Yeah, okay, I’ve been remiss and downright derelict in tending to my membership for this blog lately, and I do have an excuse. About ten days ago, I got this phone call. Normally, I ignore anything not in my contacts list, but modern phones are smart enough to flag the origin, and this one was coming from the Philippines. It just so happened I was expecting it, so I picked up. It was mid-afternoon here in Thailand, and sure enough, it was exactly who I thought it’d be. Turns out, something I’d been grinding away on for the last five or six months had reached the point where I needed to show up in person—and I had only a few days to make it happen.

It was a crazy-ass trip, but I’m back now. What I’m going to do here is give my members a whirlwind recounting of the whole thing, since I’ve neglected them the most—and hell, they pay me. No more bullshit preamble. I’ll lay it out like this: a blow-by-blow of what went down, including the less-than-ideal arrangements I had to scramble together (spoiler: the flights sucked). Then, how I got there, handled the business, and took in a ton of observations—it’s been a year and a half since I was last in the Philippines, and it felt strange as fuck. I’ll contrast that with what I’ve seen in Thailand since its recovery from the COVID shitshow, and wrap it up with my take on the widening gulf between the two countries in this post-COVID world. I’ve been chewing on all this since I got back, and it’s only deepened my satisfaction that I’ve picked the right spot to plant my ass in this later stage of life.

Now, how does any of this apply to you—an American dude grinding away in a cubicle or some soul-sucking office? Well, there are a million places you could fuck off to in this world; I’ve hit a bunch as a traveler. But there’s something about Thailand that’s pretty damn chill, and I’ll break that down too. Okay, here we go. It’s a long story.