So I wanted to sell my guitar amp and put it up on KSL Classifieds. I was asking $400. It was a low-end model, so I wasn’t very optimistic in selling it for that price but I figured I had some time to see what happened. I had one call from a guy last week who actually was going to buy it for the asking price, but he couldn’t get the money. That’s another (but less interesting) story, so I’m just going to give the account of the final sale of the amp.

So this guy calls me on Monday, obviously a Mexican from his accent. He was asking about “the speaker” and I told him what it was. Then he told me that he lives in Idaho, so would I come down on the price to pay for his gas. (He wasn’t quite so eloquent as this, his English was terrible.) I was expecting to come down a little to be able to sell the amp so I told him I’d go down to $380. Then he says “Well, I have $350, so can you help out, because I have to pay the gas?” I reiterated that no, I would not come down any more than $380. He finally said “OK, I call you tomorrow and come to pick up the speakers.”

So then he calls me the next morning and says he is getting ready to leave to come down. I was a little bit suspicious of his understanding of the price, so I asked him again if he had the $380. He said “Well, I have $350, but I have to drive from Idaho, so you can not help with the gas?” I said no, the price would be $380 and if he didn’t have it then he shouldn’t drive down here. He said he would try to get more money then and call me when he was on his way.

About 2 hours later he calls and says he is in Ogden. So I’m assuming he has the $380, since I told him not to come down if he didn’t. So I finished up at work and came home a little early to clean off the amp and bring it downstairs. Then I waited about another hour before he finally called me. Another long part of the story which I won’t get into detail, but I had to go searching around for him to find which Chevron he was at and then lead him back to my house, even though he had told me on the phone that he knew how to use Google maps.

One thing to note was that the first thing I looked for when I saw his car was the plate. As I had suspected, it was a Utah plate. His phone number was also a 435 area code, which is not an Idaho code. Now, if I know anything about Mexicans, it’s that they will do anything to save a few pennies. If he was really living in Idaho I’m certain he would register his car there, since it is way cheaper than in Utah. So from this point on I’m working under the assumption that this guy is a total liar.

Well, finally we got to my house and he tried out the amp for about 30 minutes with his gay wireless mic. It sounded good and he said OK, he’ll buy the amp. He pulls out his wallet and hands me a wad of cash; and it is my belief that he deliberately performed this in such a way as to make certain that I saw that there was no money left in his wallet. I counted the money twice and there was only $360. So I said “Hey, there’s only $360 here. I told you $380.”

He says, “So how much do I need to give you?”

“$380. that’s what I said on the phone. You need to give me 20 more dollars.”

“Well, but can’t you help with the gas? I have to drive from Idaho and I need the gas money to get back to there.”

“No. I can’t help you with the gas. I already came down from $400 for you. I told you $380 on the phone.”

“So, what do we do?”

Even though I knew I could just be done with this amp quickly and not have to worry about it not selling, there was no way I was going to let this weasel scam me. I would rather have nothing than let him get away with that kind of shit. So I handed him back his wad of cash and said “Sorry man.”

He looked dumbfounded. “You mean I drive all this way for nothing?”

“I told you $380. It’s not my fault you came here without enough money.”

He was grimacing. You could see the gears working in his head. Finally he said, “OK, I go to the car and get the gas money… but I hope I can make it. Do you think I can make it?”

I said “I’m sure you can make it.” I was absolutely certain. Because first of all, he didn’t have to drive all the way back to Idaho… He probably lived in Ogden or something. And second of all NOBODY would even consider giving you their gas money if they really had even the slightest chance of running out of gas on the way home. He was just being a weasel!

So… end of story, he paid me the extra $20 (well, not extra, but adequate) and was on his way back home to “Idaho.” He was probably grumbling the whole time at how he wasn’t able to pull a fast one on a stupid gringo. Well, my friend, you’re the one who just bought a guitar amp to use for vocals!! I win!!

Funny thing is, when I was watching it I kept thinking that they were totally ripping off Guy Ritchie (and doing a fantastic job, mind you.) I knew nothing about the film prior to renting it, other than it had Robert Downey Jr. in it. Finally as soon as the movie ended the first thing that popped up was that it was a Guy Ritchie film. I was pleased, not only that he had taken on a film that was somewhat different from all his other films, but also that my suspicions were affirmed. I only wish I had known it was Guy Ritchie all along, or else I wouldn’t have spent the whole movie blaming them for the rip-off.

I did have one problem with the film, however. Downey’s British accent (and the others’ accents as well) were so completely British that I had a hard time understanding a lot of the dialogue! I want to watch the film again with captioning on just so I can catch everything. Ha ha ha…

Anyway, everyone has probably already seen it so I don’t need to do any recommending but I just wanted to make a note that I thought this was a great film; and I love Robert Downey Jr. and Guy Ritchie even more now.

I saw this car on my way to 7-11 one day. I have no idea what kind of car it is, but it’s totally old and fully pimped out! I love the red wheels!

Today I saw a copper mid-90′s Honda accord. It was bright copper, not like an old penny, but like an almost pink shiny new one. And it was in mint condition. Yesterday I saw a mid-90′s Corolla that was lime gold. LIME GOLD! It was rad. And to make it even better, on the back was mounted a gigantic F1 racing spoiler. On a Corolla! Ha ha ha…

Once I saw a fully restored 60′s Mustang and a mint-condition Chevelle in the same day. Totally rad.

Anyway, about the sunburn part… Today I went to the pool again but I took my book with me this time. I’m reading “The Collectors” by David Baldacci. I had a nice time just perched in the corner of the pool reading for about an hour. I was facing away from the sun, with my arms out of the pool and my book on the concrete. I figured I might get some sun on my shoulders but I wasn’t too concerned. It was just so nice and cool and refreshing… Finally I went home and commenced the rest of my daily activities.

So I just looked in the mirror and my ENTIRE back is sunburned. All the way down to my lower back! I can’t figure it out, because I was submerged up to my armpits. Anyway, I guess the water doesn’t reflect the sunlight like I thought it would… From now on maybe I can get one of the maids to spray me with sunscreen before I go, because I can’t do it myself. Durnit, it was so refreshing! I want to do it every day now.

So now I’m just waiting for the brown and peel that always happens to me when I get too much sun.

Anyway, I got there at 3:45 because at night it gets really packed because of the promotion. I saw on the display that there was a showing at 3:30, which was perfect timing because I would only need to wait 15 minutes for the previews to end. The guy told me it had already started and I said I knew. His English sucked and he was confused so he went back to get a manager or something. I was waiting for like 5 minutes and finally some girl came out of the back and told me that there was no 3:30 showing. I tried to argue but there was no getting past them. So I reluctantly bought a ticket for the 5:00 showing and skulked away.

I guess I should preface this with my story about my sour cream issues. Well, remember the first time I went to Carrefour, and they had sour cream (among all the other goodies)? Well, I have been back there about 5 times SPECIFICALLY for the purpose of buying sour cream and they never frigging have it. 5 times! And I specifically went early in the day so it wouldn’t have been before all the sour cream had sold out. But still they never had it. I kept getting angrier and angrier and wondering if they had just stopped stocking it, or why they didn’t have several different kinds so at least one would be in stock. Finally I decided they had just discontinued it and I would never get sour cream again.

But I need it for my chili bake and nachos! So now that I had an hour to kill at Esplanade, I decided to walk down to Carrefour and verify that no, they indeed are not selling sour cream anymore. But on the way I decided that actually, they probably WOULD have it just this once, since I was waiting for my movie to start and didn’t have time to buy it and take it home and then get back to the theater.

So I arrived at Carrefour and guess what? No, guess what??? Yep, they friggin had it!! But it was a different brand. Which made me even more annoyed, since now I knew that they stocked TWO brands of sour cream, but some idiots were going in there and buying up the whole lot before I could ever get some. I left the store angrily and went back to Esplanade.

I was outside having a smoke and looked at the time… only 4:20. Then I realized fudge it, I DID have time to buy it and go back home because of the friggin 30 min of previews! So I walked back to Carrefour and bought the whole stack of sour cream. I think it was like 13 or something. Luckily sour cream freezes well. I took a motorbike taxi back home and dropped it off, and then walked back to Esplanade. I still had plenty of time.

Finally, to end the story, I was looking at the grid of all the store icons outside of Esplanade, and I realized that one of them was Tops supermarket. I knew it was there before but I got to thinking that it might have something special about it since I had seen a lot of farang coming out of there. Since I still had time, I decided to go check it out.

I went inside, saw the yogurt section and in 5 seconds I had found not one but TWO different brands of frigging sour cream. And fully stocked. I could have been going to get sour cream every day, and it’s closer to my house… FNA. At least now I know. Forget Carrefour and your stupid high prices.

And I still had to sit through 3 previews and 4 commercials…

Anyway, thinking about that made me think about one of the things I hated about China. Spitting. People are always spitting there, everywhere, no matter where you are walking, there is someone spitting. And they don’t even do it a cool way – you know, where you shoot it out of your mouth like a bullet straight to the ground. No, you’ll see these ugly old grammas just bent over, letting the spit slowly ooze out of their mouths; making a long trail of glob hanging from their mouth. Finally they’ll release it with a ptthhhh. It’s totally disgusting.

So the reason this has to do with swimming is that once I went to a public pool in China with my friend and I was taking a rest between laps and I noticed people spitting into the grate around the edge of the pool. They didn’t realize, or probably more accurately — care — that this water gets recycled back into the pool. It was just like a sink to them, for them to spit up in. No class. Absolutely NO class.

I also remember being at the beach and trying to have a nice swim in the water, but noticing that everyone around me was hacking up giant globs and just spitting them out into the water. No class…

China sucks.

When I got to the end of the subway line I still had a 10 minute cab ride to the immigration center. The last time I went there the guy ended up driving me to another building way past the actual place, and then when the security told him where he actually needed to go he got me there. He was cool, didn’t charge me the extra dollar it had ended up costing on the meter. So I was a bit nervous as I started looking out for oncoming taxis.

I had my map in hand and finally flagged down a cab. The first guy just shook his head and drove off. The second guy took forever looking at the map and the address and then finally said he knew where it was. That should have been my first warning to just get another taxi. But stupidly, I trusted him, and got in and we were off. My second clue was when he veered right instead of left at a big interchange. I told him he wasn’t going the right way but he said he was going that way because there was less traffic. I was unconvinced, but there wasn’t really anywhere to make him stop and let me out.

Finally we ended up in a strange part of town where I knew we were not headed in the right direction at all. I told him he was going the wrong way again and he was like “It’s not right here??” We stopped at the building he THOUGHT we should be at and asked the security about where we were going; and I showed them the map and they did some long explanation to him in Thai. We drove off and he said ok ok he knew where it was; but I didn’t trust him and I wasn’t going to let him have any more of my money. The meter was already up to 4 bucks. So we got to a semi-major road and I told him to stop, gave him his money and got out. I wanted to get somebody who could look at the map for less than a minute and know where we were supposed to go.

The next cab driver looked at the map and said he knew where it was, and i trusted him. We had to take the EXPRESSWAY back to get on the right path, another 2 bucks. So the whole trip ended up costing me 10 bucks instead of 3. But we did get there and I thanked the taxi driver and told him I was sorry for yelling at him when we were getting onto the expressway.

Now I was really mad at the original driver. I wanted to track him down and beat his skinny little face in.

Unfortunately, I had only just ARRIVED at the immigration office, and who knew what awaited me inside. I went in and got my number and sure enough, there were 20 people ahead of me in the queue. But actually the queue was going pretty fast so I think I only spent about 30 minutes inside. Now I got my permit to come back to Thailand. Before I left the immigration office, I asked the girl at the help desk to write in CLEAR THAI some instructions on my map for all taxi drivers that I can show them from now on. If anyone takes me where I don’t want to go he’s either getting stiffed or beat up, or both.

Now I had to get another taxi back to the subway… Luckily everyone knows where the subway station is so we drove right there this time.

p.s. This is not the first time a taxi driver has screwed me by not going where I told him or taking me on a longer unnecessary route. I’m sick of it.

One of them is at the beginning after Farley wakes up from a night of drunken debauchery, and Perry says “I’m surprised you’re even hungover at all, considering the amount you regurgitated into the harpsichord.” Ha ha ha…

I highly recommend this movie.

I’m totally stoked because my last version of Photoshop and Illustrator were CS2, and my Flash and Dreamweaver were still Macromedia versions… Waaaaay old. But now I’m 100% up-to-date and don’t need to upgrade for another 5 years! Ha ha ha…

When I went out for lunch I saw this weird looking guy walking up the stairs to Fortune Town as I was going down. He was a little tall and lanky, and walked like Igor. He was wearing what looked like pajama bottoms, an old T-shirt and flops. His hair was a strange cut… long in places and short in others; and it looked like he hadn’t washed it or combed it for about 5 days. He was with 2 other dudes that looked pretty normal. Anyway, as they passed I heard him say “My feet really hurt” in a thick Australian accent. So it was more like “Moey feeat realeee hahht.” I thought, “My eyes really hurt after looking at you.”

I saw another guy (Thai) who was wearing a T-shirt that said “I (heart) BOYS” but the word “boys” had been crossed out and underneath it said “PEACE.” He didn’t look gay at all. But he did look really stupid wearing that T-shirt.