Songkran & Alcohol Ban Blues

Today would normally be the beginning of an extended holiday week around the Songkran festival, the traditional Thai New Year (which falls on April 13).  The government canceled celebration of the entire holiday in an effort to stop transmission of Covid-19, reasoning that the enormous annual mass gatherings of people would increase infection.  All mass gatherings have already been outlawed during this ongoing crisis.  And many provinces have banned alcohol for a ten-day period. 

(Tuk will go in to work on Monday the 13^th, because she can work better in her office than online work-from-home.  Her office complex now has much, much fewer workers attending daily, but she has heavy managerial responsibilities and needs to be there.  It’s the electric company, and is deemed essential.) 

This government is nuts, like all the rest.  Like all would-be central planners, they don’t have a clue when it comes to any unintended consequences of their arbitrary decrees from on high.  Theoretically, they reason that if they ban all sale and consumption of alcohol during this ten-day holiday, then people will not illegally assemble together at parties and thus pass on infections.  Plausible.  Yet as soon as a ban on alcohol was announced for Bangkok as well as many other provinces, huge masses of shoppers crowded tight together in long lines at stores to stock up – not quite the social-distancing ideal they recommend. 

So, many provincial governors here, including Bangkok, have just decreed a ten-day ban on booze.  My province of Nonthaburi is not one of them, so I have been stocking up in case they soon follow suit.  I utilize alcohol for pain relief (or, more accurately, a relaxant) to relieve my chronic fibromyalgia pain.  I can go months at a time without using it, but it helps relieve my agony most when I am not able to exercise (such as now when the heat is unbearable) and/or when I am writing and researching, typing under deadlines.  My pain can be crippling, putting me into a fetal position ball of pain.  No other medicine works as well.  So, screw the ruling elite’s ban – and I don’t even socialize when I drink. 

On that note, I hold with the great American philosopher and Blues Rock singer-guitarist, George Thorogood – just a youngster, as he was born ten days after me – when he authored and released the 1985 song, I Drink Alone:  (Imagine here the slow bare Blues beat of drums and bass, along with the phenomenal lead guitar and the vocals George belts out): 

“I drink alone.  ...

  With nobody else.  ...

  And you know when I drink alone, ...

  I prefer to be by myself.” 

George Thorogood and the Destroyers, they are definitely “Bad to the Bone”.  American party music, even if you do drink alone. 

This is going to be a long hot week and way beyond.  I hope most of us will come up intact on the other side of it.  Stay well. 

-Zenwind. 

.