Rant

More kids poured in. One more hour. The band probably will be late anyway. I was so bored. Standing bored. Rock gig is a funny thing. You pay hundreds of dollars, you have to queue hours, fight your way to the front and stand throughout the whole show. It’s pure sadism compared to going the Indoor Stadium.

Then a good old-fashioned conversation opened up. Not before me, but behind me.

Him: ‘Hi, you’re here alone?’ (Nice. This is gonna be interesting.)

Her: ‘Ya, you too?’

Him: ‘Yaya, My friends are not into Placebo.’ (So are my friends.)

Her: ‘Mine too. I always have to come alone for these gigs.’ (Alone? Awesome!)

Him: ‘Ah. So what else did you went?’

Her: ‘Paramore? (And some more shitty bands I cannot remember.)

Him: ‘I was there at Paramore’s too. It was awesome! So was Lifehouse!’ (Shitheads. Gay. Shitheads.)

Her: ‘Yaya, The sounds were amazing! I heard Stereophonics would be here. I can’t wait to go!’ (Dakota… Think that’s the only song I cared.)

Him: ‘Ah. I’m not into them…’

Her: ‘How about AC/DC? Or Led Zeppelin?’

Him: ‘Heard about them, but never really download their songs before.’ (Fraggot maggot.)

Her: ‘You should try Stairway to Heaven.’ (Or Immigrant Song, Black Dog, When The Levee Breaks…)

Him: ‘…’ (You and your Lifehouse cha-cha. Buried your head a hole and hide. A chick’s musical taste is better than yours.)

Her: ‘…’

Him’…’

Him: ‘So what songs do you think they’ll play tonight?’ (Nice rebound though.)

Her: ‘Hopefully all of their new album’s.’ (They should play all their old songs, cause I didn’t catch the new album.)

Him: ‘I hope they play Bright Lights.’ (Bright Lights?)

Her: ‘Yaya! I adore Bright Lights! I listen to it every night!’ (Must check out Bright Lights.)

Him: ‘I hope Battle For The Sun will be on too.’ (This conversation is getting annoying.)

Her: ‘I want them to play Infrared Red, you like their old songs?’ (This conversation is not getting annoying anymore. Discuss more on their older songs, cause they are the only ones I know.)

Him: ‘Actually I have only listened to their Battle For The Sun album.’ (GET OUTTA HERE!)

Her: ‘I like their ‘Meds’ album. It is the greatest.’ (I worship her. I really do.)

Him: ‘Do you like Every You And Every Me?’ (I am surprised you know that.)

Her: ‘Nope.’

Me and him went totally silent. This is bad. Who is she? What is she doing here not knowing what is that song? This is so wrong.

That could only be one reason.

Him: ‘This is odd but how old are you?’

Her: ‘I’m sixteen.’ (BURN! FLASH ALERT! JAILBAIT! JAILBAIT!) ‘And you?’

Him: ‘I’m twenty one…’

I pretended to look for friends I don’t have and turned around.

Gawd. She looked like nineteen and he looked like twelve.

Speak about plastic reality.

 

Spring Is Here Again, Reproductive Glands

Dear fat shit dressed in communist red,

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Journals_(Cobain)

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This entry is a response to j's.

While she's on the topic, regardless if it's in jest or she bored, ya have to admit it's in everybody's head. Yes, I'm not ashamed to admit that I've contemplated suicide before. Be it a phase, an idea of escape, religious or last resort, I think it's human nature to think about it.

Who wants to live forever anyway?

I always remember the kitchen window at my parents' house. They took off the iron grills when their kids were big enough and replaced with sliding glass. When the glass were slided all to aside, it's just like a mid-air doorway to the skies. It's wide enough to fit two person, probably they have to help one another up the ledge, holding still to one's elbow and when the wind is right, it'll pull them off. And the wind is always right up at the seven floor.

I think I was about sixteen and thought of flying out that kitchen window humored me until I was twenty. Of course I wouldn't consider jumping off my own block. I'm not out for revenge. I guess enough is simply enough. I have seen life, passing around the same corner, the way it was yesterday, one year before and always will be in centuries. I have nothing to look forward to other than waking up to depression and my inferiority complex. No future, no love and no dreams. It has became a struggle to even begin my day. I felt drained at the slightest business and choked and suffocated with regularity. The people I have to meet and small talks I would have with them, hating every letter of it. I dragged my footsteps and turned insomniac. I read books and watch films excessively for escape. At train stations, in malls, around the fire exits, I will always look at the tiny sign of a green man running towards a promised exit. I wished I was green.

At sixteen I gave life a chance to redeem itself. By twenty five if I'm still not happy, in any ways or forms that allow me to look forward to the rest of my life, I will kill myself. I had plenty of time to lay it out. Plotting your own death is quite similar in plotting others. In Singapore where homes are built to reach the skies, jumping off them is a popular choice. However it will have to be far away from when I lived. I can't let my parents or the neighbours see the sight of me on the pavement. It will be in Jurong or somewhere across the sunny island. I will be fallible, unidentifiable and free hitting the gravel.

But that was years ago. Now when I looked back, I like to think that joining nursing has changed that. It allowed me to meet my wife, caring for the sick gave me a purpose and some societal meaning for existence, there were always be better books, films, music and ideas for inspirations and I like it when people read what I write. Alive I am able reminisce about the misguided bouts with my school fling, pretend that I could still can become a bestseller and continued to be enthralled by how perversely the beautiful japanese pornstars can be.

One lifetime. No less, no more. It's the same deal as everybody else.

 

Our Overrated Future

There was this alien family from the moon. They worked hard their entire lives to pay for a space vacation to Earth. By then when they had saved enough to fly to Earth, Earth is nothing but rubbles of smoke and dirt.

Alien Dad: ‘I can’t believe we've paid so much for this shit. This is exactly like home.’

Before I Axe This Draft

    Like the rest, Mother attempted to fail her intelligence test. They were jostled into a dark cell with swinging naked bulbs. Genders a building apart. They were squeezed into benches, sixty people filling the cell to the brim. The air was thick with gravity, sickness and hunger. Mother stared long and hard at the thinned windows, hoping to catch a glimpse of her husband in the next building. Questionnaires were thrust to the ladies; they were printed on the shreds of their flags. Flags of defeated nations were recycled mainly for toilet paper. Always shreds of them, never in a single whole piece. It was against new decree to keepsake a whole flag of the defeated nations.      

   She saw herself instead reflected by the hanging bulbs that hovered like stars upon the black windows. Mother must have lost half of herself; she could feel her ribs under her breasts and goose bumps on her thin scalp. She wanted so much to reach for the thinned window, to touch herself or to touch her husband in the next building, or to touch the real stars outside this tiny cell. Her warden barked for her attention and proceeded to instruct the ladies through an interpreter to fill the questionnaires. The nervous interpreter spoke clumsy English which incurred dozen of bewildered eyes in the shivering darkness to question his questions. After a while though the ladies have not gotten used to broken language, they scribbled their answers with ease and careful stupidity. Like the rest of the men in the next building, they attempted to fail their intelligence test.

   But deep down, the men and ladies knew that the tests applied to them for so many days now were inconsequential to their fates. Their captors have long gathered information of their previous employment status and genetic facts. They were men and women of intellects and this bit did not bide well at all for them in times of intellectual prosecutions. These little tests that could well went on for weeks were designed to break them. The submissive ones would be sent to the colonized mines and the rest, shot like dogs.

   Like the rest, Mother thought that the Germans would lose the war. Though it was unlikely as the Germans had to fight two fronts, it was the Soviet sabotage of the Manhattan Project allowed the Germans to first develop their atomic bombs and tip the balance of war in their favor. Calculating that their nuclear arsenal were still infantile and expensive to produce, the Nazis had focused their atomic holocausts on USSR and pushed into heart of the Soviet to increase Germany’s size of Lebensraum.

   After the test, the ladies were lined back to their holding area. It was a makeshift bunker where they cramped to sleep sitting up. They had been holed up here for almost a month after the fall of their country. During the daytime, they could walk around the fortified camp where they could see their husbands and sons across the barbwire, but interaction was forbidden. Sometimes they would be brought in to the building for interviews and sometimes some will not return. Music, mostly Germanic folk tunes were allowed but books and board games were banned. At nighttime when they were not made to do tests, they had to endure hours of propaganda films and radio.

   Through the radio it was apparent that the prosecution of the intellectuals had topped Chancellor Göring’s priority for domestic security of the defeated nations. The radio urged that harboring intellectuals could be a capital felony and reminded that it’s a national duty to blow whistle on suspected intellectuals and harborers alike.

   Moments after the radio and the lights went out in their bunker, a bony woman whispered to Mother in raspy voice, as if she was speaking in the rain. ‘How long is this going to last? There must be a point to all this.’

   ‘They will move us again.’ Mother replied with her tired eyes still closed. She listened to her own heartbeats and thought about her husband.

   The bony woman remained silent for a moment as if she was listening to her own heart too when the shadows of the barbwire thrown from the roving watchtower swam across their walls. ‘Death camps?’

   Mother did not answered to that. It would be unlikely, Mother thought. After all the tests on ripped flags they had done, there must be a point. Somewhere. ‘That, or the moon.’

   Mother could felt the head of the bony woman nodding softly. They kept quiet when shuffle of footsteps pounced outside their bunker.

   ‘There’s nothing there on the moon.’ The bony woman moved her cracked lips.

   Then there was a gunshot from the male bunker across the fortified fence. Immediately, the ladies rose and tried to rush outside to see. The armed guards by the exit pushed them back in and they attached themselves by the grilled windows and saw that more gunfire exploded, illuminating the night each time. The women began to cry and one tried to scream her sons’ names, the others covered her mouth and held her down. Two bodies were dragged out from male bunker and could not be recognized in the moonlight.

   After a while, the women slide back into their sitting positions and were all insomniac, Mother closed her eyes tightly and replied to the bony woman, ‘There’s nothing here either.’

City Of Life And Death

Went to watch 南京！南京！ or City Of Life And Death with HL and Vim.

It was a Chinese film about the Nanjing Massacre in 1937. For most movies I always know what to expect but with Nanjing I was being experimental and had wanted to watch a China made movie ever since I returned from Mainland.

My impression with the Rape Of Nanjing was not at all sufficient. I knew that it was the Chinese holoclaust where many chinese were brutually murdered or raped by Japanese. But beyond that I know not what to expect other than the extent of a documentary film.

The movie was presented in black and white. Grim and dastardly. The Nanjing soldiers despite putting up a brave resistance had lost China's capital to the better equipped Japs. Liu Ye, the only Chinese actor I knew in the movie was brilliant until the very end. Liu Ye had minimal dialogue and had expressed himself impressively with his eyes. Until his very end, which was fifteen minutes into the show.

Yes, the star of the movie, the ironman Liu Ye himself perished fifteen minutes into the movie.

The fall of Nanjing then unfolded the tragedy of hopesfall and pain. All men in Nanjing are rounded up and machine gunned, burned or buried alive.

What was left was women and children, a lawless capital with restless Jap soldiers with endless ammunitions.
 
Ironically, the only haven that stands between them was a Nazis businessman Rabe who founded a safe house. Like savage beasts, when the Japs wanted to expand their comfort women population, they cunningly devise all sorts of methods to gain entry into the safe house.

The movie was infested with gore, merciless slaughter, rape, rape and more rape. Streets of Nanjing were littered with corpses, metal barbs and singings of the victorious Japanese soldiers. Children were thrown off buildings to coerce folks into submission. Naked corpses of comfort women piled up \and discarded past the lines of eager Jap soldiers waiting to have their ways with the remaining battered and near death comfort women. Some women were raped to death, while others went insane and were shot like dogs. This is a movie of intense fear and hopeslessness.

Perhaps the film's subtle message was the hope of life and the courage of self sacrifice, but those values were overshadowed by its horror and japanese atrocities. To me, it is like watching Hostel or Saw, but worse. In torture porn, it's quite individually directed. The fear is contained compared to Nanjing's travesty of death and death of your loved ones.

This film is suitable for the older generation of grandpas and grandmas who cursed whenever a Jap drama came on telly and blew up whenever their forgiving grandchildren who don't give a fuck about history, don't have roots and will grow up to be dipshits.

This movie is also suitable for all Japanese people who shunned the atrocities that their forefathers did and wondered why we Chinese hated them so much. They should watch it and feel the shame that they should be having.

 

Upstairs

I'm writing this because I can't sleep.

Someone is dropping coins a floor upstairs. Heavy, loud coins are being dropped, rolled around and picked again. Sometimes it's a coin and sometimes it's a lot of them. Sometimes they sounded like marbles and sometimes it scratched at every corner of my ceiling.

It's two in the morning and it has been going on for two hours now.

I don't want to go upstairs and complain, because it will be the same old stale story: some dead kid who like to play coins in the middle of the night used to live there and stuff like that.

Why can't it be sex noises instead?

 

505

Grand Taoist Master = GTM

Before the GTM went into the top of the mountain, before he stepped into the cave to meditate, the GTM did before he waved his disciples goodbyes and before he would enter a ten year trance that would promise enlightenment, he bought with him only a change of robes and his grass slippers.

And ten dollars.

'Why ten dollars?' Tze Wen, his youngest disciple asked the GTM before he went off.

'So perhaps I can purchase a bowl of noodles when I complete my training in the mountains.' GTM replied.

Tze Wen pressed on, 'But a bowl of noodles only cost two bucks, master.'

The GTM smiled and replied, 'Read more news, you idiotic calf. Inflation will kill us all.'

With that, the GTM went into the mountains.

Wile the rest of the sect went on with their business, Tze Wen though naive decided to wait for the GTM at the foot of the mountain. He read everyday.

At only the fifth year, Tze Wen caught the GTM coming down from the mountain. GTM was unshaved, smelly but oddly radiant.

'My master, you have anticipated that it would take ten years before you could gain enlightenment and nirvana, it has only been five years. I know because I read the news everyday. Have you already been enlightened or are you giving up?' Tze Wen asked.

GTM just smiled and asked to be lead to town.

In town GTM used his ten dollars to purchase a pack of cigarettes instead of food.

'Why are you smoking? It's forbidden in our sect.' Tze Wen surprised. 'What happen?'

'I have reach enlightenment.' GTM traded his clothes with the stable boy. 'My enlightenment is that there is no more enlightenment. This is it. Live your life now.'

GTM completed his sentence by throwing off his grass slippers and smoked his way into the crowd.