Get Your Gun And Meet Me By The Door

I have come to realize why I have become and feel the way I do now.






I am hope-less.

And Monsters Came Raining Down

I think in a hospital, what truly separate nurses from doctors in delivering patient care is the night shifts.

Where in daytime, the nurses are basically carrying out orders and treatment plans from the doctors. Night shift nurses own the hospital after midnights. On call doctors have to cover several levels, thus incapacitating them in the whines and whims of each patient suffering at night. Probably the only time a patient would see a junior doctor at night is that he/she needs a blood sample or he/she is crashing. The night shift nurses are their only lifeline.

In night shifts, I had spent hours beside a critical patient, spent hours trying to chill down a feverish patient with several baths, reassured anxious patients and families, attended to patients in pain, shock and delirium, fought with the dazed and sometimes, literally sat there with them in bleary eyes until the spooked ones slept.

No one delivers more care than night shift nurses.

No one.


Just got off from my three nights. On the second one, I had a conversation.

Let's call him Patient Boy. He is only sixteen and he had multiple brain surgeries. Nowadays he only wakes up to throw up. He was a bright student before his accident and was in fact in one of the most prestigious school in the country, now he could barely remember his own name.

Infection hit him pretty bad, tainting his bloodstream, circulating the venom in his body. It was four in the morning when I crossed over to his bedside with my gloves and scrubs. I switched on the light, the only blight in the room. As I ran the antibiotics with syringes and burettes into a line on his arm, he woke up and stared at me.

PatientBoy: Ah Kiat?

Me: Ya. Sorry. Be done in a minute.

PatientBoy: Ah Kiat?

Me: Mmm?

PatientBoy: What... What you know?

Me: Huh? (Leaning over)

PatientBoy: What do you... you know... you know other than?

Me: Again? What do I know?

PatientBoy: Other than nurse.

Me: What do I know other than nursing?

He nodded.

Me: I know many things. All the small things I guess. I know how to draw. I can draw cartoons with no legs. I can't draw legs well. I know how to write. Not very good, but I just like to write. Almost anything. I know. I know how to watch good movies. I had been a reviewer once and I can do a analysis and comparison of films and genres.

There I was, in the wee hours of morning, trying to prove to myself that I know something, to a stranger.

Me: How about you? What do you know?

PatientBoy: I know nothing.

Me: Come on. What do you like best?

PatientBoy: Computer games.

Me: Ah. Last time I played a bit of computer games. I'm an impatient guy, so when the tough gets going, or when I couldn't jump that virtual wall in the game, I gave up. I rather write, create than to jump through hoops devised by others. In another words, I'm not really good at computer games.

PatientBoy: You are lazy.

Me: That's correct.

Welcome To Earth

We are going to talk about actors.

Xie ShaoGuang is the only Singaporean actor that can act. Fullstop. Yes, I had stop watching television since he retired early this year.

If I calculate the ratio of gender and race in raknax's award of professional acting, I would probably be a sexist and a racist.

The handful of actresses weighting against the list of male actors in my books were Jodie Foster, Christina Ricci, Emma Thompson and Emily Watson. The list for the male actors is much much more.

With the folding of 2007, I was supremely happy that I had found my favorite black actors. And for that, most part of this entry will be about them two.

Samuel L. Jackson for his performance in Black Snake Moan.

And Will Smith for his portrayal of the Omega Man in I Am Legend.

I Am Legend sank for two reasons. The director Francis Lawrence and the fucking director Francis Lawrence.

Francis, you ruined John Constantine a while ago, one of the greatest character ever.

Then you went on to ruin I Am Legend this year. One of the greatest Sci-Fi book ever.

You ruin my Christmas. Please, for the love of God, scram back to make MTVs for Britney Spears and Jennifer Lopez.

For the rest, if you are keen on watching I Am Legend, watch it for Will Smith.

For the longest time, Will had been the black John MacClane. These couple of years, we see his direction shift as he made somber movies like Ali, The pursuit of happyness, I. Robot and now I am Legend.

Will is the lonely Omega Man of an infected Earth. He had a dog called Sam. This can be parallel to Tom Hanks' Cast Away. Tom had a volley ball named Wilson. If you really had to ask, I could not and never imagine crying for a pissin ball. Now a dog as your only companion, I can. After Will held his infected mutt in his arms and strangled his only companionship in the world, he cried in fury, solitude, grief and rock bottom sorrow.

My favorite scene and that alone defined Will as one of the greatest actor alive was the one he went back to the movie rental store after Sam's death. He was sunken, his eyes bloated and cheeks trembling with tears. He approached a female mannequin and said shakily:

'Hello. I... I promised a friend (Sam) I would say hello to you today.'

His eyes darting and more tears began to flow.

'Please say hello to me.'

'Please say hello to me.' He begged again.

One can never get any lonelier that that.

Heartbeats - The Knife

The Knife - Pass This On

D Is For Dangerous

The Comedy Of Memory is a bizarre story about two girls. One has no future to boot and the other comes from the future. Almost everyone have their names that begins with the letter D.

Darcy.
Dorian.
Daniel.
Dahlia.
Furiya. (Probably have to kill him off in the story for not having a D in his name.)

It's a common habit not to name characters with the same letters as to avoid confusion. And then I read Austen's Persuasion. I think there were three or four dudes named Charles in the book. It was hard at first, I have to identify which Charles was who by finding who's with hanging out with him at that time.

Thus, the experiment with the D's. Will good management with the storytelling able to ease reader's way into easily identifying characters with similar names?

D Is For Damage.

Dorian jumps the tracks of time against her will by a greater plan. She's a space monkey, training to press a couple of buttons, whom will never know what was her purpose or why she had died. Like a phoenix, she was nauseatingly reborn again and again into a variety of space, time, culture and locations. Determined to learn about her purpose and the identity of the higher power that shuffles her in the flux of time, she had to remember to remember.

Question: What effect will time travel have on people?

Brain damage! Time travel shatters memories. It was not known if Dorian's selective amnesia was deliberate or due to the trauma of time jumping. Dorian have no effective time based perception, deficit in attention span and possesses a damaged retrospective memory. Dorian functions instead by prospective memory which are event based. She can only progress her life with cues.

Stuff her into a MRI machine and have her on a CT scan, Dorian will present a complicated case of neurological disorders with plenty of lesions and stenosis, preferably in the prefrontal lobe and the hippocampus region.

D Is For Darcy

The questions with Darcy.

Darcy's occupation - Chiromancer or hair dresser? It's a tougie, though I thought it would be interesting to feature palmistry in the story.

Darcy's involvement in the greater plan? I'm still trying to figure that out. Can a single person ever strive to doom a planet?

D Is For D-Cup
Unfortunately, there is no person with such bust size in the story. Only God, Bryan, Chang and all those who knows me knows I love Big Busty Naturals.

Darcy Goes To Work

Currently writing a short fiction called 'The Comedy Of Memory'. Despite the title, it was however not funny, at all. Want to write it decent and readable - testy, but trying. I'm posting an excerpt of the first draft, probably will bleach it again and again, probably will delete it altogether if it clash with the other parts. Am posting it because I sort of like how this one turns out.

Darcy Goes To Work

   Darcy decided that she had sat by the fridge long enough for the shadows to seep in from the window grills. It had begun to rain and the storm was matronly to care into every homes. Daniel's rage parasitic to the roving climate always invites rain without fail. Darcy had wanted to grin at her grim observation was hindered by the ungenerous black eye stinging on the right.
   What is the time now, Darcy wondered as she gotten up from the floor. She had work to get to. Avoiding splinters from the broken blender and the porcelain plates, she ran the tap at the sink. Daniel won't be back for hours, she would have to clean up the mess before he gets home. With a damp rag, she pried the bruises and blood off her discolored cheek with abrupt grimaces. Darcy wondered if they could afford another blender? Do they really need one? It's only good in making cocktails in this home. Alcohol always give Daniel an excuse to act up. The vicious circle with Darcy at its mercy. She also wondered if her body would ever get used to Daniel's rage?
   She thought about the times when she was being little, with Dahlia. Their father used the belt on them all the time. Time is a funny thing. Human is the funny thing, that it. With enough time, human can get used to almost everything. She had gotten used of the belt by the time she turned eleven and she didn't even winced once. Then their father had decided that the time for corporal punishment was over in their household and never laid another hand on the girls again. How funny humans can be? She ran away from a home that had decided not to beat her ever into this home that hits her every other day. The cycle again. Will Daniel come to that epiphany that her father had? Her right eye throbbed wickedly at that hint of suggestion.
 
   Mopping away the glasses and her blood off her kitchen floor, Darcy went for work downtown. It was a school night and the evening bus was packed to hilt. The shingles and the concrete roofs were drummed with the machinations of the monsoon. As Darcy had stayed before the school, she had a seat by the window staring listlessly at the wayward rain before the wet kids trampled onto the bus. The city cried its teardrops down her window panes. Her murky reflection showed a middle age woman, malnourished and black-eyed. Though the wind sewed her bones, it smeared a numbing frost on her epileptic cheek. Her eyes, uneven and seemingly hollow glared at herself in the splashing lights of the evening traffic had tried to explain that it had almost always rained whenever she was hurt was nature’s compensation for her inability to cry. It’s hard not to get self philosophical and spiritual when you are always with yourself. With no one to talk to. And when you have no where else to run and hide, you’ll seek comfort in that space, no matter how claustrophobic, will shelter a womb for you to crawl inside. Just to die in there so you could live another day. She looked to the urban infrastructures and its unnatural lights for an escape.
   There will be none, Darcy had decided long ago. She would have left Daniel if she could, but she couldn't do it. The sacrifices she had made for their relationship and they had gone through so much together.  She still loves the young poet. It was this love that burns her most than his rage. Perhaps if one day, both her heart and the clouds could stop crying, just like when she was eleven again, when the alligator belt with silver buckle stop breaking her soul, then she could be forever free from men. The groundhog days of Darcy Kathiravan are in prefect sync then, she thought, with all that ever will be in her future. Imprinted on every reflection on the windows, the buses, the gutter puddles, the moonshine and every broken blender was her future on the kitchen floor with Daniel and the thousand puzzles of glassware.

The Killers - Mr. Brightside

Jimi Hendrix - Red House

Radiohead - All I Need

I Am Your Father

My father was a stern and silent man.

Every night, he would sit at in the kitchen by himself, rolled tobacco into smokes and drank beer alone.

He was probably lonely. But he was a proud man and men like him kept to themselves.

And he would sat there in the shadows, drinking to himself.

I am becoming my Dad.