Mostly what I’ve done over the last few months, as I’ve been working daily on building out what I loosely call a homestead here in rural Thailand, is shoot short little videos. I typically upload them to X and YouTube, but I’m not trying to make a splash on either channel. This blog remains my home base, where the real content lives. It’s been that way for 23 years or so. If you want to check out the videos anyway, here’s a link to my X profile and here’s a link to my YouTube channel. Scroll through and watch whatever catches your eye.

I’m not embedding videos here much anymore. A lot of people—and rightly so—just can’t be bothered with videos, even short ones. I count myself among them. It takes real effort for me to sit through a video or even a clip. If I want to watch moving images, I’ll put on a movie or a TV series. Somebody blabbing on about whatever, telling me what I already know or preaching to the choir, does not interest me. Still photos, on the other hand, are quick and everyone likes them.

So in this post I’m just tossing up a bunch of very recent still photos with some commentary, all from the last few days at most. Here we go.

The Man Cave Build

The sort of funny part—or the actual funny part—of this is the second story man cave build I’ve been at for a month or so, maybe closer to two. The bottom two photos show the extent of it, looking toward the space and looking outward from the patio. That area to the left and right in front will have glass doors and solid glass panels, but there’s that little side bit off to the right where you see the enclave, and then there’s gonna be a men’s urinal.

The backstory there is that my gal came up with that. She told the workers to do it. I had no idea until yesterday. At first I said no, no, I’ll just walk down the stairs—there’s a full toilet off the kitchen. She said no. She said she knows damn well I’ll be pissing off the balcony at night, and she doesn’t want me walking up and down those stairs all the time either. So she took it upon herself to have them build me a little enclave with a urinal that’ll probably be done tomorrow once the plumbing’s in.

That’s what my gal did for me. I said I’d just use the stairs, and she said fuck that—I’m not having you traipse up and down them or pissing off the edge. Her solution was better.

Her reasoning was totally Thai woman. If someone should see me pissing off the balcony, villagers, especially women, will go at her. “Why didn’t you make some place for Richard to pee?” She’d get blamed. Men, wouldn’t you love to live in a place like that?

The Kitchen Build

Well, because there were some constraints in finishing up my man cave build—the second story of this building—we pivoted and started building out the kitchen in the interim. I’ve done a couple of videos showing how they do kitchen cabinets in Thailand. It’s completely foreign to Americans, and maybe even to Europeans, later than a few hundred years ago. Here, they build cabinets out of concrete and tile so it’s everlasting. They build it the classic way so you never find yourself saying, “We need to remodel the kitchen.” You build it right the first time.

You can look at kitchens with countertops and all the rest from old European homes hundreds of years old and think, “Are you kidding? Remodel the kitchen? It’s perfect as it is.” This is all built with concrete block, mortar, and tile. The cabinet doors are just simple wood frames and doors inset into spaces of the concrete, block, and mortar. It’s totally fine and it will forever be fine.

Think about the American attitude of installing stylish kitchen cabinetry from the ’60s or ’70s, all the colors and wood finishes they used because “style.” By the ’80s and ’90s, and certainly by now, it’s laughable how awful it all looks. You avoid that trap in Thailand.

There’s another aspect to this, and that’s the workers wearing shower shoes. The backstory is that I have a friend for a long time named Mountain Evan Chang. He created a line of shoes called The Primal Professional, which I’ve reviewed twice on this blog. Out of the blue the other day he reached out to exchange a few words about a political post I’d written. I hadn’t heard from Mountain in several years. I asked how the shoe business was going. He’d had a rough time during COVID just like everyone else—COVID destroyed my business too—but he was able to salvage his. In the meantime he’s come out with a minimalist shoe that actually has steel toe protection for workmen, and it took off. He says it’s his best seller now.

So he was saying, “Since you live in Thailand, maybe I’ll come up with a worker shoe for tropical conditions, and you can review it.” My response was, “Knock yourself out, but the official working shoe in Thailand is basically flip-flops.” I told him I’d give him evidence. There you have it.

Wish I had photos of them climbing and working on scaffolding while metal-framing the structure while barefoot.

… Mini rant: as many know, my enthusiasm for minimalist shoes and barefooting goes back a long way—perhaps to when I saw Sisson sprint on the beach in Vibrams. I did not take to Vibrams, nor any other shoe that puts toes in a glove. I just can’t.

Instead, I just went all the way to barefooting and walked thousands of miles over years with zero protection, even on rocky roads. I liked Mountain’s take, because you can’t exactly attend business meetings barefoot unless you’re Steve Jobs. I have two pairs of The Primal Professional, black and brown. In storage USA. I wear 99% flip-flops here; or, barefoot.

The Food

I don’t really know what to say about the food pics, and maybe saying too much detracts from just looking at them. There’s quite a variety, but lately I’ve been simplifying things. You could boil it down to basically meat, eggs, and whole milk. That’s most of it.

It’s not that I don’t eat any Thai food. I do, including rice. It’s just not that common. The only thing you’ll see on any regular basis are those plates of chopped-up pork. I pretty much eat that every day. Barbecue pork. Slice it up and eat it.

Remember that whole milk is the superfood of mammals, and it’s the only superfood. Everyone who claims there’s a superfood that grows in plants is a charlatan and a fraud. Same with whole eggs. That’s the superfood of birds and reptiles. People who eat lots of plants don’t even come close to the whole nutrition I get by drinking quite a bit of whole milk, eating a number of eggs, and of course the meat—red meat, pork, fish, shellfish, even garden snails. I don’t eat much chicken anymore. My preferred way is just to have chicken soup. That’s fine. Boil it up and I’ll eat it. There are a couple of other dishes, but otherwise I just don’t care for chicken that much. It’s the least nutritious of all meats and an ugly stepsister compared to beef. It’s basically moron food for those touting it above red meat.

My favorite thing about the grilled pork sliced up is that it’s perfect for sitting in front of my computer just picking at it, or watching movies and TV series.

Closing

A couple of random ones to close. We took out a couple of large mango trees a few days back. Trunks are more than a foot in diameter. Once they dry, Far is going to show me how to make charcoal.

When I asked her about it, she asked, “you’re a man, and you don’t know how to make charcoal?”

I busted a gut. She said it like one guy would say to another back in the 70s. “You don’t know how to change a flat tire or do an oil change?” (By the 2000s, few pussy boys knew either.).

Thai construction—which is all concrete, block, steel, tile, and glass (nearly zero wood…only for decorative, furniture, trim, and interior doors…zero structural)—uses lots of sheet metal for various things, typically affixed to metal framing.

We visited a shop today, 2 or 3 km from the homestead, to pick some up for that pop-up door for the big kitchen window. See all the rolls in the upper left. Gave specifications, and they cut and then formed it with corrugation. About 10 bucks.

That’s about it.