Enkindled by the most flammable EDM music this side of the asteroid belt, they put on a bunch of overblown fire shows – beacons that shone all along the beach to let everyone in the universe know that this was the most mainstream party there is. Some people were doing it in the surf while others vomited, pissed, and littered next to them. The entire beach was a giant dumpster. You could tell nature was gagging. I couldn't see her like that, so I left.

On my way home, I stopped at a supermarket and my scooter kissed a taxi-truck in the parking lot. The scratch was benign, but the outrage it caused wasn’t pretty. Within seconds, I was in a knot of shouting humans. One was the driver’s wife I supposed, the other three or four or ten women bystanders that closed in from all sides. It was a nasty, monetary energy that drove their team spirit as they tried to squeeze every last penny out of me. Meanwhile, the driver just kept sitting in his seat, looking at me with a mix of embarrassment and kindness and “what do you want me to do about it?” My eyes replied: “Nothing dude, I get it.” We both knew that a scratch like that doesn’t exactly merit the exchange of insurance details (what insurance?) in those latitudes, or even just an ounce of drama, but I empathized with the hostility towards me. He and his wife drove entitled, drunk Caucasians to and from these parties for a living, parties that ravaged cultures and natures.

The women were still yelling at me from the bottom of their pipes, and one of them had seized my keys. They wanted nothing less than all the money they believed I had, but for technical reasons I could only give them what I actually had. That discrepancy in realities ossified into a semi-awkward, semi-creepy form of harassment when they started pulling on my pants to see if there was another truth in there. That was enough. With an exploding voice shouting I don't know what, I pulled down my pants in the parking lot and showed them the naked penniless truth. That did it. I grabbed my keys and drove off, feeling dirty and a bit like some Christ who had been crucified for all the sins his fellow humans had committed in Thailand. Fair enough.