Talk about Beta versions!  I really need someone to hold my hand.  I have no idea whether this is a separate post of a continuation of the post I made two days ago.  Anyway:

I like the rainy season.  It’s less crowded.  At least that’s what I read.  But I don’t know; I haven’t been trying to get reservations in the normally over-booked hip places.  I don’t even know what the hip places are.  In fact, I’m about as qualified to write a guide to Bangkok living as Donald Trump is qualified to be president of the US.  At least I’m not tweeting.

It’s drier in the mornings, though it still can be muggy and unpleasant some time and then I have to stop every so often and duck into some air conditioned place along the road.  Two days ago searching for a language school , I stopped in a Holly’s coffee shop.  Holly’s seems to be a Korean knock off of Starbucks, down to the 3^rd World friendly, we-support-good-causes décor.  The drinks and food menu are similar too, with the addition of some gooey, gelatinous deserts.  There was some sort of Chinese karaoke video playing on a screen in back however.  The screen showed a little stick figure trying to navigate its way around a stick-figure landscape with stick-figure benches, trees and houses.  Sometimes the stick figure had a dog and sometimes an umbrella; they just seemed to appear from time to time.  As the little figure wandered around, however, Chinese characters kept appearing in front of it, forcing it to turn either left or right. These characters kept unfurling and blocking its way until finally they took up so much space that the little stick figure had nowhere left to turn.  At this point a new banner unfurled; the same size, except this one said, “help!”.  I have no idea what the words of the song were about, but the meaning of the graphics was all too clear.  It was the heart-rending predicament of an English-speaking stick figure submerged in a sea of incomprehensible signage.  I watched slowly sipping my iced mocha frapucchino as the video looped and looped, I sensed the growing desperation of the little stick figure as it set out on his journey fresh and full of hope, met a dog, found itself with an umbrella, only to be buried once again in a junk heap.  It seemed sort of poignant warning to anyone foolish enough to venture out on the steamy and traffic-clogged streets of Bangkok during the rainy season season.  I couldn’t figure out what the dog was supposed to mean though.

Alternating with the stick-figure videos there were ads for Holly Coffee.  These featured a smartly dressed young man in various poses, young man at work, young man at school, young man relaxing.  The young man was always surrounded by young females with adoring and simpering smiles, ‘Oh please look at me young man, please deign to notice my humble existence.’  And he did always notice one of them, naturally the one that had thought to offer him a fresh Hollys Coffee.  What struck me so forcibly was not the commercial message but the fashion statement.  Everyone in the ad was dressed like a character in an Archie comic (does anyone remember Archie comics?).  I couldn’t figure it out.  Starbucks looks ‘80s or ‘90s but Archie is resolutely stuck in the 1950s.  The young man was wearing the stripey sort of cardigan that today would make him look uber-gay.  It also gave me prickly heat just to see him in it  It might have been just the thing to wear at a missile launching sit in Pyongyang, but it was definitely unseasonable for Bangkok.

The only think that was un-Archie about the young man was his hair, which was uber-bouffant, so bouncey that, though quite short, it still seemed that there might be a furry animal breathing in and out on the top of his head.  Pat Boone’s (remember him) hair never did that, Anderson Cooper’s hair still doesn’t (I just checked).  I noticed all that because last night I myself had my own hair cut in a little back street establishment with a barber pole and joss sticks and was plopped down in front of a poster of four young men of indeterminate age, nationality and sexual inclinations, obviously the components of some sort of boy band.  I know enough to remember that in order to appeal to the Asian-boy-band-consuming public, the boy band member’s grungy ragamuffin look had to be tweaked until he as clean and spiffy as a 1950s American teen idol.  The only difference was an advance in hair-dressing products.  In the 1950s it was either very short (like Pat Boone or early Beatles) or greased down like Elvis.  Now it’s bouncey and bouffant.  The boy-band poster was in between a flourescent painting of lotus flowers on black velvet and a beaded curtain with hearts made of pink shells.  It was a Bangkoky sort of barber shop cum beauty parlor whose female barber/beauticians all had fingernails so long and pointed that it was a wonder that they even needed to use scissors on me.

So I confess to be writing rather randomly.  I am trying to understand something of this blogging business (and the internet here is only iffy), so I play with whatever pops intomind.  Still, there’s a point in randomness as there is a point in Rohrschach ink blots.  You never think of yourself or your tastes or your patterns of consumption as weird because you’re the archetype of normal.  Bangkok barber shops are weird, Korean coffee bars are weird, but you’re not.  One of the reasons for coming here is to overcome that smugness.