In short order, I’ve seen two big-ass Rolls Royce in Bangkok. I spotted the vintage, 1970s-era model above in Ban Rak near the gem market that I pass on my way to Talat Noi. The other, more contemporary edition of the exorbitant vehicle I saw in Saladeng, just outside of our old hotel near The Commons.

Most folks know about the legendary Rolls Royce cars. But the real money stems from the British engineering company’s Trent engine family which is used to power a wide range of commercial aircraft including the Boeing 777, 787, Airbus A330, A340, A350, and A380.

Many years ago, I had a week-long film gig for a luxury hotel called Rydges in Phuket’s Bang Tao Beach. The jovial Aussie GM had me picked up early in the morning and dropped off late in the evening in the hotel’s shiny Rolls Royce. Riding alone in a wide-bodied Rolls along Phuket’s winding, palm-tree-lined coastal roads was trippy, to say the least.

I’ve been experimenting with how artificial intelligence can contribute to my artistic workflow ever since Adobe introduced Neural Filters in Photoshop back in October 2020. Recently, a friend told me about AI-generated images over at Open AI and their formidable application Dall-E which in turn led me to the remarkably useful ChatGPT, a text generator that produces coherent, well-written copy from just about any topic you throw at it (sans the cesspoolian, lewd, lubricious stuff).

The prompt I used to help the AI engine create the above picture was as follows:

A photo-realistic image of dozens of dolphins taking selfies.

This technology is still in its infancy and I can’t even imagine what it will be capable of doing going forward. While some artists are verbally skeptical and even feel threatened by Artificial Intelligence, it’s not much different from how photographers once felt about Adobe Photoshop and the slew of image-editing software that followed its introduction back in 1990. I’ve been using Photoshop on a more or less daily basis since 1996. That’s more than 25 years of image manipulation on my conscious!

My personal favorite argument in favor of image editing has always been that no camera will ever be invented that can fully capture what I see with my own two lenses (eyes) and what emotions (my heart) experienced at the moment of exposure.

Not many know this, but Photoshop was originally created to manipulate digital images way, way back in 1988 by brothers Thomas and John Knoll. The two then iterated it into a full-fledged commercial application at Industrial Light & Magic (ILM), the special effects company founded by director George Lucas of Star Wars fame, before eventually becoming the flagship product of Adobe Systems.

So what is Artificial Intelligence, anyway? One “official” definition:

Simulation of human intelligence by machines, especially computers that can include natural language operations, speech recognition, and machine vision.

To me, AI is an aggregation of human-generated knowledge and experience used to generate logical (or, illogical) conclusions and actions. The knowledge and experience can be derived from all kinds of science and the arts, but it can also use input from emotions.

I can see how some professions could be made redundant as AI develops and replaces knowledge workers like programmers, scientists, researchers, journalists, and maybe even musicians. Most  think of it as such or realize it, but artificial intelligence is already used in many fields including:

• Manufacturing robots
• Self-driving cars
• Smart assistants
• Monitoring of social media
• Radio playlists
• Podcast ad insertion

No, I don’t see AI as a threat to visual artists. Unlike Photoshop (which is becoming increasingly intelligent), AI is another brilliant tool that can be used to envision and execute creative ideas.

So, I’m clearly embracing this new tool wholeheartedly and its arrival doesn’t mean that all my other tools are left behind or thrown out. That would be a forgone conclusion I’m not prepared to make. At least not now.

We ate a delightful seafood dinner last night at Rawai Beach in Phuket. Our dinner was hosted by the always sweet and generous Sudduen family, friends that we’ve known for over 20 years.

The meal concept was new to us insofar that you buy the food you want to eat at a fishmonger’s stall, then take it with you across the street where several restaurants cook/grill and serve your fish, scallops, oysters and shrimp along with beer or whatever beverage your prefer.

Charlotte and I haven’t seen Saran, Saam and their daughter Asia together for around five years, so it was a terrific opportunity to catch up. Hard to grasp that when Saran and I went diving regularly from Kata Beach, I was just 40 and he had just turned 31. Now my old friend is 50 and in about six months, I’ll be heading into my sixth decade.

Just read that a distant friend is using her social network to sell an expensive gadget that proclaims to heal all kinds of diseases and even slow down aging. According to what I’ve read about it, this miraculous machine accomplishes its healing capability by exposing the body’s cells to certain sound wave frequencies. A lot of her followers seem to be buying both her unscrupulous sales pitch and the costly machine she’s promoting for a quick fix to better health.

Early on when I started practicing and eventually teaching classes in Qigong, I made an effort to clarify that there would be no lofty promises of curing diseases or extending life. On the contrary, before every class, I made it very clear that the Qigong postures, movements, and breathing exercises that I teach, are simply an ancient form of gymnastics. Nothing more, nothing less.

If life has taught me anything about my well-being, its that there are no quick fixes when it comes to maintaining and/or improving my health. Eating good, mostly unprocessed food, getting a few good hours of exercise a week, striving for emotional balance and enjoying quality sleep are all key health factors that can stave off past sins and possibly reduce the threat of succumbing to genetically inherited diseases.

A fruity smoothie, just like the one above shot the other day at a fancy café, is certainly a nice treat. But it ain’t no elixir. Once again the old adage that if it sounds too good to be true, it’s likely just another sales pitch for cure-all snake oil, i.e. bullshit.

Of the three projects presented here, with some luck, I’ve been able to capture new images for two of them while walking along the streets and alleyways in Sieng Gong. Yesterday’s visit with buddy Erik was one of those rare days where I located a couple of new artifacts for the Resurfaced project and captured one or possibly two new images that might make it into the book about Sieng Gong.

Wednesday night. We serendipitously met these two guys late yesterday afternoon. Charlotte and I were on our way to the usual eatery further down Silom Road and we’d taken a new route to get there.

The sun had finally dipped behind the towering skyscraper ‘King Power Mahanakhon’, bringing the heat down to a more manageable level. It was still damn hot, but now it was bearable.

The time between the sun setting and before it gets dark is called the “golden hour”. It’s a great time to experience the local atmosphere along Bangkok’s many nameless side streets and narrow, twisting alleyways. This is when folks come out of their homes to socialize again. The atmosphere feels festive somehow.

When I asked the guys if I could take a picture of them, it was obvious that they were each other’s best friends and that both had enjoyed a lot of fun together during their long camaraderie.

The moment reminded me again why Charlotte and I like this country so much. The Thai word “Sanuk” (நாக்கு) sums it up pretty well. Sanuk means to have a good time, enjoy yourself and feel happy and appreciative about being with someone. It almost seems like an unspoken rule here. Whatever Thais do socially, Sanuk has to be part of it.

While the two buddies above were having a relaxed and delightful afternoon Sanuk together, my best friend and I continued towards our dinner where we eventually enjoyed stir-fried noodles, crunchy vegetables, and an ice-cold bottle of Chang beer.

– Mr. Joakim, please pull down your pants and underwear and lay back on the table. I want to feel your testicles.

That’s how weird my afternoon began yesterday, Saturday. But this story’s genesis actually began the day before, late Friday afternoon.

It was while I was in the shower, after a sweaty workout at the hotel’s gym that I felt a rather large lump while washing my undercarriage. As the hypochondriac I can sometimes be, I panicked and came close to slipping on the wet bathroom floor, likely giving myself a bad whiplash and some bruises, as I stepped out of the shower on trembling legs.

Ok, so this is how it begins, I thought.

At seven o’clock last night, after carrying this burdon for a few hours – both physically and emotionally, I told Charlotte about my discovery. We had just been served a couple of beers and ordered a few of our favorite dishes from our favorite table at our favorite restaurant along a busy soi near Silom Road.

Talk about a Triangle of Sadness; there we sat, Charlotte, me and my poor testicle in some kind of shell-shocked state. We ate our food without much being said and then walked home to discuss what to do next.

During the evening, Charlotte researched and located a couple of private hospitals near the hotel, and this morning I emailed both with a brief summary about the lump. I’ll take care of this next week, I reasoned as it was Saturday. But after only an hour, both hospitals had answered me.

The first hospital’s email was your basic auto-reply. The second mail surprised me. In it was a proposal for an examination for later the very same day where I would be seeing both a urologist and a radiologist. In addition, the email contained an attachment that specified how much the various procedures would cost me.

A five-minute walk to the hospital. In through a magnificent entrance and to what looks like the lobby of one of the city’s more luxurious hotels. Registration and guidance to the waiting room in the adjacent Surgical Department where a dozen or so nurses, most of them wearing small, white hats, are busy at work. They’re cruising smoothly between waiting room chairs where patients are either dropped off och or picked up and chaperoned to one of the many examination rooms next to the reception counter.

After just a few minutes, I am taken to the hospital’s on-call urologist. We don’t shake hands or fist bump, but he asks me kindly to sit down and tell him about the growth in my right testis (no, doctors don’t seem to have time to read much of the journals before meeting patients here either). It was immediately after I told my story that he asked if he could feel my balls.

Gloves on. Cold hands. Cold hands that only get marginally warmer from thin rubber gloves. It’s okay, just as long as he doesn’t decide to check the old prostate as well, I thought. He leaves my anus alone.

– Okay, Mr. Joakim, I think you have something abnormal here. I’ll call the nurse and she’ll take you to the Radiologist and he’ll use an ultrasound system to identify what the lump is. Then you’ll come back here to me and we will discuss a strategy. How does that sound?

A strategy? WTF? Ok, I guess I’ll have to wait a bit before letting my latent hypochondria run amok.

A nurse gently knocks on the door and with a warm smile below her little white nurse’s hat, asks me to follow her to the Radiologist. A new waiting room. A smaller one, but with nice illustrations on the walls. Yes, I guess this is how it begins. Gently and sensibly. Just before being hit with the hard truth about…

I put on a slippery, silver robe given to me by a new nurse. Then I walk into the new examination room where I am once again asked to lie down on an unnecessarily hard table.

A new nurse, (the fourth or fifth?) steps into the room and greets me softly. She then abruptly pulls apart my skimpy robe and places several strips of green surgical cloth so that they frame my now exposed genitalia. I’m pretty sure the pattern forms an almost perfect square. Like an old TV where my soon-to-be sixty-year-old crotch has the involuntary leading role of this increasingly intense drama.

When the nurse (without the white hat) is finished with the arrangement of strips below my navel, the doctor of radiology walks into the examination room. Behind him, two women and a man, all clad in chalk-white scrubs, gloves, and masks. Med-schoolers?

– Mr. Joakim, would it be okay if we have the company of these students during your examination? They are from a nearby medical school here in Bangkok.

What do you say in that situation? I’m already there, preparing for what I am assuming is going to be something much, much worse. I am convinced the ultrasound will show that I have a large, malignant tumor and/or that both the scrotum and my pee-pee are now full of small, aggressive metastases. That I’m already a goner.

But instead, I hear myself say,

– Sure, no problem whatsoever. The more, the merrier!

While my last comment likely flew a bit over their heads, the gang seemed to interpret it as, “It’s a Go!”, adjusting their protective masks, and, with an almost comical synchronization, the trio stepped into the room.

Now five adults are standing close, close, close to the table where I lay, defenseless, exposed, naked where it counts. They’re crouching over the doctor, unabashedly peering straight at my private parts

While I’m lying there, staring up at the ceiling, hoping that the examination will go fairly quickly so that the audience can be dispersed, the Radiologist moves his plugged-in microphone slowly, slowly over my genitalia. He is possibly being extra methodical for the sake of the students.

The students are whispering eagerly to each other and I wonder what their conversation is all about. Are they impressed by the Radiologist’s skillful microphone movements? Or, do they see something on the screen that they’ve never seen live before?

Meanwhile, I’m just hoping, praying I won’t get one of those rare unwarranted erections.

Back in the waiting room. I feel slightly sticky between my legs after the Radiologist’s smear, which I tried to remove with a small towel, given to me by a nice nurse once the ultrasound was done. A sixth or seventh nurse steps up to me. She’s wearing a tiny white hat.

– Mr. Joakim, the results have already arrived and the doctor will see you now.

The Urologist looks tense. Is his diagnosis that burdensome? Does he want to feel my balls one more time? Maybe there will be even more candidates now? Is this a friggin’ freak show, or what?

The doctor shows me an educational illustration, a kind of map of the male reproductive system. Looks quite advanced. Definitely more “points of failure” than what I remember from biology class at high school.

– Mr. Joakim, you have what is called an Epididymal Cyst. It’s a pretty big cyst, but the ultrasound shows a structure that tells me it’s benign, just like most cysts in this region of the body. Still, you do need to keep track of it. So it doesn’t grow, you know?

GROW???

– So Doc, you’re telling me that I have a goddamn, testicle-hugging Alien hanging on the inside my scrotum? How the heck am I going to get rid of that sucker? That’s what I thought. But instead, I said,

– Ok, so what do I do now? Wait and see?

– Well, Mr. Joakim, as I said, you need to keep an eye and a hand on the cyst’s growth. I suggest you get a new ultrasound in four to six months. If it has grown larger than its current size, let’s say beyond 5-6 centimeters, you should have it surgically removed and analyzed.

And if it gets even bigger, well, then I’ll actually have three testicles! Yayyyy!!!

Out of the urologist’s office. Sitting now in one of the waiting room’s comfortable armchairs. A sturdy woman in a power suit approaches me. She smiles broadly. In one hand she’s clenching a bundle of papers.

– Mr. Joakim, how would you like to pay for your examination?

Charlotte and I have a couple of different insurance policies, (corporate + private). If the deductible is roughly the same as the healthcare cost, then we usually pay ourselves. Not least to avoid arguing with the insurance company.

I pay the bill with cash. It comes out to about $150. I’m very content with how smooth this whole process has been. From email to the exam in approximately six hours. From being deeply worried to feeling somewhat relieved, in no small way thanks to the hospital’s super nice and competent healthcare team.

When my receipts are neatly tucked away in my wallet, I step out into the street, bask a moment in the late afternoon sun, and then head off to Villa Market to buy a couple of cold beers, a bag of pistachio nuts (lime, and chili flavored and ridiculously good). Then home to tell Charlotte that my new body part is unfortunately here to stay. At least for a while.

In some strange turn of events, I have thus become a foster parent to a four-centimeter-long cyst hanging on my right testicle. And there’s not much I can do other than wait and hope that the Alien doesn’t grow.

All said, it feels good to lighten my…er…heart and to have shared this strange episode from my life on the road.