Bangkok, Thailand, July 21, 2023 — To be honest, my plans weren’t that well-laid to begin with. In June of 2023, I set off on an eight-week pilgrimage to Thailand and its neighbors with just a few vague ideas about the purpose of my journey.
Broadly speaking, I believed my purpose was to determine whether the writing of an interesting sentence—or poem, or story, or novel—was an ability I still possessed.
Unspoken, yet equally critical, was the related question of whether, after an approximately forty-year hiatus since I had last seriously exercised it, I still had a real desire to make use of that ability.
My intent at the outset was to answer both questions by returning to the USA in mid-August with a manuscript in hand demonstrating my success.
What’s Your Book About?
I had lately become fascinated by an account of John le Carré bribing a revolutionary army cadre to sneak him from Chiang Mai into the heart of the Golden Triangle during an armed rebellion in the 1970s. By recreating that journey, I thought I might encounter enough material to inspire a novel loosely based on le Carré’s adventure.
Failing that, I imagined I could come up with the makings of a novel about a one-time writer trying to rekindle his long-inactive talents while chasing down shadowy stories about a favorite author’s past. That sounded like fun, if a bit too meta.
I also had to consider the possibility of a third, less desirable scenario: that I might find myself reenacting Martin Sheen’s role from the opening scene of Apocalypse Now, practicing Tai Chi in my underwear and burning up in an existential fever with no manuscript in sight. Definitely a realistic, if suboptimal, possibility.
What Really Happened?
What actually happened was altogether different from anything I had imagined, and far more fearsome than even the Martin Sheen scenario. Age, and its evil cousin Mortality, crashed the party and demanded all my attention.
Here’s how it unfolded: Within hours of my arrival in Chiang Mai on June 21, some minor lower back and leg issues I’d been ignoring while home in Austin burst into a full-blown case of what I thought was sciatica, complete with the characteristic blinding spasms of pain in my lower back and buttocks, bilateral leg cramps, and stabbing pain up and down both legs.
I can’t imagine that back pain is ever not annoying, but my symptoms were loaded down with an extra helping of chagrin because, after limping across Europe and Asia the previous year with a variety of foot, ankle, calf, knee, and shoulder injuries, I had spent months in Austin working on clearing them all up, only to have my spine betray me before I’d even enjoyed one stroll across town.
The pain forced me to admit the existence of an additional, subconscious motivation behind my journey: the opportunity to regain my youth. I wanted nothing less than to pick up where I left off forty years ago, with the same ambitions I had at twenty-seven: to create important work, to travel the world freely, to revel in the possibility of literally anything happening on any day, and to find peace in my own skin. But instead, I spent weeks popping Tylenol and CBD supplements and visiting one acupuncture clinic after another, until finally I ventured into a hospital, where the sight of three fully collapsed spinal disks on a CAT scan convinced me that traditional Thai medicine wasn’t going to fix me. I needed surgery.
It was time to fly home and face the music. With nothing accomplished, nothing written, and none of my questions answered. Ugh.
For the rest of the story, including our protagonist’s phoenix-like recovery, see Best Laid Plans, Part 2.
