I really, really, really need to do some maintenance on my blog. When I switched from being hosted by WordPress, the ‘Other Related Posts’ at the bottom of all old posts became inactive. That’s a lot of broken links that need to be fixed. Like around 5,000 of them. And I’m not a fan of doing repair work. My twist on that old adage, if it ain’t broke don’t fix it’ is ‘if it is broke, don’t fix it, throw it out and buy a new one’. So finding excuses to not repair all those broken links hasn’t been a difficult chore. Finding an excuse to fix them, not so much.

I wrote a piece about an old salt I met on the streets of Penang – who may or may not have been a professional photographer – whose peculiar brand of wisdom dictated one only take seven photographs of . . . well, I’m still not sure. He never quite managed to be specific of what that bagging limit entailed. And yet that encounter still sticks in my craw. So I’d been contemplating doing a new recurring post, Seven Shots, which would be seven of my favorite photos of a variety of subjects. Both because pictorial posts are easier to do and it’d give me an opportunity for posting some photos that I’ve yet to come up with an excuse for posting. Unlike photos of naked guys which require no excuse.

So I thought Id start that series off with seven of my all-time favorite photos, spread out over seven days, each with a minimal amount of text accompanying them. Which, in turn, would give me some free-time to make a dent in correcting my broken Other Related Posts links. But then I recently read yet another farang’s tale of outrage, anger, and misery over being done wrong by a Thai boy. I get that those posts, which crop up on the message boards with an alarming frequency, serve as a catharsis for their writer. And I think they are meant as a warning to those who cum after them. Though I often question if they managed to find the forums to complain after the fact, why they didn’t manage to find the forums before taking the disastrous steps they did. It’s not like finding bad bar boy threads is much of a challenge. Nor is finding a reference to that popular idiom: A fool and his money are soon parted.

I think Ben Franklin came up with that little ball of wisdom. And since historians have pointed out that Ben was a fan of prostitution, you have to assume Ben knew what he was speaking about. You’d also assume with some 200 years of warnings about falling in love with prostitutes on the books, by now we’d have learned our lesson. But obviously not. Even though every disgruntled farang’s story of a bar boy who done him wrong starts at the same place, follows the same course, and only differs in the size of the farang’s depleted bank account, those tales continue to pop up with a regularity that’d make Jamie Lee Curtis jealous. So while I had in mind starting off my Seven Shots series of posts, I also thought I’d take a stab at providing some words of wisdom to all the potential victims out there. Combining the two, brings you today’s posts, the first of seven, covering Seven Shots (of Reality). Which I’m not sure is gonna provide me with the time I need to fix all of those broken links. I am sure, however, passing this wisdom on will do little to prevent another farang from making the same mistake countless of men have made before. But hey, being able to say I told you so is almost as gratifying as knowing you saved someone’s bank account from facing extinction.

Over these seven posts I’m gonna use the term ‘bar boy’ for simplicity. Assume that also means money boy. And covers any other form of Thai manhood, regardless of where and how you met him if at any point during your relationship money comes into play. Which it will. I’m also going to use the word ‘prostitute’ even though fans of prostitutes in Thailand like to use other words and phrases that take some of the sting out of what is, plain and simple, prostitution. ‘Cuz a rose is a rose, blah, blah, blah, and when it involves both money and sex it’s prostitution. I think a lot of the troubles farang go through in their relationships with the Thai guys they fall in love and in lust with could be avoided if they were required to use the word prostitute in place of boy, boyfriend, boy special, or whatever other term they came up with to avoid calling that spade a spade. Because any tale of woe that began, “So I met this prostitute who told me he loved me,” really wouldn’t need to go any further.

In that light, I’m gonna start this series off, and end this first shot of reality post, with a fable that should be required reading for any farang prior to his getting off the plane in Bangkok. Having it tattooed across every farang getting off a plane in Bangkok’s chest might not be a bad idea either. It is a fable as old as prostitution itself, and yet farang still continue to get stung:

The Scorpion and the Frog

One day, a scorpion looked around at the mountain where he lived and decided that he wanted a change. So he set out on a journey through the forests and hills. He climbed over rocks and under vines and kept going until he reached a river.

The river was wide and swift, and the scorpion stopped to reconsider the situation. He couldn’t see any way across. So he ran upriver and then checked downriver, all the while thinking that he might have to turn back.

Suddenly, he saw a frog sitting in the rushes by the bank of the stream on the other side of the river. He decided to ask the frog for help getting across the stream.
“Hellooo Mr. Frog!” called the scorpion across the water, “Would you be so kind as to give me a ride on your back across the river?”

“Well now, Mr. Scorpion! How do I know that if I try to help you, you wont try to kill me?” asked the frog hesitantly.

“Because,” the scorpion replied, “If I try to kill you, then I would die too, for you see I cannot swim!”

Now this seemed to make sense to the frog. But he asked. “What about when I get close to the bank? You could still try to kill me and get back to the shore!”

“This is true,” agreed the scorpion, “But then I wouldn’t be able to get to the other side of the river!”

“Alright then…how do I know you wont just wait till we get to the other side and THEN kill me?” said the frog.

“Ahh…,” crooned the scorpion, “Because you see, once you’ve taken me to the other side of this river, I will be so grateful for your help, that it would hardly be fair to reward you with death, now would it?!”

So the frog agreed to take the scorpion across the river. He swam over to the bank and settled himself near the mud to pick up his passenger. The scorpion crawled onto the frog’s back, his sharp claws prickling into the frog’s soft hide, and the frog slid into the river. The muddy water swirled around them, but the frog stayed near the surface so the scorpion would not drown. He kicked strongly through the first half of the stream, his flippers paddling wildly against the current.

Halfway across the river, the frog suddenly felt a sharp sting in his back and, out of the corner of his eye, saw the scorpion remove his stinger from the frog’s back. A deadening numbness began to creep into his limbs.

“You fool!” croaked the frog, “Now we shall both die! Why on earth did you do that?”

The scorpion shrugged, and did a little jig on the drowning frog’s back.

“I could not help myself. It is my nature.”

Then they both sank into the muddy waters of the Chao Phraya river.

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