BANGKOK, THAILAND, July 21, 2023 — Okay, my plans weren’t that well-laid to begin with. Instead, exactly one month ago I set off on an 8-week pilgrimage to Thailand and its neighbors with just a handful of vague ideas about the purpose of my journey.
Broadly speaking, I believed that my purpose was to determine whether the writing of an interesting sentence (or poem, or story, or novel) was an ability that I still possessed.
Unspoken, yet equally critical, was the related question of whether, after an approximately 40 year hiatus since I had last seriously exercised it, I still had any desire to make use of that ability.
My hope at the outset was that the answer to both those questions would be positive, and that I would return to the USA in mid-August with at least the start of a manuscript demonstrating that outcome.
I had a few possibilities in mind for a topic. I had lately become fascinated by a account of John le Carré bribing a revolutionary army cadre to sneak him into the center of the Golden Triangle during an armed rebellion in the 1970s. I thought in my travels I might encounter enough material related to that time to inspire a fictionalized novel about le Carré’s adventure.
Failing that, perhaps 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 wouldn’t be too meta, would it?
Then again, I had to also consider the possibility that I might find myself re-enacting 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 be a suboptimal outcome.
What actually happened though was something altogether different and far more fearsome: Age, and its evil cousin Mortality, crashed my party and demanded all of my attention.
Here’s what happened. Within hours of landing in Chiang Mai on June 21, some minor lower back and leg issues that I’d been ignoring while home in Austin burst out 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, and bilateral cramps and stabbing pains up and down both legs.
I can’t imagine that back pain is ever not annoying, but my symptoms were loaded down with extra chagrin because, after limping across Europe and Asia last 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 stab me in the back 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 laid 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 the next few weeks popping Tylenol and CBD, and visiting one acupuncture clinic after another until finally I ventured into a hospital for a CAT scan which revealed the three collapsed discs in my lower back that required surgical repair.
Ugh. Time to fly home. Nothing accomplished.
For the rest of the story, including our protagonist’s Phoenix-like recovery, see Best Laid Plans part two.
