It was a beautiful sunset, and Randi had left me to my own devices, and our bungalow has a little refrigerator filled with beer, and pistachios make one thirsty, so I consumed bottles equaling 1.4 liters. Our porch faces the Gulf of Thailand, and the sun was melting into its golden and purple constituents over the horizon, one of those moments of breathtaking heartbreaking beauty that make you realize how insignificant you really are. I knew Randi would want to share that feeling, so I got the camera and captured it digitally. Then, because I left the camera on the exposed porch, it began to rain torrentially.

The power went out and we waited in the dark for the taxi that would take us across the island to the famous Full Moon Party. When it arrived, I ran skidding and slipping through the darkness, and on the porch of our resort’s little eatery, I slid and lashed out to save myself, punching a statue squarely in the jaw. I yowled in pain, to the indescribable delight of the diners, and we loaded into the taxi. Taxis in Thailand are covered pickup trucks. You ride in the back with as many fellow passengers as the driver can find. They like to maximize their profits here. (Who doesn’t?) The necessarily harrowing passages do much to create a sense of camaraderie among the passengers. When we disembarked from our last drive (again, through torrential rain, up and down mountainous jungle roads), I gave my co-daredevils a bow and a grand wave: “Goodbye, everyone! Enjoy your journey, and good luck!” The response was enthusiastic and heart-warming.

On this jaunt, we journeyed with two Australasian girls, who were quite pleasant. Then we rolled our eyes as Mr. Fucking Females and his friends climbed in.

Let me tell you about this gentleman. On our first day on Koh Phangan, we were enjoying the blissful view from our porch hammocks, unwinding from the hectic pace of Koh Tao, letting our spirits dissolve as spirits dissolved us. It was another moment of stillness and utter beauty and quietude, one of those moments when you forget that our oceans are turning to acid, the economy is turning to shit, democracy is turning to fascism. The sea was perfectly flat and perfectly blue, and palm fronds moved gently in the wind.

Into this idyllic scene comes two young Norwegian fellows (I’ll go ahead and tell you they were Norwegian, though we didn’t learn this until later). They grasp Chang beers, they walk onto the beach, and one of them says loudly, in accented English, “Where’s the fuckin’ females?” Randi and I rolled our eyes at this crassness, which became inexplicable as they then conversed amongst themselves in Norwegian. Why would he say that one phrase in English? Then an older woman, presumably their mother, came up and spoke to them, and they spoke harshly to her, argued a bit, and she huffed away. My opinion sank lower. I can abide the Supreme Court selling our democracy, I can abide Turkey disavowing the Armenian genocide, but I cannot abide young men who disrespect their mother. The eccentricity of this character’s jackassery was only accentuated when he repeated the phrase at least twice more within my hearing. He was not even looking around for females when he said it. He said it once while walking down the beach, looking at the sand, and once while splashing in the water. I concluded that he had heard the line in a movie or TV show, loved it, and committed it to memory.

So. We rode with him and his two friends. They were actually quite pleasant, if enthusiastically vulgar. The subject turned to Bangkok, and, inevitably, live sex shows, on which subject their enthusiasm was only matched by their explicitness. At first I was determined to adopt Social Stance B, which is noncommittal affability masking subtle mockery and brutal judgement. But the beer had left my mind a-glow, and we had the bond engendered by facing death in a Thailand taxi, so after good-naturedly encouraging them to throw their empty bottles at passing cars for a while, I tapped Mr. Fucking Females on the knee and said, “You’re Mister - ” I was about to say “Fucking Females”, but he grabbed my hand, pumped it and said, “Paul. Pleasure!” with such open friendliness that I forgave him his faults. As, indeed, I would hope others would forgive me mine. Then we had several rounds of shouting, “Party party party!”, an old Norwegian custom.

Then with a festive sliding of tires in mud at high speed, we were there, at the biggest party in the world.

Today the wound is quite nasty. It is a trio of deep gouges backed by a purple-black bruise. Randi, in a mood of playful, experimental sadism, put tiger balm on it, causing miniature volcanoes of pain to fire ash-clouds of agony into my brain. But I have suffered worse than this, and I will suffer worse yet ere I die.

We were surprised to see the Norwegians in the cafe at an early hour, as we had assumed they would stay at the party much later than us, and rise consequently later. They had; Mr. FF came to our table and asked if we had enjoyed ourselves, and we responded noncommittally, having reverted to SS-B, but his inquiry was really an excuse to blurt his tragic story:

“Yeah, I was fine until some guy beat me down and took everything I had just walk up to me and BAM took my wallet took my smoke!”

We expressed our sympathies, and he made a gesture indicative of the lot of man: to suffer without knowing why; to be cursed with reason yet not with wisdom; to struggle to assert one’s identity and dignity in an unfeeling and merciless world; to be crushed in the winepress of society; to live, to live and then to die!

I was so despondent that I had another cup of tea.

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