Category: Sunday talk

Friday night is traditionally patrol night. My old friend wanted to do the rounds, so we started on Soi Buakhao, dropping into one of the popular open-air corner bars. Almost every table was occupied by pensioners—some solo, some with company. We grabbed seats next to a 70-year-old Canadian tourist on vacation. Bored out of his…

While the heaviest rains of the season are drowning the city, the people in the industry are not sitting idle. They are gossiping. All week, the internal LINE groups have been furiously circulating a screenshot from the newest lottery winner. A girl posted a banking receipt showing a transfer from her sponsor for 500,000 baht.…

Friday and Saturday night. The final phase of the rainy season. The traditional streets, historically engineered for Western foreigners, are completely dead. The city looks like a movie set they forgot to dismantle after filming. I didn’t have a specific goal this weekend—I just went out to inspect the territory and drop into venues I…

A few days ago, I walked into the venue long before the shift started. The main floor was empty, quiet, and smelling faintly of floor cleaner. Walking past the open door of the girls’ locker room, I caught a glimpse of a face. Muscle memory kicked in—I gave a quick, automatic wai and kept walking…

There is an old joke about probability: What are the chances of walking out of your front door tomorrow morning and bumping into a live dinosaur? A mathematician will tell you the probability is zero. A philosopher will tell you it’s 50/50—either you meet one, or you don’t. But if you live in Pattaya, the…

November. Ekkamai. He was chain-smoking. Even though we were sitting in an open-air gazebo behind the building, the space felt completely suffocated by his smoke. He is Thai, slightly over fifty, and the owner of several massive nightlife venues across Bangkok and Pattaya. “Look at the others,” he said, exhaling a thick cloud. “They all…

Yesterday, I found myself sitting in one of the restaurants inside Central Festival. To a casual observer, the scene looked perfectly respectable—perhaps even mundane. Foreigners sat with their partners, a family with a young child enjoyed a meal, and the hum of the mall provided a calm, climate-controlled backdrop. But through the tinted glass of…

Welcome to another Sunday Talk. Lately, I’ve been noticing a few comments popping up with the exact same question: “How do you manage to write so much? Do you ever actually sleep?” Let’s start with the easy one. Do I sleep? Lately, very little. Especially on Fridays. For the past couple of weeks, I haven’t…