Do You Know This Man?

One night in Bangkok, we were hanging out in the courtyard of our guesthouse, listening to the rain and trying to ignore some loud Austrians to our right. Some time later, the Austrians left to go drinking, and it kept raining and we kept talking, and maybe a few hours later the Austrians came back, considerably worse for wear. The loudest stumbled over to us, brow wrinkled, brandishing a pink and purple umbrella emblazoned with the image of Winnie the Pooh. It was an umbrella he'd obviously bought out of neccessity, on impulse and while drunk, and it seemed to be confusing the hell out of him.

"Excuse me," he said politely in a thick German accent pointing to the chubby, cherubic face of Winnie the Pooh. "Do you know this man?"

And oh, how we laughed. We added that line to our arsenal of Things To Say To Remind Us Of The Trip, and now we use it constantly whenever one of us is confused. Why is this bread stale when I only bought it yesterday? I don't know; do you know this man? Is this the right button to press to get the DVD player to work? Hmm, I'm not sure---do you know this man?

All joking aside, though, I think I need to file a missing persons report, perhaps approach a few people myself and ask them if they Know This Man, the one up the top there with the three-day stubble and the pretty eyes. Do you know him? I think I knew him once. But that was back in the days before he was kidnapped by his computer, before he spent every free hour sorting and filing and making sense of the five thousand photos he took over three months in Asia, and then designing a gallery in which to house them. (That's not just a random number, by the way; he really did take five thousand photos. Give or take a few hundred. But probably give.)

Because all of those Flickr pictures I posted while we were away, those ones over in the sidebar on the right? Those have been my photographs, not Sean's. You may have already guessed that, what with the blurriness and the poor composition and all. But his photographs---oh, his photographs are a thing to behold indeed! His photographs are beautiful, and I would urge you, if you have a few minutes to spare, to go and have a look at them. Because then, if nothing else, at least every evening I spent watching Laguna Beach by myself---neglected, lonely, and really confused about all the Alexes---will have been worth it.