Today I had an amusing conversation with my fellow teachers here. Maybe it shouldn’t have been amusing, but it was, and highly revealing as well. Along with two other teachers, I live in a three-story apartment complex that is about five minutes or so by foot away from the school where we all teach, Legacy Institute. Apparently yesterday morning, early in the morning, one of the dogs was barking its head off and it woke one of my fellow teachers (it may have woken me up too; I didn’t sleep well that night either). The other teacher then piped in that the dog was barking loudly because some drunk guy had fallen asleep along the wall where a lot of our town’s stray dogs hang out around the market, which is very close to where we all live.
You don’t want to be known as the town drunk of Ban Mae Sa Luang. It’s almost in the same league as being the town drunk of Tampa. Ban Mae Sa Luang is a small village, but large enough to have several karaoke bars that are open late at night to people singing badly and drinking voluminously. Meeting drunk people is a very frequent occurrence, and I’d say it happens about as often as not when I am walking to my apartment fairly late at night (generally around 10PM) that I meet someone who drunkenly tries to start a conversation, or cheers the sight of a farang [westerner] walking down the road. To put it mildly, there are a fair amount of drunks here.
What it takes to be the town drunk of Ban Mae Sa Luang is to take your dedicating to hitting the bottle to more than usual levels. Falling asleep next to a wall would qualify. So would attempting to follow me upstairs because you couldn’t remember where you lived (that happened to me last night–fortunately drunk people aren’t very fast so I was able to zip up the stairs quickly). Additionally, one gets bonus points for being drunken very early in the day. There is one drunk fellow who I normally pass by in the early afternoon when I am taking my constitutional along the village roads, and one of my fellow teachers saw him drunk at 11:00AM on the footpath of the clinic across the street. That is dedication to drunkenness.
At that point, I started singing Amy Winehouse’s song “Rehab,” because a person in that sad state needs an intervention [1]. Really, if you’re staggering around without a sense of balance because of drink at 11AM, you have some serious issues in your life. What is it that would make one drink as soon as one got up? How is such a person getting the means to drink that much? What a sad waste of life it is to be known as the town drunk in a village with no shortage of drinking. Life is worth more than that, and it’s very sad when people seek the escape of drunkenness because they have nothing in their life that they can handle sober.
Edge Induced Cohesion 