When my henna teacher and I arrived at the Arts Festival Convention Center we knew at once something was off.

 
Our knowledge came in the form of an old woman in a pink leotard. Around her waist flagged a once bouncing tutu, on her back, two wings like shiny, pressed penises. Around her head twined a crown made of iridescent streamers and those metallic stars small children in the East wind around wire to delight small children in the West.

 
She pranced towards us at a frenzied pace. I was starting to back out the exit when she leapt directly at me an boffed me upside the head with her wand. It showered us in glitter. “BLESSINGS!” she trilled.

 
My teacher was too quick for her and they did a couple ‘shall-we-dance’ moves before the old woman’s eyes narrowed, she switched fists, and with uncanny speed and another cloud of glitter, struck her foe in the forehead. “BLESSINGS!”

It was New Age Convention.

 
There was a copper wire sauna which aligned your ‘magnetism’ near racks of zero point energy wands. You waved these over wounds.

 
There were masseurs who massaged the air, crystal merchants and energy healers, Tibetan flags but no Tibetans.

 
There were acupuncturists and Midwestern Shamans with names like, Shanti, Shakti and Rune. There were phalluses made out of hematite.

 
There were the distillations of some things which then became no-things but which were regarded as everything.

 
There were aura cameras, aura candles, aura capsules and people cleaning other people’s auras with little snippy finger movements like full body, hair-dressing mimes.

 
There were dream-catchers which could have caught hobbits.

 
There were no Henna booths, but there WERE several tattooed dudes wandering around in fatigues and jack boots. They had hunting hats or camouflage and a barrage of t-shirts featuring deciduous mega fauna and the quotes of patriots.

 
My favorite was on a short, fat kid holding a pan flute. It read, “I’ll give up my gun, when when they pry it from my cold, dead fingers!”

 
By a brilliant stroke of luck, The New Age Convention was right next door to the Annual Gun Show.

 
I saw the BLESSINGS Fairy skipping toward the gunmen. I wondered, not without a certain macabre glee, who would take the first shot.

Dah!

So I got back from the nicest place in the world!

And then I got sick. But still had to work 12 hour shifts. So I was like this:

Remember when you were four-years-old ‘coloring in the lines’ and thinking, Wow, maybe when I grow up there’ll be a magical job where all I get to do is draw all day? There is.

It’s called Advertising.

It will suck all the magic from your milkshake through a long long straw.

And then it will point at you and laugh because you have no healthcare.

Okay, I do, but the incredible old guys I work with don’t. One of them recently crooked a Cassandran finger at me and wheezed, ‘Get outta this business, before it’s too late.”

They’re the real Mad Men. They drew the Camel ads and can cuss like it’s an endangered language:

“Mother-fuckin’ shiney-hineyed, blaze-ball, fuck-tarded myopic fuckin’ aht-director can’t draw for SHIT, sends me this fuck-all lookin’ barcalounger, what the FUCK? Who’d put their ass on this? I’d wipe my ass on it. Relaxing? Only thing I’d relax into this piece’a shit is my bowels. Garbage!”

I love them.

We play Ennio Morricone when shit goes down.

Incomparable company, but coloring in the lines for 144 hours? Terrible, my weasels, terrible.

You can literally feel the liquefaction of your active mind. Then you stew in what was left of it while your little stylus jerks back and forth. After a time, your old mind kind of collapses into your heels and the tops of your shoulder blades like a damp mummy in a warm rain. After three weeks of non-stop painting other people’s pencils you are a resentful shell of a human being, wishing only to apply for a career in entomology so you can understand how to best make use of your new exoskeleton.

Also, because bugs are way more interesting than Adobe Suite.

A while back, when I admitted to a coworker that my soul was dying, he was fiddling with a Swiffer mop we’d just used in a television spot. He was sticking it to the carpet and ripping it up over and over again. The Velcro base of the mop-head would make a satisfying squetcha noise each time it parted from the ground.

I fell off the Blog-Horse.

I’m sorry.

Let me tell you about how amazing Thailand is.

It is soooooo amazing. Like ’3 hour massage’ amazing.

There are waves and sunshine and long-tailed boats and crazy, love-starved cats with broken tails and sand in their noses.

There are wild trees and rubber groves, and kind-hearted hostesses and mango and sticky rice and curries that will make you weep with pain and love and all things holy.

There is a restaurant called, Cabbages & Condoms and you should go.

There are MTV movie beaches and lonesome roads, and roving monkeys, and mad flower blossoms and the smell of jasmine. There are entire hotel walls which can be pushed aside to access king-sized cloud beds from bubble baths in which you may or may not be drinking wine with your lover.

Also, this:

No really. There are enormous, endless shopping malls connected by a series of refrigerated tubes (like the internet) which extend through central Bangkok in descending order of class. Underneath the Middle-Class food court is Sea World.

It’s like a Tolkienian Mid-World for orcas.

I shit you not. It boasts the biggest wave pool in history.

Also the people are really nice. I mean reaaally nice. They don’t even have a word for, ‘No.’ They just say, ‘Not yes.’

I cannot recommend Thailand enough.