are certainly some styles of behavior and actions which indicate that a woman might be interested.
Kuhn Saak had mentioned some old fashioned and downright mysognystic norms that he thought were proper in women. He lamented often how bad of a wife I was to Ka because I drank and smoke, something a woman in his family would never do. I noted to him that being Muslim men weren’t supposed to drink either, and it was obvious from day one that he liked my husband’s company to get away from his family so he could drink in peace. This left him in a difficult position because on the one hand if I was sober I was usually staring at a computer screen ignoring Kuhn Saak completely. So he wanted me to drink and dance and sing and hopefully throw some of my own money in for more booze later. That made me appear, perhaps, to be an easy karaoke girl who just needed to be coaxed in his direction.
Me and Ka had engaged in a few displays of affection at the bungalow in front of Kuhn Saak. I don’t think it was anything too racy but sometimes my husband pushed me to kiss him as though he felt he had something to prove.
I didn’t find any of that too compelling as a sexual come on from my Western vantage point. Kuhn Saak came to our house. I certainly had never professed an interest in living under Sharia law.
The simple fact that he had abandoned my husband five miles away and drove to our house in the middle of the night indicated ill intent. There was no benign explanation for this. Even leaving such a large amount of whiskey behind seemed calculated in the knowledge that I’d probably get into the bottle myself at some point and would thus be off my guard.
So was I giving Kuhn Saak sweet eyes? Uh, sort of. I was ovulating around that time...
It amazes me how few women know or consider attraction in terms of their monthly menstrual cycles. In Western countries these have been largely messed up by drugs, poisons, and birth control pills to proactively hide the damage from the fertility drop which they intentionally caused. I haven’t taken any type of hormone based contraceptive in well over two decades. I always notice that men try to pick me up most during the time of month when I am most fertile.
I also engage in behaviors that are more attractive to men. I drink alcohol, smile and become more receptive overall. Supposedly my pupils become wider and more adoring. Some of this behavior is because I get awful cramps when I ovulate, even worse than during my periods, and booze is a pain killer. Some is because in this case I was hoping to get frisky with my husband Ka later that day to try to make a baby.
I didn’t give the timeline of my would be rapist being in bed with me any thought until my period was late two weeks later. It was suddenly all that I could think about. Could Kuhn Saak have somehow had sex with me and could I be pregnant with his child?
I replayed the scenario in my head 1000 times. I had gone to bed after drinking and worrying about my husband at around midnight. When I had turned on the phone after discovering that Kuhn Saak had snuck into our bed and pretended to be my husband it was 4:00 AM. I remembered vaguely being relieved and nodding back off to sleep when the person who I thought was my husband spooned me from behind on the bed. I had no memory until at some point later he started kissing me on the back of the neck.
How long had this asshole been in our bed pawing at me? The thought made me want to rip Kuhn Saak apart. He could have come in at 12:36, or 1:36, or 2:36 or 3:36 AM. I had no memory of it as I fell back asleep. But could something have happened more? Perhaps even full on sex and then in some type of sleepwalking action I put my clothes back on? It was possible.
For those who are wondering I would have kept the child had it come that, even though the thought sickened me. That is a major part of my covenant with God. But the situation was the farthest from ideal. I had never had to consider such a possibility before with somebody who was not who I wanted.
For me though 2021 was the year of dead babies. My period arrived perhaps two days late after agonizing over these things. It was not meant to be and thank God for that. Even more than earlier in the year, when facemask mandates in medical setting terrified me away from the idea of even wanting to be pregnant and needing medical care, I breathed a huge sigh of relief.
Kuhn Ron had come to our bungalow some months before in 2021. “This is a six year for the three of us,” the Cancer with the birthday July 8, 1979 explained to me and Ka. “In Thai style, this is the most difficult year. Do you remember when you were six years old? Do you remember what happened? And then 12 years after that and 12 years later again? 2021 same same. What is the most difficult thing?”
I thought about this. “So for me this would be 1985, 1997 and 2009?”
“Yes.”
I nodded. “It’s the year of dead babies.”
I explained the story to Mr. Nathan and we went to both the military barracks and then to the police station. The facemask wearing wives all came out to listen to the story in fascination. “I don’t even know Kuhn Saak’s real family name.” I lamented to our Thai Scottish friend. “I never paid much attention to Thai names. But I saw his ID card once and remember his date of birth. February 19, 1975.”
“No worries.” Mr. Nathan informed me. “We got him.”
The head of the military barracks informed us that we would have to go to the police station to file a report. They told me that me and my daughter were welcome to come there anytime if I felt unsafe.
I followed Mr. Nathan on his motorbike and found one of those disgustingly unsanitary facemasks under the seat for the grisly task at hand. At the time the 20,000 baht, or $666, fine for not wearing a facemask in public still stood. There were calls to deport noncompliant foreignors over the summer months for not wearing a facemask properly. Although the facemask 100% compliance frenzy had died down a bit, all of those decrees were still in force and I was walking into a Thai police station.
I kept the awful thing under my nose. Sometimes at official business I would be told that I needed to cover my nose, which led to me covering my nose but pulling it out 2 or 3 inches as I talked. This always made Thai people extremely nervous. I’d had to walk out of one government building in tears as I explained to Ka that I couldn’t wear the damned thing. This caused such a stir that somebody walked outside to help us get the needed document.
Mr. Nathan did most of the talking in Thai language as the police ignored my poor facemask usage. Even under my nose it quickly became uncomfortable. The policeman was explaining something in Thai language.
“Did you understand what he say?” Mr Nathan asked me.
My head was starting to spin. “No. Not at all. Explain it to me.”
“He say you can’t file a report without your husband here.”
“My husband is drinking with the asshole who did this!” I exclaimed, using this as an excuse to pull the God forsaken symbol of shame below my mouth.
Mr. Nathan explained this in Thai language as I cut in. “Please. I want the man out of our house.”
Some more things were explained. Nathan sighed. “All right. You can file as single woman if you go to the hospital and get checked.”
“That won’t be necessary. It didn’t go that far.” My stomach was turning just thinking about it but I would have avoided a hospital no matter. In an ironic twist of fate my inability to wear a facemask due to my rape decades ago had led to an inability to prosecute someone for rape. Everyone knew that hospitals were even worse than police stations on enforcement of facemask rules. I couldn’t go there.
Mr. Nathan explained this and the police officer talked about it. “All right. They say they can come to your house and take Kuhn Saak out.” I nodded vigorously.
I ripped the facemask off as soon as I walked out of the police station. Technically it was illegal to be anywhere in public without wearing one but they were becoming more lax outdoors. My phone was ringing and I answered it. It was Kuhn Chef.
“Gen where are you? Kuhn Ka he crazy worry where you go. Where you go where you go? That’s all he talking.”
“You stay bungalow with Kuhn Ka?” I questioned. “Is Kuhn Saak still there?”
“Yes we drinking a little bit.” I nodded.
“I come back now. About 20 minutes.” I replied and clicked off.
“Kuhn Chef is at the bungalow now with Ka and Kuhn Saak.” I said to Mr. Nathan as me and Eliza hopped on our motorbike. “This is good. He doesn’t know anything about what happened.” It was such odd timing as Kuhn Chef only dropped in out of the blue and visited like this perhaps once per month.
Four police officers followed us in a barred truck to the bungalow. Kuhn Chef, my husband and Kuhn Saak were drinking beer this time and regarded us in surprise. The police asked me to identify my would be rapist. “Him! Kuhn Saak!” I pointed my finger at him.
Police wanted to talk to my husband Ka. Now my Thai language is not great but I understood my husband enough to know that he expressed confusion and did not want to press charges. The police sent Kuhn Saak away, not in the back of the barred truck, but on his motorbike. I find the whole your husband has to press charges thing in Thailand extremely archaic. In the extreme case of a pimp husband whose wife is not willing to be with somebody for whatever reason she has little legal recourse.
“He destroy his value.” Mr. Nathan would tell me later regarding what Ka said to the police. “Kuhn Ka should have his dick cut off.”
Even for me Ka’s initial lack of jealousy or protective instinct enraged me. “This is not a Thai Buddhist thing.” I explained to BFF 3 on messenger. “If this same thing had happened when I was with my husband Oh Kuhn Saak would be dead.”
In retrospect I can see that a combination of heavy drinking, Ka’s extremely poor short term memory which accompanied it, plus the lack of communication between me and my husband had led him to not even grasp the situation at first. But I wondered for days if the two of them had wanted to play swingers with me as the unwitting and unwilling third party. For me any man that climbs in bed like that is a threat to my family, my security and my home from there on out.
“I sometimes think Kuhn Saak is trying to push my husband to drink himself to death.” I had told my daughter Jasmine earlier in 2021. The Muslim man was always seeding doubts and pushing my husband to drink. This seems like a great point to segue into a conversation about alcoholism.
I recently updated my substack about me page to read, among others things, that I am a “Bad Alcoholic.” I will explain what I mean by that. In child custody paperwork for Jasmine my ex Joe accused me of being an alcoholic. I made a joke that while I am sure that I drink too much, I’m not even a good enough alcoholic to bother with the habit daily. Hence being a bad alcoholic.
What keeps me from turning to the bottle every day? Some of it is structure and social norms. I don’t plan on drinking if I plan on driving, and I wouldn’t pick my child up from school even if I was walking there. It is only very rarely 5 o Clock somewhere, meaning morning and early afternoon drinking are not common for me. Certain family friendly events aren’t appropriate for drinking. Even though I largely work on the Internet as an editor and a writer, I find only a few beers is enough for me to lose my edge for either job. Once I’ve consumed three or more it is all over and I don’t even have the interest in it. I shut it down in favor of listening to music.
I understand the ways my brain changes while drinking for both better and worse if the drinking has been kept in moderation. I am more social and emotional when drinking and much more likely to reveal intimate details. My psychic abilities are more in tune at a certain level in a sort of stripping away of the minutia way. Most of my partners over the years began with me and him drinking the first time we hooked up. Alcohol does not create desire but it can speed up a process already underway. I have fond memories of stupid drunk things both me and friends did that elicit much more laughter than tears. Importantly perhaps neither of my parents were remotely alcoholic. Dad was a happy drunk reminiscing about the good old days with friends while Mom kept a cool tact with her one beer with salt on those nights. I wished as a child my parents would drink more together and clear the stifling air between them.
What reasons have I quit booze over the years? Usually it came down to me doing things that were incongruent with drinking. Being pregnant and breastfeeding both of my girls, for instance, led to 2-3 largely sober years. I couldn’t train for my marathon very well if I’d drank the night before, so I usually just had one or two bottles of wine per week on the night before my off running day. That was it. Maybe that sounds excessive to some people reading this, but I came to view alcohol as a reward of sorts for a job well done. I tolerate it well and am usually a happy drunk.
That said if I were an addiction recovery specialist who was tasked with the evil proposal of determining how to get people to become, relapse and stay addicts, I would have drafted up the Covid virus theater restrictions. I could see the way that all of these carefully constructed poles which kept people clean, from wholesome social events to support groups, were fragmented and destroyed. Tasks of all sorts from taking children to school or working were gone. Instead the world was told to stare at a box and be very afraid and that the vaccine would give them back their freedom. Church was closed but the liquor store was open. Money was thrown at people, which could be spent on what exactly? They wanted people dead and in despair.
I hadn’t paid much attention to Kuhn Saak’s ramblings, but had my naive husband done so? Some of it was so insane that I thought it was a joke. When Ka’s visa proceedings to come to America ground to a halt over the summer of 2021 yet again for Covid closures doubts were easy to seed. Kuhn Saak told Ka that he couldn’t come to America because the FBI was investigating him. Then he said that I really didn’t want Ka to come to the USA because it would disturb my boyfriends over there. Then I heard him say that if I brought Ka to the USA it would likely be to sell him into sex trafficking on account of his deformed but extremely large member.
“Kuhn Saak is an idiot.” Mr. Nathan lamented to me. “And your husband is a fool. Drunk and drunker.” Our Thai-Scottish friend has a Polish wife, incidentally, and a then 11 year old daughter. I have never met them but have been told they stay in Isaan somewhere fairly close to our land around Thad Phanom. Perhaps I’ll look them up next time.
The durian harvest over the summer of 2021 was the worst time, ironically because the pungent fruit fetches very high prices at market. Kuhn Saak had many durian trees on his family land and after only a few hours in the morning both him and Ka could procure the 200 or 300 baht necessary to spend the rest of the day shitfaced drunk.
“As great as it is that I’m not paying for my husband’s drinking, at this point I’d rather be.” I told Jasmine about this. It was brutally self destructive.
“It’s funny Jasmine.” I told my daughter regarding him. “If you strip out the radically different race, religion and culture, Kuhn Saak reminds me of a lot of some guys I knew in Toledo. He’s got some exes and grown children. He likes to complain about the many ways women have screwed him over. He sort of holds this standard of a bygone era when women just did what they were told in high regard. He just wants to drink and complain and commiserate. And he’ll never once look in the mirror to see anything he might have done wrong.”
Whatever doubts Kuhn Saak was seeding were not doing Ka any good. He had a series of epileptic seizures while he was out with his drinking buddy. I heard about a few such as one where he fell backwards and hit his head on a rock. A single grand mal could kill him and at its height in the summer of 2021 he was having several in a month. I cut him off from working with Kuhn Saak terrified that he would fall from a tree he was harvesting and die.
With extreme effort I was able to cut my husband’s drinking down to a manageable level. If Ka earned any money at all he became in the habit of giving it immediately to me to manage, as he had done when he had stayed with his mother for all of those decades before. In September of 2021 I quit drinking and smoking completely. I’d decided to really try for a baby again despite the facemask mandates. I did the whole Phuket Vegeterian festival thing too. Every day I spent trying to learn new ways to cook jackfruit from our trees, which eventually became a book which, like all of the rest, sold near 0 copies. I think the AI harvested from it though, as I had several completely new to the Internet recipes including jackfruit vegan cheese, jackfruit ceviche and jackfruit banana bread which now generate responses. I tracked my ovulation as I always did and we scored a few direct hits. Then my period was late. I was overjoyed.
Days stretched by with three negative pregnancy tests. I’d only had one time in my life before that where my period was more than five days late and I wasn’t pregnant. That time, oddly enough, had been 10 years prior during a total celibacy period. I decided to wait a week and not go too crazy about it. That was when I found out it was the year of dead babies for me.
“Maybe it’s time you accept that you’re pretty old.” My mother informed me matter of factly. “You might be going into menopause.” I just didn’t want to be pregnant and deal with the repercussions of a miscarriage.
My period arrived that time 11 days and 5 negative pregnancy tests later. You might be able to guess what this did to my six week long quit smoking quit drinking stance. Those bad habits both came back with a vengeance. To hell with it and misery loves company and all.
So as the Hell year of 2021 was closing out Kuhn Saak was, exactly as I said, a drinking buddy that I tolerated. He was always egging at Ka about his house husband status as the primary cook and cleaner of the area. There really was not much else for my husband to do. The fever pitch on the unmasked had died down slightly but the restrictions on the unvaxxed remained as strong as ever. There was nothing my husband could do in any type of traditional work that didn’t take him away from home for possibly 10 day quarantines. Even those were assuming that he had the Covid jabs.
After the police left I noticed a marked dislike of our family from everyone in the area. Ba Raat stopped allowing me to enter her shop again over the facemask thing. Eliza’s best friend Bootlamfee was no longer allowed to play with my daughter. I understood it all well. There had been two incidents only weeks apart which involved my family and a sexual assault. Both times drinking alcohol and a social gathering had led to the incident. The first time had involved a barely known friend drinking with everybody else and then dragging my daughter’s six year old best friend to the abandoned house to assault her. The police then the military came out on that one too. Now just weeks later I had gone to both the military and the Thai police accusing a friend of pretending to be my husband. In a neighborhood with a lot of salt of the Earth types who just wanted to be left alone, I was beyond sticking out by this point.
“Is there any special reason we need to be surrounded by rapists and pedophiles?” I asked my husband harshly some days later. “And drug junkies and thieves and alcoholics?” The Covid restrictions seemed to unleash this lawless undercurrent of immorality. Following orders was the only thing that mattered, no matter how nonsensical the orders were. A predictable consequence of this was that the rule of law disintegrated as might made right.
Ka went to talk to Kuuhn Saak and explain that his presence was not welcome at our bungalow anymore. The Muslim man pulled up a few nights later trying to look menacing. I was having none of it. I took my largest frying pan and proceeded to start screaming at him. “Get the fuck out of my house!” He didn’t seem to back down until I approached what I knew was his sister’s motorbike fully prepared to do as much damage to that as I could, at which point he hopped on it and screeched away.
“I’m scared you’re going to get arrested, Mommy.” Eliza told me after that incident. My daughter had been worried for months that I was going to get arrested and go to jail, mostly over my flouting of facemask mandates. The suffocation nightmares had come back over the mandates. I had seen videos out of Australia and other places of police arresting and forcing facemasks on the noncompliant. It looked like some sort of Hell on Earth to me. What would happen if I was handcuffed and forced into one? Would my body somehow adapt to the imposition as so many billions of people had quietly done during the virus theater? Or would I be forced into a cycle of hyperventilating, waking up and passing out until I faded away?
Mr. Nathan had told me a few months before that I would soon not be allowed to buy anything without a Covid vaccine pass. I laughed in his face. “How would I even go about getting a jab if I wanted to?” I questioned him. “These stupid fuckers had me at facemask already! So I’m going to do what now, go to a mass vaccine center, put on a facemask that I can’t wear, wait in line for 15 minutes to an hour wearing a facemask that I can’t wear so I can get a fucking death poke so I can now continue to wear a facemask that I can’t wear and now also show my compliance certificate at local shops?”
Nathan sighed. “Sometimes in life you must do things that you don’t want to do.”
“I won’t!” I screamed, punching a hole into our wooden table. I had been drinking and was emotional, but the sentiment was the same regardless. My violent and traumatic rape decades before and Covid restrictions were viscerally connected in my head to the same underlying dance with the Devil. There was no way for me to unsee it.
In an Asian collectivist culture where saving face and compliance were everything my American style open revolt were like a raging bull in a shop. I broke a lot of China. Ka was able to navigate more freely as he could wear a facemask if he felt the situation warranted it. Him and Eliza had to go inside many places masked to buy things as I stood around out front waiting for the cops to arrest me for my bare smile. My husband was also more capable than I was at implying, misremembering, or even outright lying about his (un) jabbed status.
By the point of the Kuhn Saak incident in December of 2021 everyone in the area knew that not only was I an unmasked, noncompliant foreignor as the only farang in the area, but I was also not Covid jabbed. I might as well have put up a neon American flag and blared “Unvaccinated!!! I will not comply!” over some loudspeakers three times a day like some Muslim call to prayer. I wouldn’t have gotten any more attention. The gossip soured even more than it had already. I am sure that somebody in the military told people in the area that I was an unregistered foreignor living in that bungalow and probably implied that they were complicent in a crime by continuing to allow my presence there. The beginning roots of the land grab almost certainly took place in the Year of Dead Babies.
The criticism turned to me. Phuket was opening up for locals who had dutifully rolled up their sleeves and complied. Yet here I was allowing unmasked, unjabbed deplorables into my home and partying like it was 2019. “If Kuhn Ka stay out late, lock your door!” Kuhn Chef told me for next time this happened. I didn’t want there to be a next time. I could have prevented this if I had just not drank or smoked or carried on. I could have prevented this if I had just worn the facemask, gotten the jabs, and smiled with gratitude for being allowed outside to play again. If only I had just complied I could have prevented all of this.
Nobody seemed to place any weight or relevance on the fact that Kuhn Saak had hijacked my husband and snuck into my house with absolutely unsolicited sexual intent. The victim and the victimizer had been turned upside down. I suspect that the Muslim man had made a calculated gambit that, outcast as I was already from polite society, I would never go to the police. Then it was simply a matter of convincing my husband to go along with his warped way of thinking.
I felt like Kuhn Saak had single handedly tried to set a wrecking ball to our marriage. It almost worked. As the nightmare year of 2021 drew to a close I had only one person to take my anger out on, that being my husband who had failed to defend me. Kuhn Saak was gone by then and I should give Ka credit for negotiating that. If he had for whatever reason chosen to stick by his drinking buddy it would have been the end of our marriage. But Ka’s lack of concern about what happened was stinging to me. I didn’t want the extreme possesiveness of Oh, who once pointed a loaded gun at my head over a two minute interaction with a cashier while buying beer in Las Vegas. Yet this lack of jealousy on Ka’s part was at the extreme other end of the scale.
“If some friend of mine ditches me at a party and goes to my house to fuck my wife, I’m not going to be friends with that person anymore.” My brother Andy stated matter of factly. Even the easygoing always on both sides of the story Gemini got it. Just being abandoned at a party five miles from home even if Kuhn Saak had simply left and gone to his house to sleep it off would have been enough to merit a cutoff from more hotheaded tempers.
Christmas 2021 came and went with me giving presents to my daughter under our modest tree. It was just the three of us my daughter’s best friend Bootlamfee and her brother were not allowed over. I could tell the girl’s family was packing up for their move out of the neighborhood. Our dogs seperated a large bull calf from its mother and it barrelled past me in fear, almost knocking me under its hooves. Me and Ka had to get the poor calf out of some mire it got stuck in and the cow farmer chided us for our unruly dogs. Nobody in the area liked them or us either anymore.
Nobody visited us during that time. Nobody even seemed to talk to us anymore. I made a plan to go to the Nai Yang beach hotel to ring in the New Year. A neighbor came at noon with a large bottle of laow khao whiskey on New Year’s Eve 2021 and that plan was scuttled. The man left by three in the afternoon but the damage had been done as neither me nor Ka were in a condition to drive anymore. I gave my husband money to buy some more booze as I was not allowed in Ba Raat’s shop myself.
“I want that motherfucker dead!” I yelled as I slammed my beer on the table later that night. All of this seemed to be coalescing around Kuhn Saak as he began to represent something sinister about these dark days of Covid compliance. It was ironic considering he hadn’t complied with the jabs either.
Eliza had gone to bed earlier and me and my husband were just drinking with each other and waiting for midnight to ring in the New Year 2022. I desperately wanted out of 2021 the year of living hell. I continued to Ka dismissively. “And you are just like Kuhn Saak he my friend, like you two are gay lovers or something. At least I’m not pregnant with his baby.” My period had arrived some days prior to this. The only person I had told regarding the possibility of bearing my rapist’s child was my mother.
Ka understood this and slammed down his beer. “Kuhn Saak have sex with you or no?” He asked me pointedly.
“Would you even care if he did?” I yelled back. “You sure as fuck didn’t seem to care that day as long as he bought you more booze!”
“Kuhn Saak have sex with you or no??” Ka repeated again louder.
“Do you even give a fuck? Kuhn Saak my friend! My friend! That’s all I heard for days from you!”
“KUHN SAAK HAVE SEX WITH YOU OR NO?!!!” Ka screamed, throwing his beer bottle into the woods.
“WHO CARES???!” I screamed back. “WOULD YOU ACTUALLY EVEN GIVE A FUCK IF HE DID?!!”
Ka howled and punched through our glass window, shattering a large part of it. It had once been the front door for a salon in Patong which had been discarded and given to my husband by a friend. Being that it was an entrance door for a business it was a very tempered glass which was designed to withstand a lot of traffic and all sorts of mishaps. Yet my husband had punched right through it.
“No.” I said finally, looking at Ka in shock. “Kuhn Saak did not have sex with me. I mean, I don’t think so. Jesus Christ are you okay?” I came over to inspect my husband’s hand and wrist. There were a few small pieces of glass sticking out of his skin, but it didn’t appear to be anything but small cuts. “Is your hand okay? Do you need to go hospital?”
“No.” Ka shook his head. “I okay Gen. I never die.”
It was a fitting end to a horrific year. 2021, the year that shall go down in infamy at least as much as the predecessor pandemic intervention hell of 2020. There were broken tables, broken windows, broken bottles, and broken mirrors. All over the landscape, all over the world, was the litter of broken promises, broken laws, broken elections, broken businesses, broken families, broken bodies, broken dreams and broken hearts.
At least I had my family. Not everyone came out so lucky. I realized then that I had never even told Ka what had happened with Kuhn Saak in any specific detail. Perhaps I’d been afraid to. I was worried I was just another replaceable cog in the wheel, easy for my husband to pass around or share if the circumstances merited it. Who could blame him? I had a past and Kuhn Saak certainly had to know that from brother Tee and perhaps even from Ka himself.
How could I have expected more? I remembered when I had scoffed at Ka in 2018, on first suspecting strongly that he’d had a thing for me the whole time.
“First off Ka, I’ve been with men before. Kuhn Oh is number eight.” I told him and continued. “I killed my rapist.” I don’t count the rape incidentally as a sexual partner. I went on. “I’ve had four abortions.” All of that happened before I turned 20, with three in 1997 alone. Hormonal based contraception works so poorly on me that I’ve seriously considered picking up some birth control pills to try to get pregnant. “I have two daughters that are not yours. But most importantly to you is that I HAVE BEEN WITH YOUR BROTHER FOR SEVEN YEARS!”
“Oh my God.” Ka said, staring into the Heavens.
“Could you really be with me? I mean REALLY? Not in some you angry me about Kuhn Oh, or you just curious or I so pretty way? Could you really be with me? Really?”
“I thinking.”
“These are not easy questions I am asking you.”
“I understand.”
The next morning Ka spoke to me. “Gen. I have the dream last night about me and you stay together. Very good.” He looked down shyly and smiled. “I okay. I okay everything.” He was so handsome to me from as soon as I saw him. It was odd as it usually took a long time for me to see something attractive in a man. I guess the stars aligned.
I never found out what that dream specifically was that Ka had. Now he mostly just says “I dream about you every night.”
Shooting the moon in hearts is difficult. Perhaps I had been aiming too low before. I knew that I needed to take them all or I wouldn’t take any. I had already heard quite a bit about Ka’s problem down there. I was corrupting a virgin, as it were. It was like God saved him for me.
Things worked out after some awkward days figuring out fit. I had something on my side, a deformity down there of sorts. I think the only person on Earth to be in a position to really know those things about both of me and Ka, that being my first husband Oh, was probably driven more insane by that than the birthdays. For a long time I had discounted Satanic ritual in my rape because they wouldn’t have delivered damaged goods as it were. But then it occured to me that what if they had seen down there and thought I was damaged goods already?
“Gen you same same me!” Ka had exclaimed to me in those early days. Or sort of kind of same same but different?
He’d told me around then that “Doctors not sure if can working or not.”
Although it turned out that it worked and quite extraordinarily well for me, with the lovemaking veritably in a different galaxy from anything I had ever experienced before, my husband still could be shooting blanks. As miraculous as it had all been thus far, could Ka have talked to his drinking buddy about his concerns as my period arrived each month on time and on schedule? Of course he could have. He probably did.
I have no idea what Kuhn Saak’s motivations were. Perhaps he’d been posessed by a demon that night, but I doubt it. He’d been testing boundaries for awhile before that. One afternoon weeks prior to this incident Kuhn Saak had gotten drunk and passed out on my daughter’s bed in the middle of the day. I told Ka repeatedly to wake him up as this was concerning to Eliza. My husband didn’t want to disturb his friend and I took Eliza and Bootlamfee to Nai Yang beach, with Kuhn Saak gone when we returned. I should have kicked his ass then.
What I do know is that keeping this hatred of him allowed Kuhn Saak to live rent free in my head and me and my family suffered for it. I heard updates through the grapevine. His mother died and I expressed my condolences. She had always been a good woman to me, but the local shop they had run across from the high school had to close. Kuhn Saak’s parents had been devastated by the closure of the high school for most of 2021 as the jab campaign became coercive. I heard from Mr. Nathan that Kuhn Saak had gotten in a drunken brawl and was commited to a mental institution afterwards. Then he got out and was charged with stealing from his sister Kuhn So.
“Kuhn Saak family throw him.” Mr. Nathan informed me. “He go to jail now.” I saw him walking on the road sometimes and he seemed as homeless as any of those I encountered in America.
“For how long he go jail?” I questioned.
“Maybe a few days. Maybe a few weeks.”
I shook my head. “I’m sad it’s so little time.”
Forgiving is not the same as forgetting. Even if Kuhn Saak were to show up somehow, sober and reformed and wanting to express his sincere repentance for what he had done, it would not mean that he was allowed in my life anymore. He had breached trust in a manner that had permanently branded him as an outcast to my family. But I needed to let him go from that. We had all done bad things and under the urging insistence of a world that seemed to have been designed by Satan. It was always just one little thing and then once compromised it became just one little other thing. Eventually we all feel spiritually damned. Even the churches and religious orders have all been compromised.
I realize that I represent something in the old bungalow that nobody wants to be reminded of. They still want to bury it all and pretend it never happened. The world could well be taken down with this energy. I have to release it in my personal life.
I wish Kuhn Saak the best in his future endevears. That’s if he’s still alive, at any rate, which I am not entirely sure of. It was like 2021 was thrown at me to relive all of the worst details of my childhood and redo them. I am grateful for that. There were no dead babies in my personal life in 2021. The spell was broken.
There was another thing which happened during 2021 which I have never mentioned or celebrated. I began my first substack late that year, which quickly became three seperate pages. I had no idea what I was doing at first so apparently I started three seperate pages with my first three posts in November of 2021 or so. My Wordpress page was getting almost 100 views per day and several downloads of a religious exemption form for vaccine mandates in the US, with almost all of the traffic coming from DuckDuckGo. I recognized that there was a market bubbling up for all of you who saw how wrong things were but who were cut off from each other.
Being on Substack allowed me to make friends, expand my viewpoint and evolve my writing in ways that had never been possible before. I can sometimes sense when you have read my words and I’ve even had dreams about a few of you. Some of my journey is a type of total disclosure. I realize that is not for everybody and I am ironically one of the biggest defenders of being able to maintain anonymity on the Internet. I just can’t do it. I have to have a story that is fit for God.
I suppose I can take consolation that if Kuhn Saak did rape me somehow while I was sleeping, the experience was far less traumatic than it would have been simply terrible. The Muslim man would be a poor source of information on this and I don’t seek it. He’d be equally as likely to boast about something that didn’t happen as he would be to deny something that did happen and in any case due to his extremely drunken state he might not really remember either way. I suppose I am a size queen but I think of my husband more in terms of a one in 8 billion fit. I hope you all have or find somebody like that.
Forgiving is not forgetting. The masses haven’t even ripped the band aid off yet. Perhaps I can do my small part to help them along the way…
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