othing like a small dose of adversity to fortify one's character, I always say. Rather, that is what I used to always say.

Midway through last week, I realized what a damn fool I was for saying such a thing at all, let alone always.

Adversity may be the spice of life for some people, but I don't want any more red-hot chilies tossed into my bowl of cherries. All future adversity still in reserve for the fortification of my character is to be held for future reincarnations. Thank you very much.

          Things started going awry last Sunday and just got worse. To begin with, I didn't wake up until half past noon, which left me a mere forty-five minutes to pack luggage and catch a flight to Bangkok. It was at the outset of a long-anticipated vacation that I'd managed to get uncorked the previous evening by drinking several bottles of brownish laboratory alcohol with a few friends of mine at a joint called Rocky's over on Lamai Beach.

By a strong display of determination, I succeeded in extricating myself from the wanton clutches of two bargirls, waved off the continuing enticements of my ne'er-do-well companions, and began the late-night motorbike slalom home—zigzagging around fallen coconuts, dead dogs, and stray buffaloes.

I collapsed in the general vicinity of my bed, still assuming there'd be no problem waking up sometime Sunday morning. Hell, I thought, Jesus woke up Sunday morning and he'd been dead for two days.

          As it was, I arrived at the charming Koh Samui airport just as my flight was taxiing down the runway. Never in my life have I been on time for a flight that left on time, nor have I ever been a minute late for a flight that didn't leave on time.

Had I been thinking clearly, I would have called it a day and gone back to bed. But, I wasn't thinking clearly, and the reason was because of a fair ration of romance scheduled for my embrace on a small Greek island off the West Coast of Turkey. Of course, there was also a fair ration of alcohol poison cascading through the capillaries of my whiskey-sodden brain. 

I got on another flight—which, in retrospect, I refuse to consider a stroke of good fortune—and checked into an inn on Sukhumvit Road around sunset. After a shower and a room-service cheeseburger with french fries, I placed a person-to-person call to Irena, my ration of romance in Rotterdam. The purpose of the call being to confirm that my darling had secured transport to Greece and would be there to meet me six days hence.

What the call revealed was that my Dutch darling had opted to secure a new boyfriend instead.

          I'd been dumped, damn it. Cast adrift from the vessel of her affections. Tossed overboard and hung out to dry . . . trailing mixed metaphors in the wake of my shattered dreams. Another coxswain has taken my place upon the bridge. Clearly there was something rotten in Rotterdam.

    We'd fallen in love with each other six months previously while she was on holiday in Samui. (For the sake of anonymity, let's call the bitch, Jezebel.) So anyway, Irena had just finished a year working with retarded children in Katmandu and was on her way back to Holland.

   I liked her because she was beautiful and had a delightfully whimsical sense of humor. She liked me because I made her laugh and . . . and, well, I suppose because I represented a point of facile transition between retarded Himalayan children and the soggy lowlands of conventionally sane adults.

   We had such fun together. Didn't we? Frolicking naked in the bay at sunset, sharing candle-lit dinners on my verandah, hearkening to the sweet symphony of nature around us, and sharing the same toothbrush. My God, it must have been love.

    After she returned to Rottingdam, we wrote regularly to each other. The letters were brimming with fervor and yearning. It was agreed that come September we would rendezvous in Greece, and spend at least a month fueling our passions with ouzo and exchanging bodily fluids with reckless abandon. Now, I'm sad and angry and disappointed, and she's happy as a lark—and that just makes me more sad and angry and disappointed. You'd think she would have had the decency to wait until I'd fallen in love with someone else before dumping me. How rude can you get? The heartless hussy.

     Then that little inner voice of reason whispered, "It's all behind you now. So, forget about it and move on with your life."

    That was how my week began. I'd missed my flight and lost my girlfriend, and it wasn't even Monday yet.

   You start thinking, what are my little problems compared to the suffering masses of humanity?

   Then you start thinking, hey, wait a minute. Does that mean my problems aren't worthy of anybody's concern?

The answer is, "yes.”

The answer is, "no.”

   I considered this quandary for a while until I decided to sidle out of bed, slap off the TV, vacate the cocoon of my room, and slide onto a barstool in the “real world” of an other-worldly place called Nana Plaza.

  Nana Entertainment Plaza, as it is officially known, is right up the street from the inn. It's also right down the sewer as far as most Christian morality is concerned; an amusement arcade for drunken lust-aholic characters who may have recently been dumped by their darlings in Rottingdam.

    I found a parking spot on a cushioned barstool at a go-go joint called Voodoo and ordered myself a Johnnie Walker Black and soda. Then I found myself listening to a Hare Krishna devotee from San Francisco talking about the illusions of Maya that were dancing naked upon the flashing, strobe-lit stage.

   They seemed pretty real to me—especially when number seventeen squatted down and attempted to conjoin one of her concavities with one of my convexities.

   "Don't be deceived my friend," intoned the Krishna man. "What you see are only illusions. Illusions of wickedness and evil. Maya is a crafty sorcerer."

    "So join the crowd, pal. What guy wouldn't want to bear witness to a bevy of pretty girls baring their bodies?"

    "It's the power of illusion that I'm bearing witness to. Krishna consciousness strives to encompass the whole of existence; both earthly and transcendental."

    "How would you like to encompass number seventeen?"

    "I see. How about another Black soda?"

    "I'd like one very much. Thank you my friend…. Tomorrow I'm off to India. I'll be sojourning with my master at his ashram outside of Delhi—the birthplace of Krishna. Three months of fasting and chanting."

    "Well, one more Black soda, and then, as I said, number seventeen does seem lovely."

    "Well, what's a little more grime if you're about to spend the next three months at a spiritual laundromat, eh?"

    "We're all sinners, my friend. The first step on the path of salvation is to understand that truth. Krishna loves us all."

    On that comforting note the two of us drained our glasses of Black soda and went our separate ways.

    Tuesday afternoon I waited around for them to return my calls, and Tuesday night I got drunk with the only person who did. Nice guy, good writer, fun-time drinker, and the world's worst singing guitar player.

    Wednesday it rained. At some point during the deluge I invited a couple of young ladies back to my room for drinks, and the next thing I remember the chambermaids were knocking on my door wanting to clean up the room.

It was dark outside and I thought, What the hell’s the big hurry to clean up my room at five in the morning? Then I realized it was 7:30 Thursday evening.

The girls were gone. I'd been drugged and in a coma for nearly twenty-four hours. Then I realized all the money withdrawn for my trip to Greece was gone. Then I realized my passport was gone, my favorite—albeit only—sweater was gone, and lastly I gradually began to realize what a complete bonehead I was.

     I called the local constabulary. This was necessary only in order to obtain an official police report that the embassy requires before they'll issue a new passport. There was never any hope that the police would solve the crime and return the money. They might, however, solve the crime.

     After visiting the station and the nearby hospital, I walked in the rain back to the inn, and expressed a facetious remark to the manager regarding his security personnel—which he thought was funny. I thereupon, trundled up to my room, mixed a Black soda, and ordered a room-service cheeseburger with french fries.

Friday I went to the American Embassy.

   "Your passport was stolen…?"

   "Well, you see . . . I . . . well, I mean . . ."

   "So you brought two prostitutes to your room…."

   "Not really. I didn't think they were prostitutes. It was raining out and they seemed very nice so I thought I'd . . . I mean . . .”

   "Two no doubt provocatively-dressed young Thai women standing in the rain outside of a nice hotel known to be frequented by male tourists…. Who did you think they were…?”  

   "Listen. All I want is a new passport, so let's pretend you're an employee of the US embassy and not St. Peter standing guard at the gates of heaven…."

    "We get your sort all the time. Forgive us if our sympathy is a bit thin."

    "Yeah, well your sympathy is emaciated, but how about a new passport? I'm scheduled on a flight to Athens tomorrow night."

    "Greece or Georgia?"

    "Don't mind at all. Been to Greece several times myself. You like the girls there too?"

    "Not so good looking, are they?"

    "Ever seen a Greek pin-up calendar?"

    "Because there aren't twelve good-looking girls in all of Greece, that's why."

    "Please, I need a new passport."

    "Nearly impossible to do in one day. Have a seat, we'll do what we can."

    So I had a seat. In fact, I had several seats. The one at the American Embassy I had for five hours. Then I had a seat in Lumpini Park waiting for my passport photos to develop. Next was a seat at the bank—which I occupied for two hours while awaiting a wire transfer of more money. When that arrived I paid sixty bucks for the new passport and headed over to the Thai immigration office for the necessary visa.

    It’s not always a good idea to have a seat when dealing with government employees. They may forget that you're there, or they may figure that since you're sitting down, then whatever it is that you're there for probably isn't very important or is already being attended to. In either case, sitting down makes it easier for them to ignore you. Consequently, I adopted the tactic of pacing back and forth across the tiles while trying to convince them that I'd been in Thailand for over a year and that the first character of my new passport number was a Z and not a 2.

    At sunset I took a seat at an outside bar back in Nana Plaza called Lucky Luke's. I wanted a drink and I wanted to meet somebody who was lucky. Nobody at the bar knew a guy named Luke, or even why the place was called Lucky Luke's. Nevertheless, I sat there anyway drinking cold bottles of beer until somebody took my stool, put it upside-down on top of the bar, and asked me to kindly leave the premises.

Noon Saturday began a lunch date with one of my favorite authors who writes humorously about the trials and tribulations of being a foreign resident of Thailand. He likes my writing and I like his. In fact, by four that afternoon we were both of a mind to nominate each other for next year's Nobel Prize in Literature.

By six in the evening we were vying for the Peace Prize as well. However, after considering the character and deeds of some previous recipients such as Kissinger, Begin, and Arafat, we decided the award might tarnish our reputations. The money would have been nice though.

     By midnight Saturday I was airborne for Athens. Greece, not Georgia.

     Greece, the cradle of Western civilization. Athens, a scrap heap of historical debris.

     From Athens to the island of Samos, on a forty-minute flight that was five hours late departing. And from Samos to Patmos—where I finally arrived after cracking a molar eating a grilled cheese sandwich on the ferry.

     Yes, it does seem incredible that you could sub-divide a molar while munching on a grilled cheese sandwich, but given the time difference between Thailand and Greece, the crack occurred exactly one week, by Greenwich Mean Time, following the phone conversation with my erstwhile ration of romance in Rottingdam.

      The week ending with the cracked tooth had been a mean time indeed. Please, no more adversity for me. 

 Excerpt from: Out of the Loop

         e-book via Amazon