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I'm exactly a month returned from Asia and the neurological symptoms caused by my diseased blood have begun to make me question my own sanity.  I fear that I will soon be dead, but before that I will probably infect many others.  The only solution is to take my own life.

Just kidding.  I have been getting flashbacks, though.  Of the night on Gili T. when the all of the alien stars of the southern hemisphere shone as brightly in the sky as the luminescent algae forming constellations in the sea.  Of the boy muezzin practicing his adhan on the town's loudspeakers.  Of the moon on the ocean and the waves on Indonesia.

So I'll try to convey, as best as I can narrate retrospectively (with apologies to N. N. Taleb) what happened in the now-intervening three months:

Day 17 & 18:  Three days of peace and quiet is my fill.  I bid Bao's Fishmerchant Guesthouse goodbye and board the minibus for Krabi Town.  Five Brits board in Khlong Kong who've spent the night at the concert -- Job 2 Do, a local reggae artist with one good song: "Do Chan Dai" -- which I opted out of.  Shades of Ko Phi-Phi.  I keep to myself and disembark 3 hours later in Krabi Town.  The Brits demand to be taken to their hostel (the Pak-Up, mistaken for the "Un-Pack" by ye Brits) and I jump out where the driver is pulled over, a riverwalk on a mangrove-threaded bank where street vendors do trade in fruitshakes, oddmeats and noodles.  I sling my packs and walk to find a cheap room.  Krabi Town has a lot, at the cheapest prices I'll see in Thailand but for imaginably spartan conditions.  One hundred baht (about US$3.10) buys you a double-wide closet with a lightbulb and fan, a mattress, pillow and sheet.  Good enough.  That night I go out to the Old West Bar where I meet two English girls, then we're all off to the Buffalo Bar where the owner and his friends are playing bad covers of classic rock tunes.  They do "Do Chan Dai" on my request.  Hell, I missed hearing it live last night.  The girls make an early night of it but I finish my beer and have a conversation with a Canadian (with one day left in Thailand before he flies back to a newly repossessed home and estranged girlfriend in Canadia) and a Kiwi (who's just begun his trip and is unsure how long he'll be gone or just what in the hell he'll do next).  We eventually move back to the Old West Bar where the DJ, a skinny Thai with a greasy black pompadour, is spinning the Doors and selling drinking-straws filled with "cocaine", one of which the Kiwi buys (for around US$100).  It's not coke, but some sort of designer amphetamine with an hallucinogenic kick that gives you the walleye and the dipsydoodle, but without the full coldcockin' teethrocker.  You know what I mean, a real boom-BANG!  Kidding.  From all reports -- I didn't partake of any hard drugs in Thailand, out of a prudent fear of their Draconian anti-drug (re: license to extort) laws -- the powder inside the straw was as inert as chalk.  We end up drinking beer until the sun is in a fair way to rise.  I go for a walk along the river as the boys go home, feeling pretty good, and before you know it I'm going for a run.  Still drunk, I run along the river until I come to a jungle gym where I do a few pull-ups and half an abdominal routine.  I run back to my room, really feeling my oats now, and flush all my tobacco down the toilet, determined to quit and devote myself to an healthful life from that moment forward.  I catch forty winks and wake, still drunk, to move to a yet cheaper hostel that I'd found the night before (about five minutes after I'd already checked in to the first one).  I fall asleep again and wake up with a nasty hangover and a lingering determination not to smoke.  After a water and a Sprite I feel partly human again (to be continued...)