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.

 

 

The Living Room

He polished the beer dry, the green bottle gleamed in the darkness of his living room triumphantly. That is how it should be done, he thought, beer should never be warm. People should never talk and drink at the same time that will only bring out the shit from the beer. Beer is as shitty as it gets if it’s warm, toast as a bone.

He smiled with his numbing face as he nodded to himself in the dark. The first beer always gets him in the face. His head nodding to the rhythm in his earphones as the clear crisp guitar scratched eight times on the seven and nine frets to the explosive bass drums. Of the beat to A Certain Romance.

‘God.’ He smiled to himself, ‘Arctic Monkeys should play in my wedding.’

He was in the living room, in front of youtube at his dinning table. It was midnight and so he had used the earphones. He had finished cleaning up the house when he decided he needed a beer, regardless if he had a buddy or not. It was hot and the beers were freezing in the fridge and he had finished sweeping the floor and mopping after mopping with soap and he had had his shower and he was alone and nobody is going to drink anything out from his fridge for the entire week.

The living room was dark because he had wanted to save electricity. Two people are paying for the fee of five people and that’s just crazy talk. He wished it was the afternoon and so he could unplug the earphones and let Andy Nicholson’s bass burstfire and ricochet off his purple walls. Instead he had to settle in playing air guitar and dance the forbidden dance that nobody are allowed to see in the confine of his chair.

The first beer warmed up him enough to write. Write what? Anything! He just needed the focus to keep his fingers tapping the scores away at the keyboard; otherwise they will just stick to swimming off in the air to the voice of Alex Turner. So he typed out one page detailing to the details of his afternoon cleaning every corner of his house. Then the first beer asked him to ask himself what’s the point. He shrugged while nodding to snare drums of ‘Perhaps Vampires Is A Bit Strong But…’ deleted the entry and begun a new one about brushing his teeth. Twenty words through and he wondered about boredom of teeth brushing but went on anyway because he had loved the constant drumming of his fingers across the keyboard and the guitar riffs in his ears. He soon scrapped away that entry too, scratched his numbing face and started a new one about enjoying cold beer after cleaning the house. He would write about the wonderful music of Arctic Monkeys and write about him writing.

When he was bored and his fingers tired from making nonsensical entries, he shut off the laptop at his dinning table and jumped into the corner of his very red couch, flicked on the table lamp and read Andre Dubus. He would read until he fell asleep on his numbing face to his first beer. His fingers aching of typing, his neck complaining from nodding with his ears, his shoulders ruining from the mopping and his eyes will open again to his living room when she returns from her night shift.

The Bed

The bed is one of the very last things they had bought of their furniture. This is not necessarily true; she had bought the bed frame along with the dressing table and the wardrobe for a bundle price. But he has never thought a bed frame enough to make it a bed - the bed is the mattress.

The history of beds he had slept in came in various forms. He had spent nights on the couch if his brother’s girlfriend came over. He had slept on the floor mattress, barely a piece of cotton in his parents’ room whenever his mother had turned on the air conditioner. His two other brothers would each take a corner around his mother’s bed.  Elbows and toes in each other’s hair and they would speak to each other in the cooling darkness. They would talk about everything until it was really late in the morning and they all have to wake up later for school and work. In his formative years of emotive tantrum, he would refuse to sleep in the house. He would sleep at the bench a distance from his flat, he would sleep beneath the shop house at the beach and he would sleep in his friends’ house. When his insomnia came after he graduated, he would sleep anywhere in the house and at least attempted to anyways. He tossed and turned in the kitchen or under the bed. Finally he will always gave up and stared blankly outside his kitchen window.

The irony when he goes traveling is always the hotel beds. There they were, majestically comfortable and puffy and cloudy, they are always the ones he had to spend the minimal time with. After all, a rare chance to go overseas no one would want to spend it all by sleeping in. On their Thailand trip he did it. He was so convinced that he had food poisoning from eating fired bugs from street, he insisted on spending the rest of his vacation in the hotel’s king sized bed, the kind that swallow you alive with thread counts, satin pillowcases and yellow table lamps.   

In fact when he had shopped for his bed, he had used the word ‘that kind that eats you alive’. He’s shopping for the ultimate cotton coffin. The one that you won’t mind dying in. He had heard so much about dying in one’s sleep. His primary school principle had told his school that it was a very much-preferred way to die. It is a very romantic and a dignified way to pass on. When he did nursing, he was then told dying in one’s sleep is actually suffocation. He shrugged away that scientific notion and went ahead and ordered ‘the kind that buries you alive’ mattress anyway. He guessed that he was more afraid of deprivation of comfort than death itself.

It was not that he had intend to spend a lot of time sleeping or bought the bullshite about how people will spend a quarter of their lives sleeping and thus the need for a better bed. He needs a good bed now that’s he’s married with her. He has to believe that it can work. If you ask him to close his eyes and talk about his parents or just get him drunk enough to feel sad, he will tell you about the voices between the walls. How when he was a boy in his bedroom tuning in to his parents’ conversations before they slept, across the rooms. It was before the time when his parents fought and slept in different rooms. It was a quieter time when they would ask about each other’s day and tease about little things. Sometimes his mother’s voice would go shrilly and called his father ‘Friend’ in Hokkien. People would nickname each other silly sweet titles but theirs was ‘Peng Yu Eh’. He could always picture them at the head of the bed, propped up on pillows, his father would probably smoke and they would talk until their voices were no more across the rooms. Or at least until he curled up and sleep like a ball in the covers. Safe and comforted by his parents’ bedtalk.

When they shopped for the bed, he had specifically asked for a high bed so that they can ‘climb into’. Actually a normal twelve inch mattress would suffice but he felt that he had to be animatedly specific to oppose the low lying Zen-like beds that were rampantly so in the rage. As a result he fell from his new bed once. It was three thirty in the morning and he was due for his morning shift in the next three hours, he woke up upon a thud and found himself on the floor. He was so embarrassed and looked around in the dark for her. She was sleeping like a log, her back against him with her face in her hair. At least he paid well for the individual pocketed spring mattress.

One night he was turning in with her, they heard noises between the walls. Being a newly weds in a new house there will always be irrational fear of breaking and entering. He climbed out of bed and checked all the windows, locked them and returned to the bed. More crashing sounds broke out from upstairs. It was one in the morning. The couple above raised their quarrels and their kids began to brawl. He listened closely and thought that he was back in his old flat when his parents used to fight endlessly in the nights. He used to wonder about his neighbors. What would they think and how would they look at him in the morning when they see each other in the corridors? Would they try to look into his house? Lying in the bed with her and listening to the fight a ceiling apart, he had become the neighbor. He pulled the covers to their chin and asked her to ignore the quarrel. And there he slept in the thick and soft bed, holding her hands and prayed that they will never end up like that.

The Things We Called Friends

Hi.

Thought I come up for air, ya know? Before I rejoin the rat pack again.

Busy is not really the word why I don't write anymore. Spent and only in a way that Philip K Dick knows how. Dick once describe exhaustion in scientific metaphors akin to a man after ejaculation. Of how physics deem that heat can only be transfer and never destroyed? Transference through ejaculation spends a man truly; where there is no more heat or light left in the body. Not broken, but spent.

I help run our hospital nursing newsletter. Facilitate is the right word. Chasing datelines and nagging strangers. Then it was the new house. When I had moved in during the renovation, I had literally build it from scraps. The landscape changes from time to time. One period I was living in sawdust, exposed electrical wiring and unfamiliar shadows, next I was living underneath newspapers and TV boxes. I slept and breathe in a room fresh of paint and lacquer, I have not stopped coughing since. Now I scrub for a living.

Spent. Financially and mentally.

At least I've got my own home. I should count on that.

Yesterday I went to Harry's again. I didn't get the bar seat because of the small crowd enjoying the basketball match under the telly, instead I got myself a seat at a corner. It has become a deliberate ritual now whenever there is a wronged death. Wronged in the way that it could be prevented, wronged in the way that guilt keep telling you that it is. That it might be on your hands too. Gone are the days when I thought that if my patient is fine when I have hand over to the incoming shift then anything that should incur next should not have anything to do with me.

Gone. Now anything and everything has to do with me. That's what my king size guilt tells me. Everything. Global warming, third world children dying, AIDS, the hole in the sky, the stubborn stain on my kitchen floor. Anything. Whether I'm there or not. People don't just die like that. They don't just look pretty for your shift and then die on someone else in the next minute. But they do, all the fucking time. They shouldn't. But they do. People don't die just like that. Even a cardiac arrest have a freaking process to follow. There must be something I didn't do. It could be anything. I didn't observe him closely, I didn't address his distress properly. Anything and everything.

I'm so incompetent that I could only mourn for him with a glass of promotional cocktail.

Spent. Emotionally.

I should at least be glad that I have realize that myself and not from somebody's else. Guilt is my own mother. 

50

I tried to hold it all in my head. Until I'm blue.

It's like those times we held our breaths underwater. Until we were blue inside.

I held it in my head, like a leaking water balloon, I reached home an hour later, that's the best I can do. No, that's not it. I went into the stores, into white light and pushing noises. The eleven o clock shoppers. I joined the queue and bought stuff I don't need. I bought a bagful of wafer biscuits I knew I won't eat. But it had to be done. Ritual is a ritual. When 63 died, bleeding his entire bed, I had spent the afternoon in the bar. Like everything worthy in life, self indulgence is a 12 step program.

At home in front of the computer, I unloaded and there was nothing. My head the size of a sunken balloon. All I could remember was the mixed emotions of relief followed by instant horror when he finally spoke.

I swore that was him speaking.

His first word after a 280 days of coma was his death rattle.    

Now I can remember that first time we met. He could walk then and he was in the isolation room. They said he's a bit crazy but don't we all? He refused to let the nurses shower him, so they get me, a dude. He's not crazy, towering and shaggy headed, but not crazy. In fact he's quite polite.

A while ago at his bedside where everything was ripped opened and him rattling for a good ten second, I could remember nothing. All I could comprehend is this thick muck of silence in my head.

On the train home I put on my ipod and tried to drown this fog of silence off. I can't. I'm defenseless even against myself. All I had were The Cure and Smashing Pumpkins.

For the longest time, I don't believe that this woman was his wife. She appeared only at the last two weeks. Spending 270 odd days with him, I had my doubts with her sudden appearance. But seeing her crying, calling and slapping his cold clammy torso, I believe she love him.

When the rest of the family came, the wailing imploded. Even that could not drown out the murky silence in my head. So I stood there and let both of the wailing and the absurd tranquility bathe me like how the sun and the moonlight do. I must have tell myself that I had in fact enjoy this. The hollow rotten bastard that seek pleasure through people's misery. I think deep down I have to keep telling myself I do what I do, so that I won't leave this job, or worse: join them and burst into tears.

Lean On Me Now

We are billed as the worst disaster as a couple.

We lost tons of stuff.

Always being shortchanged and taken advantage of.

We lag behind others in so many ways. We are not very bright and far-sighted.

We always get the worst bargain, worst quality of goods, worst service and worst luck among our friends.

Our strengths does not lend to compensate each other while our weakness combined and get blown up.

People actually afraid that we might:

A) Lost our baby.

B) Roll over our baby when we sleep.

C) Fall into drains.

But we truly love each other.

We will be happy even as luckless trolls, dumb and dumber and come what may.

We will be happy because in love nobody else exist.

If we are the world to each other than there is no such things as worst bargains or coming short in comparison.

We will be happy being just us.




 

Sleepless Tides

I wonder which is more taxing?

Guilt from harming others intentionally?

Or.

Guilt from harming others unintentionally?

Watling

Stumbled on an obscure movie at two am - The Oxford Murders starring John Hurt and Frodo. I thought Hurt was great so it's kinda disrespectful that I fastfoward the entire movie just to watch Leonor Watling as the busty nurse. Her angular feature appeals to me and yah, she has great knockers and stimulated several sex scenes with the ever deary Elijah Wood. I don't give two fucks about Elijah Wood. I slept throughout Frodo's scenes in Lord Of The Rings, waking up just to see Helm's Deep and that psychedelic eyeball in the air. How cool is that? Will never be as cool as waking up to Watling making breakfast for me in just an apron.

Falling Down

I Hitched A Ride With My Soul By The Side Of The Road Just As The Sky Turned Black

Wanna hear the saddest story, kids?

Here's one. And it's real.

I have a patient. Thirty plus. He has brain tumor. Now tumors are tricky sons of bitches, they are these ticking bombs waiting to explode in your body.

And it did to him.

He came in walking, smiling and talking to us. Then his tumor bled out. Now he drifting in and out of consciousness.

His wife was crying her heart out by the corridor when the surgeons told her that there was nothing they can do further. That western medicine was a cheap shot and there is nothing they could do. They could only make him as comfortable as possible.

That means loading him with inhumane doses of painkillers and sedatives.

The young wife stayed on. She was there for the entirety of the day and only went back home to shower. Eventually when she found out that she could sneak and use the patient's bathroom to shower, she gave up going home altogether. She wanted to be with him until his very end.

The cancer pain. It was a pain like nothing we have ever seen. The pain was so tormenting that it seems physically real. He would wring and groan to nightmares that were never there. He would pull his hair, his tubes and his wife, trying to defend himself from something.

The wife stood by him every moment of the way, called us up for painkillers, sponged him, messaged him and even once apologized when she has fallen asleep. That was four in the morning.

Every minute of his life, she fights to stay with him. Every single second she wants to be there.

What kind of love is this?

Today she was told that at best he would live for three months. She nodded her head and just went back to sat by her husband, pulling his hand over hers and slept on his shoulder.

Three months from now she will lose him forever. I kept thinking to myself that there are so many things I will be doing three months from now. I will get my house and I will be married.

And he will be gone by then.

Three months are just days away.

The Dreams We Have As Children Fade Away

I was doodling on the table while blasting away Oasis' Fade Away.

'What's that?' She asked about the music that bore clashing drums and crying guitars.

'That's Oasis.' I replied without looking up. I drew bugged out eyes, snapping my mechanical pencil leads in serial succession.

'So that's the band that you will be going to their concert this April?' She said, holding her mug to her lips. She was interested in what I do. That's rare.

'Yup.' I grunted without tearing my eyes from my doodle. I reached over for an eraser and decided to rub off everything.

'If you had like them so much, how come I have never hear you playing their songs before?' She exclaimed.

'What?' I spun away and looked at her. I'm offended, sort of. I'm like their biggest fan.

But she will never understand. My glaze soften and I returned my focus back to my drawing.

'Uh huh.' I grunted.

I have decided gingerly that I'm gonna elope with another female fan at their concert in Singapore this April.

Gutter Sex And Neon Thunder

I shouldn't be here. I should be working instead. Working as not in nursing but on the nursing newsletter I'm contributing. Actually I think I'm not supposed to talk about the newsletter because it's an official newsletter and my presence here might conflict against it because of my incessantly tactless journals at this site.

The point is I should be cracking my head on the lip of the glass bowl and hopefully bleed my yolk of wisdom, zeal and restrained humanity. But I can't. Given a cubicle in an office, the right picture would be that I will clicking impulsively on email jokes. Procrastinating indefinitely. The best hobby in the world - doing utterly surreal stuff that you shouldn't be doing at that moment. I'm struck in that zone where I cannot work or rest properly. Like when you have too much coffee and you cannot sleep, nor can you rest. Your world hop agonizingly. The human molecule. 

This is the result of insisting to sleep for only two hours after getting off night shifts.

This year is a big year. Was planning to get a degree initially but dived into getting hitched after much discussion with her. A wedding year is a busy year. We did everything on our own. We spent three months house hunting and went to every possible household/electronics/bridal fairs we could. We talked to many people for ideas for weddings and renovations. We been to endless websites for videography, catering and banquet services. It is namecards after namecards, handshakes and single serving beverages. It's smiling and asking and walking and sighing and fighting and sleeping late. There was even a twelve hour span we blazed the pouring rain to knock on doors of a dozen hotels.

We even went to the zoo to enquire about their banquet service. Seriously, zoo wedding rocks! At evening the guests could admit into the zoo with their wedding invitations where they will be ushered onto a looping tram. The tram would bring them to the wedding reception where they will be served cocktails beside a streaming koi pond. The couple will arrive in horse drawn carriage. How outrageous is that? In my opinion, horse drawn carriage beats everything any hotel offers hands down. Hands down I say! You can offer me free booze, luxurious bridal suite or even wedding at an evening poolside, but you ain't beating a grand entrance via horse drawn carriage. I will be so cool!

Well that aside, it will still not happen in the zoo.

But Chumbawumba will happen! Sort of.

'Never compromise. Not even in the face of Armageddon.'

The film stays very true to the book. But it has no climax. Alan Moore is right - not everything is meant to be presented on the silver screen. With the book, the climax is the saturated wisdom and craftiness beneath the panels of colors and colors of horrors.

But I have to give credit to the movie for at least making him right.

He is the coolest vigilante.

Because he is not locked in here with us.

We are all locked in here with him.

Losing My Religion

Because I can.

And I choose D.

It is written.

So fight destiny.

Pissin' The Night Away

It's only natural that I want it to be all me.

The wedding that we if not everyone else can remember for the longest time.

With rock bands, songs from the nineties, dancing, chinese kites, golden balloons, tapping shoes, movie quotations and flying pies.

It's only natural.

And then the lights go out and I wake up to an authentic traditional let-me-paint-the-walls-with-my-balls super dull wedding banquet. Yes. That all so familiarity in the soaking ten course substandard food that goes round on the table that sits ten strangers and they could barely see the bride or the groom on the horribly decorated stage. With a loud and chesty 'Yam Seng!', the forgettable charade will be over.

I cannot believe that that's no Chumbawumba.

The Thoughts That Makes Me Old

 

Night shift. Zero Two Twenty Six Hours.

Funny how I would always only write numbers in letters. Word for word.

I'm surrounded by ventilators and thrashing ceiling fans and suckling sounds of electronic beep.

And exhale.

Because we all need to breathe.

All we wanted is someone to run along and tell us that nothing is going to be the same anymore.

Heartbeats After Midnight

It's exactly midnight.

All Lin could think about is how thin the walls are. Paper thin. Even with her television exploding away canned laughter, she could hear the sobbing through the walls.

That was not all Lin thought about. She had wondered about the crying and had searched the next doors for other occupants. There were none. After a while, Lin stopped wondering and got used to the sobbing in the walls.

Lin has also wondered about the midnight. Time to die, innit? Eight minutes more. If sunlight takes eight minutes to reach Earth then this is the last of the sunlight that the other hemisphere is receiving. Then go ahead, inhale all the oxygen you could get and keep your lungs filled and brains alive. It's silly. But when the world is ending, everything sounds either silly or trivial. You don't have to learn anything new.

The world is ending, time to die, yes, time to die. Yes with lots of asses. It had took humanity an entire day to stop panicking when the news was announced two days ago. And the routine of violence and looting and petty crimes were quickly replaced by the need to happy one last time. Once more, forever more. And boy, did these dying people did bouts of stuff that defied morality. Free fall babies, everyone of them. Some embraced occults regardless of absurdity and logic. Who needs logic when you are dying? We all fight to cling on the ankles of religious promises that could give us an afterlife. Lin for one has engaged in a mass orgy six hours ago. It didn't helped anyone though, everybody just ended up weeping instead. 

All broadcasting ceased transmissions two days ago with the breaking of the news. Nobody works anymore. All forms of transportation halted and Lin was struck in her rented apartment a continent apart from her parents. Since then, Lin could only watch Friends season one to ten on her DVD player. It has been her favorite show, Lin has used it to brush up her conversational English when she first came here to study. These guys were her only friends in the four corners of her apartment when she was afraid to meet real people. At the edge of Earth's time line in a foreign country, it's only right that it gives her the comfort of familiarity. Her surrogate siblings whom never failed to put a smile on her face. It kept her away from the memories of her own parents and their fights. The canned laughter went on drowning the ghostly crying of the walls, the burning of the streets and the very thought of midnight. Her favorite character was Phoebe. She had wished she was more like her.

The message was simple. The sun is prematurely dying from a Q-ball infection. It will collapse under it's gravity from it's core at midnight. Six more minutes left until the tails of the last sunlight touches Earth. Lin had heard that everything will be bright forever.

Lin reached for the remote control to fast forward to the last six minutes of the series finale and she found the answering machine blinking in the heap on the coffee table.

She paused the television and switched on the machine.

'Hey Lin, this is Jojo here. Have you heard the news? Don't believe what you heard. It's not true. Remember what we talked about the other time, this is it! The country's so fucked that they have to engineer more lies to distract us. I don't believe that the news ain't coming back. You'll see. This is a fucking conspiracy. Just like when they told us they had landed the moon and shit like that. The sun's imploding now? Fuck that! I will check on you again. But probably try to stay indoors instead for now.'

The second message came on.

'Lin baby, are you there? (Hysterically) Pick up the phone! This is mom. Pick up your goddamn phone!'

The third.

'Lin? Are you there? Pick up the phone. Mummy's so worried about you. (Groaning) Try to catch the next plane back, whatever it is, just come back so we could all be together. (Sniffling) I'm contacting Koon too. Whatever it is, just come back. I missed you kids so much. Call me to let me know you're safe, hon?'

The fourth.

'Hey little sis. Did mum called you? Yea, I talked to her a bit. I'm not going back. I'm not going to see him, not even for the end of the world. Oh my god. (Chuckling) I can't believe this is it. You know what? I think it is not a hoax, it's erm, it's real. Oh god. You think praying will help? (Chuckling nervously) I can't believe I'm saying all these, can you imagine? Listen, little sis, you got to watch over yourself. Are you still with that jackass boyfriend of yours? Well, go to him. Don't be alone at this time. I will come over for you as soon as the flights are up, if they are up. Contact me to let me know if you are safe. If you want to go back, I will go back with you. Love you.'

The fifth message.

'Hello, erm hi Lin. (Pausing) This is Nick. (Pausing) I just want to say I'm sorry for everything. I really do. (Pausing) Please forgive me, I need you to. (Pausing) I'm sorry about the baby. (Pausing) I'm so sorry about the abortion. (Pausing) I'm sorry for hitting you. I'm so fucking sorry now. I'm so stupid. I know now. Please find it in your heart to forgive me. (Pausing for the longest time) Please.'

The sixth.

'Little sis, your bro here. (Hissing fiercely) Do not attempt to venture outside, lock yourself in! This is getting pretty fired up here. They are lynching anyone with an uniform. It's anarchy out there! Arm yourself, lock yourself in! Beware especially the folks from occults, they are the worse! I'm coming for you...'

The seventh message.

'Oh lord, where are all my children! (Screaming) Mum here, Lin, it's mum! I missed you guys so much. Please call us.! I know you hated your father. But please let begone be begone. (Sobbing uncontrollably) Oh lord oh lord oh lord oh lord, I can't stop crying. (Sounding more distant) It's all your fault, Kai! What kind of a father are you! To beat your children so much that they resent you to the inches of your pathetic life. You drove my babies away from me! I hate you. I never thought I would say this, Kai, I hate you. You ruined this family, you happy now? You god fearing man, you have always place Him above all of us. Now your god is gonna kill all of us. Get out of my house! I don't care if the mob gets you and I hope they do! You stay away from this house! (Turning back) Oh Lin baby, please phone home, I'm sorry for everything. I am so sorry for this family!'

The eighth message.

'Lin, Jojo here. This is too much for me. I took all the antidepressants. (Smiling) I just want you to know how much of a friend you had meant to me. I want to be honest and loyal to the end. Be safe. Goodbye.'

The ninth message.

'Hi. If you are listening to this right now, you are cordially invited to join the hundreds of us outside the city hall for our exit ceremony. It will be pain free and everyone is welcome. Do join us if you share the concept that as human we have the right for a dignified death, at our own pace and method. Do join us if you simply just need some company. We all are family now. Good luck.'

The final message.

'This is Dad. I've always loved you.'

By then, Lin was half sprawling to the floor with her claws gripping the wooden edge of the table so hard that her metacarpal veins were popping red. She brawled her lungs out in epileptic cries of whichever short or long howls she could afford her tiny frame to generate. She cried and cried so hard, as if she trying to cry herself to death. As if she was being born. Tearing her hair and pulling the skins of her elbows, Lin demanded pain to accompany her sorrow, she thrashed around hysterically, not remembering what upset her so much in the first place. There were too many factors. Accumulating, it is the horror to live for this moment.

She has become the ghostly cries of the walls.

'One more minute!' Someone has shouted from the streets.

Lin laid on the floor and held her breath. She blinked away the magma tears. There was a knock on her door.

'Who...who is it?' She went to the door disoriented and nervous.

'I heard you crying.' Came a gentle voice.

Lin opened the door and saw a boy her age, he has been crying too.

The boy hugged Lin and their weights sent them onto their knees. They sat by the misty doorway flanked by desolation of the corridors that seemed to stretch on without ends.

'Hold me please.' The boy whispered into her ear, like the last important secret of this world. 'Don't let go.'

Lin put her fingers through his sandy hair and replied, 'I won't.'

Cold freezing darkness seized upon them and though the baring blackness all they could sense were each other heartbeats. Soft pebbles into the ripples. Calm and fearless.

Then there were lights everywhere. Blights flooded the forests, every windows, the lonely machines in the mills and the frowns on people's faces. Blights filled up lakes and hearts and arteries and songs and question marks and the bodies at the city hall.

In vast whiteness, the answering machine is no more.


 

My 25's.

Rules: Once you’ve been tagged, you are supposed to write a note with 25 random things, facts, habits, or goals about you. At the end, choose 25 people to be tagged. You have to tag the person who tagged you. If I tagged you, it’s because I want to know more about you! Blah Blah Blah, tagged by Owen, Blah Blah Blah, nothing to do now anyway, so here we go.

1. When I put down watching movies in my interest section, i meant every word. I watch movies exhaustively and extensively. Was a film reviewer years ago.

2. It is annoying to watch films with me. There is nothing in this world I loathed more are lameduck idols trying to make it as actors.

3. And sprouted beans.

4. And folks who don't wash their hands after they pee. Seriously they should be gassed.

5. Love to drink, but unable to hold liquor well.

6. With observations from friends for years, it's easy to know if I have a beer too many; I'll start to mouth off fluent English.

7.  Always wanted to be a rock god. Wants to play at Glastonbury.

8. Bad at grammar. Very.

9. Hated Backstreet Boys for the entirety of my secondary schooldays. But has started listening to them now because I missed those days.

10. Thinks that the seventies is the coolest era.

11. Part timed in Bedok's Funland Arcade during my poly years. It paid the lowest wages: $2.50 per hour, yet I'm not surprised; all I do is to watch people play games. The fun part of the job was that we get to play free games for half an hour after we've closed the arcade.  

12. I get to become a cashier in the arcade at times and being cashier it allowed me to take charge of the store's av system. I get to decide what booming music the customers have to listen to. During an insufferable breakup at year 1, all the gamers have to listen for ten hours a day, three times a week was Hikaru Utada's First Love, looping endlessly.   

13. Tone deaf.

14. My waistline unlike the general population is of definitive volume and cannot be expanded. To make room for more food, my body just keep purging. My bowel movement are well rostered, straight after each meal. Never gain or lose a kg in the last five years.

15. Excels in trivia. One look at someone on the tv, I can almost always name you his/her name, movies acted, awards won and other random stuff.

16. Came in third in the whole of Singapore during 1999's O Level Chinese Calligraphy (Arts).

17. There were only three students who did Chinese Calligraphy that year.

18. I like the color purple. And I can explain to you why it is not gay at all to like purple. When I was a boy, I like blue just like every boys. When I reached my angst years, all I associated myself is black. So liking purple now is basically matching these colors.

19. Thinks that girls look hot in purple.

20. Strangely attracted to bookstores. Any bookstore. Must enter one whenever I go to a mall, even if it's the goddamn Popular. Initially wanted to be buried in Page One of Vivo, but decided against it because then Page One will have to relocate. Decided to instead sculpt my dead body into a smiling usher standing inanimately at the Philosophy section of Page One wearing a bubble that says 'Reading Is Awesome!'

21. Told that idea to Vimcent which in one of his function actually met the owner of Page One. Vimcent told him my intention.

22. Is trying to save enough to go Russia. For Lenin, for the Winter Palace, for the Russian chicks.

23. Thinks that the Chinese language is way superior than English.

24. I can eat chicken everyday for the rest of my life.

25. Don't believe in sleeping.

We Can Remember For You Wholesale

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Betamethasone Valerate 0.025%

Got off my nightshifts again. Slept for three hours and found myself staring at the computer screen again. Honestly I find the modern relationship between people and their computers these days is hypnotically religious. As if we can seriously google to all truth and meaning to life.

Not much happening lately. Except in finding enough excuses to hate everything recently. Everything must suck and I must abbreviate apparently enough so that everyone knows that everything sucked. From food, commercials to the sun and the stars. And by recently, I meant for the last twenty six years of my life.

Not much happening except that I was kicked in the neck this morning. Old confused patient restrained drew me near to him with his mumblings and delivered a vicious blow to my neck. Human body is cleverly designed against pain like these. Like when I was kicked, I was rendered a third person watching myself instead of absorbing the trauma as myself. I felt no pain, just dazed that I was kicked. I looked around and staggered a bit. The nightshift cleaner a distant away was watching me closely as if I was going to fall. I shook my head like a boar in summer flies and walked off.

The human body is amazing and sometimes it can turn sentient, displacing the conscious to defend us.  Examples such as passing out in pain, fight/flight reflexes, denial and if you know how our immunity system works, the human body is zealously brilliant. We are just like '58 plymouth engines mounted into Ford Mustangs, inapt in even comprehending what our bodies could do for us.

At least I was not kicked in the nuts.

Boo ya, I live to fight another day.

Pornstar Unicorns

Gras: Oh my god.

Jin: Yup.

Gras: Holy shit, she did it again.

Jin: I know. I'm here.

Gras: How could she fit that entire thing in her mouth?

Jin: Shut up. Your mum's just next door.

Gras: Can your girlfriend do that? Take it all orally?

Jin: No. Of course not. Nobody in their right mind will do that. It's just in the porn. Reality is very different.

Gras: I have got to meet a pornstar.

Jin: Don't be silly. They ain't real.

Gras: You're shitting me.

Jin: Come on. Everybody knows that. There are nothing such as pornstars. They are mythical, like unicorns or santa claus.

Gras: Kay. So what exactly are we watching right now? How is she doing that?

Jin: Computer special effects.

Time Is Never Time At All

So I was wrong.

No surprise.

Amount of hours stayed awake does not equates existence.

It doesn't mean that if you fight to sleep only two hours a day, you are existing twenty two hours a day. It doesn't work that way.

That is only barely existing. Time zombie.

Existence is all about passion. If you are passionate enough about something, two hours would seemed like a lifetime.

饺子

Making dumplings on the first day of the Chinese New Year.

Me: I could never get this right!

Her: What?

Me: I could not get enough fillings in properly. Compared to mine, your dumplings are filling up ample and busty. The big one over there is like the goddamn Aki Hoshino of dumplings!

Nothing Is Important

Meaningless sex.

It is an oxymoron.

Even reproductive sex means something.

Does everything has to mean something? Every single act a motive, every breath an impulse?

Then humanity will soon crush under its own weight.

Therefore meaningless sex is a subconscious defiance against rationalism. 

But then it won't be meaningless after all.

And it is not sex anymore.

Dhoby Ghaut Mrt. Cloudy. January Ten. Fifteen Twenty Seven Pm.

Raknax's model of 5 stages of trauma.

1. See Dragonball the movie's poster.

(This is the stage one of trauma - Shock. Usually characterized by widening of eyebrows and locking them in instantaneous surprise. Common physiology include quickening of pulse, nausea, irreversible mental retardation and visual shock if one sees Chow Yun Fatt first.)


2. Scratches my head furiously for a minute there.

(This is the stage two of trauma - Perverse Curiosity. Admittance to such stage often indicated shock victims' high tolerance for pain or that he/she must be a manga fan for at least twenty years. Possible risks for latent complications such as erectile dysfunction, epilepsy, gastric hemorrhage and collecting Garfield comic strips.)


3. Reach for my balls, will ignore the fact it has shrivelled but glad that it's intact.

(This is the stage three of trauma - Self Preservation or Self Assurance. While this stage can be rare, clinical studies have shown that survivors often possessed superhuman sense of denial and heightened reliefs. Exceptions also presented 'phantom balls' experience where even though the trauma has shocked their genitals into hiding, they hallucinate that they still have balls. Criticisms drawn from Orthodox Raknaxists claimed that such stage of trauma is centrally metaphorically damaging instead of physical - Male victims grab balls for assurance that they did not devolved at spirituality under the offense of the poster.)


4. Sympathized with the eunuchs that make the movie happens.

(This is the stage four of trauma - Hypocrisy. Why not? Health benefits like walking with enlarged steps and singing the 'I have thunderballs' song have shown a staggering recovery chance up to forty two percentage. Survivors of this stage can also register with the local support group and get a free 'I've seen the Dragonball Movie poster and all I got is this lousy T-Shirt' T-Shirt from now until end of March 2009. Proceedings from the registration fees will go to Chow Yun Fatt Visual Shock's syndrome patients and help pay for rehabilitation for Garfield fans.)


5. Remembers that Stephen Chow was the producer and died abit inside.

(This is the fifth and last stage of trauma - Shame. Some survivors cry to sleep every night, and some kick little animals. Recently, there has been optimistic speculations that some can live long enough to attain Kubler-Ross' Five Stages Of Grief.)



 

Chinatown. Sunny. Janaury Ten. Fifteen Eleven Pm.

How did I get to the point where I incessantly narrate everything? As if without these narrations, nothing functions, everything halts. The red menacing lanterns will ceased to wave in humid air if I don't talk about them in my head. Or that the sun will refused to bounce off glass doors and shadows of high noons unable to shift from gravel to gravel if I hadn't paused to appreciate it.

I wonder what I should do now? Never stop wondering before. But if I have stop or in other words, quit narrating existence, will I cease to exist too? Just like the sun, the shadows from the noons and the awfully red lanterns of Chinatown. Like how sharks have to constantly swim to stay afloat.

I should eat. But I detest easting alone. Maybe I should drop in on one of those massage parlors and pay for an afternoon with a hooker. Can I pay her to eat with me instead? If one really look into the psyche of paying for sex, it is really more than the act itself, it is a form of seeking attention. Like committing suicide. Death and sex made good bed partners. It is certainly no mystery if you ask me about my deathwish now.

One single lonely afternoon in the crowd, there are only two gratifications available; retail therapy or prostitutes. Both reap the same effect - to purchase a notion that we matters. Ironically with the very currency that renders us emotionally impotent in the first place. Very soon we all go back to our homes feeling swindled. Why didn't buying stuff and fucking beautiful strangers make us happier or vindicated or complete or different? They should, shouldn't they?

I'm meeting Own to grab a beer in his university in the evening and then to play Counterstrike with Hao in the night. Should I start drinking now, polish off some cocktails; all with ridiculous names and even more ridiculous prices, and proceed to meet Own for more beers? It gives me great joy to imagine playing Counterstrike in such state. I would probably be shooting against the wall in a corner.

The sun is on me. Is it on me because I have think about it now? So, don't define it! Stop giving it meaning. There is no such thing as temperature.

Realising the size of the crowd, I realised that I have gone deaf. I am not making sense of the noises, nor did I feel related to my social environment. It was as if I was dropped into Chinatown.I must narrate to remind myself that I'm somewhere, to make sense of the things I'm seeing. To remind myself that I'm here regardless I like it or not? My existence is parasitic to my acceptance of my loneliness. There is no such thing as loneliness. It's all physics.

The sun found me again, I should move.