When you grow up in a house sitting on top of a branch of the San Andreas fault, having the earth move beneath your feet is about as note-worthy as Madonna releasing yet another album in her continuing bid to prove she’s still relevant. To me, earthquakes are not the earth-shattering event that they are to others. Earthquakes remind me of my childhood, they remind me of home. For me earthquakes are the comfort food of natural disasters. For most of the rest of the world, not so much.

Earthquakes scare the hell out of people. While to those who live in the rest of the country and who site California’s earthquakes as the #1 reason they would never move here, the tornadoes that cut wide swaths of destruction through the middle of the country are considered just a seasonal weather anomaly, and hurricanes that redefine the eastern seaboard annually barely register as a blip on their radar. Hail the size of baseballs are just part of the winter landscape, and flooding rivers are nothing more than the planet’s way of telling you your floors need a good mopping. Which of the numerous practical jokes Mother Nature likes to play on us causes you concern, and which are about as exciting as anal warts at a proctologists convention depends largely on where you were raised, on what you are used to. Earthquakes are kinda like a bar raid in Sunee Plaza. To outsiders they are scandalous news, to those who call Pattaya’s most notorious area for kiddie molesters their stomping grounds, it’s just business as usual.

Nonetheless, with their ability to cause widespread damage and numerous fatalities, earthquakes always make the news. The media loves a good natural disaster and any geohazard is a good geohazard as long as it produces a few images of collapsed buildings to strike fear in the hearts of viewers. So news of Monday evening’s 6.3 magnitude tremor in Northern Thailand spread further than its shock waves, making for headlines in every media outlet except for Fox News which is still pushing the Benghazi story and CNN which is still searching for Malaysia Airlines Flight 370. The all important death toll stands at one – an 83-year-old woman killed by a falling wall. So we’re not talking a blockbuster as far as natural disasters go. But with more than 3,500 houses, 10 temples, three schools, three hospitals, a hotel, and a main highway damaged by the quake and the 100+ aftershocks that have since hit the Phan district of Chiang Rai province, there is still hope.

Somsak Khaosuwan, director of the National Disaster Warning Center, says that Monday’s earthquake was the largest ever recorded in Thailand. It was felt by people living in high-rise buildings in Bangkok with many of them reporting objects falling from shelves. Residents and visitors in Chiang Mai and Chiang Rai fled their homes and hotels for the safety of the streets. And one brave soul on the gay Thailand message boards reported he ran as far as Pattaya in his personal effort to keep his twisted panties from becoming further soiled. ‘Cuz nothing amps up the drama rating of a natural disaster like overreacting.

Thailand is not known as a hotbed of earthquake activity. The worst damage the country has suffered in the past was due to an earthquake occurring elsewhere, though ya gotta admit the resulting tsunami that hit Phuket ranks among the worst natural disasters in recorded history. The Kingdom, which sits on the Eurasian tectonic plate, and is flanked by the Indo-Australian and Pacific plates, is located in a region that is relatively safe from earthquakes. But historical records show that the area has previously been affected by a number of tremors, with the Mae Chan fault – which runs through the provinces of Chiang Rai and Chiang Mai – viewed as the most potentially damaging one in the country in the event of a major tremor.

Thailand’s Department of Mineral Resources reports there are 14 groups of active faults spread across 22 provinces in the country, with 8 mid-sized earthquakes (magnitudes 5.0-5.9) experienced over the past 40 years, five of which struck in the north while the other 3 were centered in the west. Up until Monday’s quake, virtually all earthquakes recorded in Thailand have been under magnitude 6.0, although significant seismic activity in neighboring countries such as Indonesia or Myanmar are often felt in areas with soft soil like Bangkok, as Monday’s tremor was.

Somsak Photisat, Mineral Resources Department director-general said the last earthquake with such severe damage occurred in 1545 and damaged the ancient city of Chiang Mai. The damage to Chiang Mai’s Wat Chedi Luang’s ginormous crumbling chedi, which reportedly was once 90 meters high, is often blamed on that quake although there is a faction that believes that damage was caused instead by the cannon fire of King Taksin in 1775 during the recapture of Chiang Mai from the Burmese. Historical records also showed that a big quake hit in Thailand in 1015, sinking the ancient city of Yonok and turning the area into a big lake.

The worst damage from Monday’s quake – if you don’t count the death of that old woman who couldn’t out-run a falling wall – is to 11 relics and 24 temples in Chiang Rai, Chiang Mai, Lamphun, Nan, and Phayao according to the country’s Fine Arts Department, which has been tasked with assessing the damage to historic sites affected by the recent seismic action. Closer to the hearts of touri, the iconic Wat Rong Khun – AKA The White Wat – just outside of Chiang Rai has been closed indefinitely due to the damage it experienced and Chalermchai Kositpipa – AKA That Angry Little Man With The Bullhorn – who designed and constructed the temple says the structural damage is so substantial that some buildings might have to be demolished.

Initially, after the major quake struck, Ajarn Chalermchai believed restoration to the damaged areas of the wat he has spent the last 18 years creating was possible. But after further damage from aftershocks he now says the structure is beyond repair and should be left to ruin. The 59-year-old National treasure (Chalermchai, not Wat Rong Khun) says he is too old to recreate his eccentric yet stunning architectural ode to the gods of Buddhism. “Everything is finished, and I may leave the temple, a world’s masterpiece, to remain as it is now for the latter generation to remember,” he says.

Chalermchai said the mural paintings which took him almost his lifetime to create on the walls and ceiling of the wiharn are now destroyed by what he called “the nature”. While he concedes that the temple could be rebuilt, he says it would not be the same as the art work he devoted his life to create could never be recreated. While the Fine Arts Department is determining if it has enough funds to restore damaged sites in the area, Chalermchai, who built Wat Rong Khun with his own funds and donations from private individuals, says he does not want any government organization to lend a helping hand because he does not want interference from, or have to listen to, any department that provides funding to repair the damage to his work of art.

In the U.S. whenever a destructive major natural disaster occurs, some leading television evangelical preacher usually blame one of the many forces that are intent on ruining America, which is most often the gays. Not directly mind you, it’s always god taking his anger with the homosexual agenda out on some poor area of the country, which for some reason most often is an area not associated with gay rights. In that spirit, I’m laying the blame for the destruction of Wat Rong Khun on McDonalds. Superman, Neo from The Matrix, characters from Avatar, the Terminator, Spiderman, Elvis Presley, and even Kung fu Panda were all cool to be included by Chalermchai in his murals that decorated the temple’s walls and ceiling, but including Mickey D’s was just too much for the Buddha to take.

So if the White Wat was on your to-do list and you never got around to to-doing it, you waited too long. You’ll never get to have Chalermchai yell at you for dawdling, or experience the joy of taking a piss in a restroom built of gold (unless you become BFFs with Donald Trump). And if you can not imagine just how great of a disaster Monday’s earthquake was, just consider that I was unable to come up with a legitimate excuse to include a picture of penis in this post. The horror!

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