“Personality Disorder Begins to Take Shape inside Me”

A great many people were unhappy about the coup, despite all the pictures of people going to take photos with tanks that invaded the streets and roads of Bangkok. One of those was obviously me.

At my office, the mistress of the guy who owned the magazine, was going after me for my writings which her lover, the owner, found dangerous for the magazine. Those mysterious men in uniform still showed up now and then, and with the sour economy as a result of the coup, the owner began cutting back money and putting my livelihood in danger. The magazine was also a front for investments by Thaksin's people and with the changing of the political wind, it’s meaning to the owner lessened.

For the first time in a long time, I felt pressured. Till then, I was like most normal Thais. In that I drink, go to clubs and go out whoring. Since most business people in Bangkok were like that, it wasn’t a big deal to do the same. My family was pretty happy with the money I was bringing home. All was fine and I was not too far from the standard deviation.

My only angle was that I was a writer with critical thinking skills. And those critical thinking skills needed an outlet.

So as you probably guessed, I didn’t shut up for too long and before you knew it, I was blasting away at the coup. Looking back, perhaps I was one of the first who started throwing salvos of cannon balls at the coup. A few followed suit but not too many. I was back at my old tricks and was posting those cannon balls of articles in Pantip.com that was allowed to open under strict conditions.

One day some guy who probably had had enough of me at Pantip.com, posted the question why is there only “Tavivoot” (my Thai name)who was attacking the military and the coup, and where was everybody else? Well everybody else, not long after that question, started to show up again. My fame in those early days was that because I couldn't write, I started reading. And some of of my reading was about one of the fathers of Thailand's constitutional democracy, Predi Panomyong, who died in exile in Paris a few years ago, who analyzed Thai politics as having classes and one of the classes was the Amart class. Amart were nothing but Royalists who were used by the Thai Kings of the past and evolved with the modernization of Thailand into civil servants. Amart loosely, therefore, comprises of the civil servants, high-society types and rich folks.

Well I looked around at the coup and what they were saying, at the Yellow Shirts, the leading civil servants especially those in the judiciary, and also at high-society rich folks and I wrote that the coup was nothing but a “re-emergence” of the Amart Class. Before you knew it, the story became the intellectual rationale for many leading scholars in Thailand and there was then a legitimate case against the coup - and not just to get Thaksin back.

I started having fun at writing again and thai-jourmnalist-democratic-front.com was getting lots of members and page views. My writings also got posted all over the internet on all sorts of websites and internet news sites. It got to the point that main stream press like Khao Sod and Manager were attacking me. Both ran stories about how I must be out of work to be so active in my writings and in posting those writings all over the place.

But the bottom line was, I was now going against the trend and prevailing winds of the coup and the powerful military. Overtly, I didn’t care and not afraid. But deep inside, I began to suffer. I started to look back across my shoulders and I definitely had the sensation that someone was constantly following me about. There were a few times when I dreaded starting the car for fear of a car bomb. And I certainly didn’t walk into a darkened environment too often.

Unlike others who were attacking the coup and the military, apart from a handful of academics who were after the Amart angle, I didn’t hide myself. And that meant I told everyone my mobile phone number and where my main hangouts were and also where I live - all of that right in the website.

So one day, at Singh Beer House on Asoke road, my known hang-out, I was having a beer and two foreign guys came to sit at the table next to mine. Back then Singh Beer House was one of the few places you could still smoke in a closed environment and so this foreign guy leaned over and said could he borrow my lighter. Before long I told him I was an internet journalist. And he laughs and said these days noone reads the main stream ass kissing press.

Then I froze because he said he worked the cultural desk at a foreign embassy and he just wanted to let me know that Thaksin’s life was in danger and that the coup leaders were positioning themselves to play politics after a promised election had taken place.

As some of you might know, the cultural desk at foreign embassies nearly always means intelligent agency people of that country.

So I wrote several stories about what the cultural guy told me - like the coup people were after Thaksin’s life, to the point of sending assassination teams and kidnap teams across the globe hunting for Thaksin - as the cultural guy said.

If you asked what type of independent confirmation I had, before going public with such a crazy sounding plot, all I can say is that personally I felt danger was in the air, and also that before Thaksin was overthrown, there had been many widely publicized stories on attempts on his life.

But the reaction to my story was more profound than I thought. I thought it would be circulating only in the cyber world of the internet, but this time, these stories broke into the mainstream press. And before you knew it, news about the coup people going after Thaksin’s life was splattered across practically everywhere - along with the other stories the cultural guy told me. Thaksin himself, again freaked out by me for the second time, totally revamped his security strategy.

Personally, all that notoriety went straight to my head. I felt important like a big shot, pulling the strings of even the main stream press. But with that bloated head also came a deepening of dread, that I have somehow crossed the line into something wild and uncontrollable. And that I have really hurt the military coup leaders. It was very dangerous to do such a thing in a country like Thailand - where people still just disappeared never to be found - most likely by an independent intelligence and national security apparatus that operates outside the law.

My writing skills were never better and I wasn’t going to stop. I was totally addicted like a heroine user and I was on the high of a life time. And what that really meant, in hindsight, is that I was truly going crazy and reality was feeding my schizoid condition.

It would be way into the future, to about the second quarter of 2009, while the world was in an economic slump, that with a lot of help from my friends, I was to regain myself again.