It goes like this more often than I care to admit. I’ll get an idea for a blog, in this case our worm-ranch adventure I started talking about a couple of weeks ago, and suddenly, without warning, the story, like Frankenstein’s monster, takes on a life of its own. Bit by bit, things that I stuck into the original tale, a sentence here or there, a little poke of fun I made – anything – shows up in the real world and I find myself in the grip of something I thought was under my control. The extension of the worm story which occurred last week, featuring the Universe, and the subsequent comment from a blog enthusiast who 1) suggested that I consider members of the llama family for the next addition to the ranch, and 2) told me my thoughts on the Universe were incorrect and that what I should do with those ideas involved a goat and a Barbie doll (I decided against posting that comment for fear of damaging the emerging psyches of my younger readers), should have been all the warning I needed. But…

Hmmmm… I thought. Llamas…

A thought which was, naturally, followed by another ill-timed opening of my mouth.

“We should get a horse.” I said.

“Why?”

“To help herd the llamas.”

“We don’t have any llamas.”

“Good point, but we might someday. And being a ranch and all…” I let the trial balloon sail up.

“Horses stink and the yard’s not big enough.”

“Good point. We could make it a pony.” I presented a reasonable compromise.

“They stink and they bite.”

Damn!

My trial balloon burst and I settled into a funk that went unbroken until we boarded an airliner and settled in for the long haul.

Many of you have experienced the joy that is modern intercontinental air travel. You wake up one morning and spend your day sealed in a pressurized cylinder while trying to sleep in a seat that was originally designed for the CIA to use in one of their secret prisons.

“Sure we could add more padding,” said the flight attendant. “But the pilots union just won a new contract. Would you like a pretzel or peanut?”

“I’ll just wait. What time do you serve dinner?”

“Would you like a pretzel or peanut?”

So twelve hours later you bid the smiling, well-paid and fed pilots goodbye at the door and emerge from the airplane two hours and forty minutes earlier than when you boarded. It’s the same morning all over again.

You are jetlagged.

For me, being jetlagged has this totally surreal feel to it, like I can’t quite get my head around a troubling thought: a thought I can’t quite figure out why I would bother thinking and why it would trouble me even if I bothered to do so. It is a state of mind in which our friend from last week, the Universe, chooses to do its best work.

We disembarked the plane at Narita International in Tokyo and set off looking for someplace to rest. While walking through a passenger lounge we passed a polished-granite counter upon which sat some treats for the weary traveler, a couple of juice machines, and a bottle of Jack Daniel’s sour mash whiskey. The bottle was flanked by an empty glass and a bucket of ice.

Jeez, I thought. That’s something I didn’t expect to see in Japan.

Which is when I glanced to my left and saw a bedraggled Australian – yes, you can tell just by looking – leaning up against a statue, holding his iPhone at arm’s length, and taking his picture with his stone companion.

Must be looking for a plausible story when his next Match.com date asks him who got cut out of his profile picture.

And then he moved.

The statue he was cuddling was the biggest goddamned maneki-neko – our other friend from last week – I have ever seen. The jumbo kitty was staring exactly at the point on the counter where sat the bottle of Jack Daniel’s. Not willing to pass up a direct instruction from the Universe, I went over, poured a couple of fingers in the glass, and dropped in some ice. The ice made the sound that they use in movies when they want you to think how cool it would be to be dropping ice in a glass destined for the hand of Angelina Jolie, or some similarly unapproachable starlet.

We sat at a table waiting for our flight to be called.

“What’s that you’re drinking?”

“Jack Daniel’s on the rocks.” I made a ching-ching motion and took a sip. “Ahhh… Just like when the cowboys came in from a hard day on the ranch.”

“Would you please drop it with the horse nonsense?”

The word substitution was my own. I pouted and tried to make my jetlagged lower lip quiver. But it did no good.

I couldn’t get over the idea of me and a horse riding the micro-range and rustling up whatever. I needed to find an acceptable substitute.

Our flight was called and about six hours later, or maybe it was sixteen, we landed at Bangkok, Thailand in the middle of a torrential thunderstorm. It was ninety degrees Farenheit, or, as they say in the local parlance, thirty-two Celsius. Leaving the terminal was like walking into a hot, wet wall. I didn’t know what time it was. I didn’t know what day it was. By that point I had either been up for thirty six hours or I was just getting set to board a plane in Seattle and retake the trip I had just completed. Like I said, jetlag really messes with my head.

The next morning, after another sleepless night, the only thing that had changed was that I now had a pounding headache to go along with my complete temporal disorientation.

“Oh, you poor thing.” I detected a hint of sarcasm. “What you need is a Thai massage.”

You may lower your eyebrows.

There are three kinds of massage for which Thailand is noted, two of them have no place in our narrative. However, the third, the Traditional Thai Massage, is an ages-old practice woven into Thai society. For the practitioner it is a form of meditation, identifying problem areas and triggering the appropriate acupressure points. For the massagee it is an incomparable experience leaving one relaxed, refreshed, and invigorated. Or so said the brochure.

Sounded exactly like what I needed.

Off we went to the spa. We were led to two massage tables and instructed to relax while they got ready. Thai massage, I learned, is a medical practice dating back to prehistory. It was described to me alternately as “yoga being done on you” and “like being twisted into a pretzel.”

As a person who has been unable to touch his toes since the eighth grade, neither of those options sounded like something I would be able to work with. As you might imagine, the period of relaxation was, for me, not working out. And it wasn’t looking too good in the refreshed and invigorated department either.

The curtain parted, and a masseuse walked through the gap. She was a very fit, twenty-something who looked like she would be gentle and understanding to an inflexible, jetlagged tourist. She walked to the other table.

Next through the curtain was a guy of the approximate scale of a sumo wrestler who bumped into the table without slowing down. I exclaimed and he looked in the direction he thought my voice was coming from, i.e. not at me. My masseur was blind, as many of the most talented are. He was, indeed, a skilled practitioner of his ancient art and within short order my skeleton had been removed from my body and he began reinserting it, bone by bone.

Once reassembled the “adjustment” part of the process began and my various limbs and extremities were twisted to unnatural angles and then pressed upon with his full weight. It hurt. Then it hurt more. Then I couldn’t breathe. It felt like I was being crushed by…

…an ELEPHANT!

My jetlagged epiphany awoke a strength within me I was unaware of, and I jumped up, dumping my poor therapist to the floor. I rushed to the other table and, in my time-zone delirium, screamed: “An elephant! We could get an elephant to ride around on the micro-ranch!”

“Uh, yeah. That might work.”

Clearly, I wasn’t the only one suffering from the trip’s after-effects but I took my only chance and at three o’clock that afternoon, in a thundering downpour, we walked into the stables of Bangkok Bennie’s Pachyderm Palace. We had smiles on our faces and a spring in our steps.

Bennie could see us coming from a mile away.

We checked out his charges and were about to sign the papers when fate intervened.

“Don’t you think we should take her for a test drive first?”

Bennie, shocked, dropped the pen. “Er, well, we can’t do that here, this being a major metropolitan area and all.” He fished into his pocket and pulled out a stained brown business card. “But call these guys.” He smiled like a mongoose looking at a snake. “They’ll set you up.”

So we did, and by dinner we had received our confirmation back from ElephantStayin Ayutthaya, Thailand. The brief message read: “Confirmed: Three days/two nights/two people/one elephant.”

We were set.