Wat Phra That Doi Suthep is considered Chiang Mai’s most important temple, founded in 1383 by the Lanna kingdom. Hang on, because its origin story is… special.

The official story is that a monk named Sumanathera had a dream that led him to a location where he found a bone. Given that said bone exhibited magical powers (it glowed, it could vanish, it could move…) it was naturally deemed to be the shoulder bone of none other than Buddha himself.

A local king heard of it and demanded the monk bring it to him. On inspection, the magical bone played possum, and the king, seeing nothing but a random bone, passed. Another, presumably better king got a look, and the bone did its thing. Which thing involved breaking into two pieces. The king enshrined one in Wat Suan Dok, and placed the other, larger chunk of Buddha on the back of his prized white elephant which he set loose in the jungle.

The elephant wandered about, climbed Doi Suthep mountain, then called, appropriately, Doi Aoy Chang (Sugar Elephant Mountain). He looked around, trumpeted three times, and keeled over dead. Thus selecting Doi Suthep as the location to build the temple and the shrine to hold the Holy Shoulder Bone.

Still with me? Good. I knew you could do it. I believe in you.

Before we actually made it to Wat Phra That Doi Suthep, commonly referred to as simply Wat Doi Suthep (Phra That literally means Buddha relic), we had a stop for a pre-prayer. This was a roadside shrine to a famous monk who died in 1939. I offered a lotus flower whose petals I had folded myself into the appropriately respectful shape, a cluster of marigolds, incense, a candle, and a piece of gold leaf that I applied to the monk’s statue. It was quite the kit. Once our monk had been properly propitiated we were safe to move on to the temple itself.

I realize that I’ve failed to introduce our dramatis personae. My guide was Maggie and my driver was Mr. K. Thai names are typically ponderous aggregations, not unlike German portmanteaux, so everyone has chosen Anglicized nicknames. Maggie’s full name on WhatsApp is Margaret Maggie Rose. Sure it is. It’s not liked I asked to see her ID.

But the most salient feature of this tour, which I’d booked on GetYourGuide just the previous evening, is that Maggie and Mr. K were the only personae. I was the sole member of their group tour, and had them all to myself. Which was excellent, as the pacing and focus were 100% to my preference. It was, in all practical senses, a private tour.

The juicy temple bits are aloft, and there are two ways to get to the top of the mountain. A stairway of 309 steps, boasting the longest Naga balustrade in Thailand, or a funicular for an extra 50฿. Happy to walk down 309 steps, but it was the funicular to go up. Maggie was relieved.

Until about 30 years ago, the alternative to the 309 steps was a basket system that involved pulleys and ropes. The funicular was built after that arrangement failed, leading to multiple deaths. If you do make the ascent by steps, you’re rewarded with a statue of the famous white elephant. I saw him at the top of the stairs on the way down, but he’s your greeter if you’re coming up.

While Wat Soi Duthep has all of the expected accoutrements of a Buddhist temple, the highlight, and the reason it’s so famous and revered, is the massive stupa holding the Buddha Bone ™. It’s the OG stupa, dating all the way back to the construction of 1383, with a fresh coat of gold to keep it looking sharp.

The plaza surrounding the Golden Stupa (which sounds like a prize from a Buddhist Willy Wonka) is just as gilt and spectacular as the stupa itself, home as it is to so very many golden Buddhas. Maggie explained that the aspirationally holy are supposed to make three counterclockwise trips around the plaza, circling the stupa. After a single circuit my eyes were swirly, so we deemed it holy enough.

The plaza with the Golden Stupa was hardly the last word in Wat Doi Suthep’s splendors. This was probably the finest Thai temple I visited, and well worth the trip. Exemplary.

The back end of the day’s tour was a visit to San Kamphaeng, a town known for its high-end craft factories. You can read about that part of the tour here. But before we got there, we stopped for lunch at a restaurant with delightful grounds.

All About Me!

When I was consulting, an Indian colleague and I had a gig that lasted almost two years. So long that it was cheaper to pay for my hotel room by the month than four days every week around weekends at home. It was great. I had the hotel remove furniture I didn’t need. I went to Ikea to decorate. I set up a more robust liquor cabinet than could possibly be arranged for multiple short-term stays. I had my dry cleaning and laundry done there, so all I traveled with was a briefcase and my laptop.

But this idyllic arrangement had one notable downside. The hotel employed a greeter, a woman who patrolled the lobby in order to be helpful to guests. Because we were long-term regulars she knew us. And boy, did we know her. We knew the names and ages of her children, all their salient illnesses and achievements, her political beliefs, and what neighborhood she lived in. It got to the point that we dreaded crossing the lobby.

When we returned to the hotel from work we’d peer around the corner to see if she was occupied so we could cross to the elevator without getting buttonholed. One day we were scoping the lobby and saw her deep in conversation with a fresh victim. My colleague turned to me and said, “It is safe to walk near the tiger if it is already feeding.” So very true.

The thing about most tourists is that they love getting pictures of themselves at whatever monument or landmark they’re visiting. Proof, I suppose. And the thing about tour guides is they know this, so they’re constantly taking pictures of people with their phones. Often, if the spot is Gram-friendly, they’ll line up for their pictures. It’s easy to dance past without getting snared. The tiger is feeding.

In this circumstance, though, on what had become a solo tour, I was all there was for the tiger to feed on. There was no getting around it. Pictures would be taken. And so I offer you, who have so often scolded us for not taking pictures of ourselves, an entire gallery of Me. Under the general rubric of Be careful what you wish for. Especially considering that these are the highlights of almost 100 pictures she took. This is the cream. Sad.

Captain All-Thumbs

I’m Marc-Fucking-Bolan, y’all!

Hey, hey, it’s a monk!

Well, I love that holy water. [Oh Boston, you’re my home.]

My Life In The Ghost Of Bush

As some of you know, and most of you probably don’t, I was, briefly, a pornographer. I’d started a graphic design firm with DC Comics’ Director of Design after leaving DC, but after multiple years it clearly wasn’t going to turn the corner so I moved on. To… nothing? I didn’t really have a post-Brainstorm plan, except that I needed a job.

Back in them days, we found jobs through newspapers, and the Times classifieds offered up an editorial position. I’d been an editor. I could do that. I called and set up an appointment. The ad had mentioned Adult, but I didn’t honestly have a clear conception of what that meant. Editing the next Fanny Hill?

Not quite. It meant picking up the editorial reins at Hawk, the title in High Society‘s stable devoted to the dewiest of legally photographable models. Which was funny, because we had a weekly editorial meeting where the editors of all the different magazines got together to share submissions they’d received from photographers to determine which of the mags, if any, was a fitting home.

We’d pass around one set of photos at a time, and inevitably just as I said, “She’s kinda hot,” someone else chimed in with, “Too old.” The joke was that they should start an over-40 magazine for me, and how sad that I’d been stuck with Hawk.

But Hawk it was, and I’d picked up an issue that was only partially completed when I started, so I had to finish it up. I maintained the previous editor’s nom du porn, as I quickly intuited how much our readers valued continuity. Henceforth, I was professionally known as Alphonse Romano.

I lasted not quite three months, and thus had one issue that had been completely produced under my version of Alphonse. I was very proud of that issue. For those curious, which is asymptotically approaching none of you, my job consisted of picking photo sets, choosing the pictures that we’d use for publication, and writing the copy that went alongside those photos.

The copywriting was my specialty. I couldn’t manufacture erotic prose to save my life, but I was the king of tortured metaphor. Another magazine’s editor came to me once desperate for help. He was on deadline to close his book for press and he had nothing to publish in the Letters to the Editor section. He said he needed one on Topic A, one on Topic B, and another that he didn’t care about. He specified word count and begged me for help.

About fifteen minutes later I gave him three letters. He looked them over with a puzzled expression. “These are all good. I can use all of them. Did you just write these now?” “Is it supposed to take longer?” And that was that. I was unofficial ghostwriter for every magazine in the stable.

I know some of you will be shocked, shocked, to learn that the letters to the editor weren’t from actual readers. I want to assure you that Hawk had higher editorial standards than that. For my one and only issue I had three letters from actual readers, more or less copyedited, as circumstance dictated.

Was I concerned that 100% of Hawk‘s letters to the editor came in envelopes that featured stamps on the outside reading, “The Warden has reviewed the contents of this letter and approved it for release”? Maybe a little, but at least it gave me a clear picture of our market. It did make me wonder, given what I received, what didn’t make the Warden’s cut.

I proudly took the letters to the publisher, who, without reading them, pointed to the longest one and said, “Too long. Cut it in half.” Which I did, of course, albeit grudgingly. But I now had to manufacture a fourth letter from scratch to fill the void, as the three letters I’d chosen were the only ones I’d received that could be massaged into publishable form. It became a parlor game at our house. When we had new friends over I’d hand them my issue of Hawk and ask them to guess which of the letters I’d written. We never had prizes for correct answers, which seems wrong in retrospect.

The copywriting became a push-your-luck game for me. I wanted to find the line they wouldn’t cross, for sport, so I kept pushing the boundaries, writing more and more outlandish nonsense, praying for something to be rejected. Just so I’d know. As it happened, I only ever got one line of copy sent back. There was a feature in Hawk that I, of course, maintained. It was a double-page spread of a brownstone’s windows, alluringly titled Hawk’s Rear Window.

I took promotional stills from porn videos that had been sent to us and dropped them into the window frames, like we were peeking into the windows and watching people have sex. Good times. Nothing mixes better than poor taste and copyright infringement. We rationalized that we were promoting their films, even though there were never credits, and that the photos had been sent to us and we were using them. Wasn’t that the point? No one ever complained, so I guess that was the point.

But the feature wasn’t complete without captions. Funny captions, according to this Alphonse. And that’s what finally got sent back. I used a photo of seven girls kneeling in a row with their butts to the camera. The caption? “This episode of Sesame Street is brought to you by the number Seven.” Curiously, they didn’t care about the highjacking of someone else’s corporate IP for salacious purposes. I had made reference to a children’s show, and any allusion to children, no matter how vague or abstract, was off limits. Which appeared to be their only line. Nothing else ever got sent back, so, question answered.

My reason for this lengthy digression, and if you’ve made it this far you must be boiling with curiosity, is that I can’t write photo captions for the blog slideshows without thinking of Hawk’s Rear Window. It transports me back to those halcyon days spent with a light box and a loupe.

As a coda, as if necessary, when I finally got a real job Dorothy and I discussed the best I’m-outta-here message. I favored “I have to leave while I can still masturbate,” but calmer heads prevailed. “I know my son is only two, but all I can think about is career day at grade school.” Message delivered, message accepted, next chapter commenced.

Defying any sense of narrative structure, as my career did, that next chapter was as the Technology & Operations Director at a Manhattan advertising agency. Because why the hell not.

Spoiler: it ended weird.

Not unlike this blog post.

P.S. I apologize that this section is nothing but text. But trust me. You don’t want pictures from Hawk.

Fine, you pervert. Here’s the cover of the issue that’s mine, all mine. Well, technically it’s Alphonse’s. You are hereby warned.